Labor Party in Trouble As Election Day Nears

Faced with steadily slipping support in the opinion polls, the Labor Alignment, Israel’s main opposition party, is making a determined effort to pull itself together and paper over internal differences with only four weeks left to the election.

Last month, the Labor Party drew up its list of Knesset candidates (its smaller Mapam partner having done so earlier.) Labor Party chairman Shimon Peres and a small committee of key leaders worked around the clock for several days to try to accommodate all the various disparate pressure groups, regions, ethnic communities, settlement movements in the list of “realistic” spots.

Presenting the list to Labor’s mammoth Central Committee, Peres went out of his way to praise his arch-rival, Yitzhak Rabin, for his “constructive help” in hammering out the list. Eleven members of the “Rabin Camp” appear in the first 50-odd places, and Rabinites professed themselves “satisfied.”

STRIVING FOR UNITY

In a low-key, conciliatory speech, Peres noted that there were inevitably disappointments for some people in a selection process of this kind. He called on everyone — especially those who felt they deserved a higher placing — to accept the party’s verdict and maintain the image of unity which is so vital if Labor is to recoup its current losses in the polls before June 30.

Among those disappointed with their relatively low (and “unrealistic”) placing were former top diplomats Simcha Dinitz and Yosef Tekoah. Another former diplomat, Chaim Herzog, secured a high place on the list, as did another of Labor’s bright new stars, former Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur. With the list drawn up, Labor began campaigning in earnest, and plainly the campaign is one of the toughest ever fought in this country.

BEHIND IN THE POLLS

Only a few months ago, things looked very different. The polls then were giving Labor close to 50 percent of the vote, and party keymen were daydreaming of the prospect of an “absolute majority” — enough Knesset seats to be able to form a government without the need for coalition partners.

This has never happened in Israel before, and, barring unforeseen upsets, it is now abundantly clear that it is not going to happen this time either. Indeed, Labor’s rating has slipped so fast that now there is very real doubt among pollsters and pundits as to whether Labor will be able to form a government at all.

In the latest opinion poll, released June 2, Likud, for the first time, forged ahead of Labor. Were elections to be held now, it would capture 45 Knesset seats to 42 for Labor, the poll indicated.

Part of the cause of Labor’s slippage has doubtless been the artful campaign of price and tax reductions instituted by Likud’s recently appointed Finance Minister, Yoram Aridor. Aridor has quite deliberately triggered a consumer bonanza, by slashing sales taxes on televisions, refrigerators, and other consumer durables, while keeping food prices relatively stable.

In the short term, Aridor hopes, this policy will not only make people feel better off, it will also have the effect of slowing inflation.

Labor economists say this is a cynical mirage, and that the public will have to “pay dearly” for these relatively few months of apparent well-being.

But many voters are skeptical of the economists, with their gloom-and-doom prognoses. The availability of money at the moment, coupled with substantial price reductions for a large number of consumer commodities, seem much more tangible and realistic than Labor’s seemingly kill joy predictions.

This is particularly the case since a number of the taxes slashed by Aridor have always seemed excessive and even cruel in the eyes of most Israelis, overworked and underpaid as they are in comparison with other Western consumer societies.

The fact that cars here cost from twice to three times their price abroad, and washing machines, televisions, ovens and other durables are similarly subject to 100 percent purchase tax, seems indefensible to many people here. A Finance Minister who is prepared to ease these crushing burdens is automatically hailed as a man of compassion.

SHAKY LEADERSHIP

But Aridor has not been the only reason for Labor’s loss of support. Political commentators all agree in assigning a good deal of the blame to the Labor Party itself because Peres has been unable to assert sufficient leadership and authority to quell internal unrest and present a solid and determined face to the electorate.

While Premier Menachem Begin has successfully halted the bickering and back-biting within his Cabinet and his Likud faction, Peres has failed to turn his own 70-30 victory over challenger Rabin into a long-term consolidation of his leadership. Indeed, since the party convention last December, Peres has had to contend with an insistent campaign on the part of the defeated Rabin “camp” for representation on all the party’s policymaking forums.

Similarly, Peres flopped badly in his selection of an “economic leadership team.” His first choice for Finance Minister, Bank Hapoalim boss Yaacov Levinson, clashed with the party chairman over the prospective powers of the Finance Minister — and eventually refused to accept the nomination. Levinson had been depicted by the Labor propaganda machine as the economic wizard who would save the country from bankruptcy; and his refusal to take up the role severely embarrassed Peres.

RATIONAL ECONOMICS VS. COLOR TV

Eventually, Peres put together an economic “leadership team” comprising Tel Aviv University president Prof. Haim Ben-Shahar and Histadrut industries czar Naftali Blumenthal, neither of them well known to the general public.

The policies that Ben-Shahar has presented seem to many people to foreshadow harsh measures: A swift and sudden end of Aridor’s consumer bonanza. Most people, granted, approve of Labor’s determination to restore the country’s economic growth, after years of effective stagnation. But “growth” is a macroeconomic term that has little direct meaning to the average wage earner. Cut-rate color televisions, on the other hand, have a very real and direct meaning.

Labor’s efforts under Peres to achieve a facade of unity have not been crowned with unqualified success. Even the hammering out of the Knesset list was an occasion for bitter and embarrassing infighting. Labor’s political opponents must have been amused to hear on Israel radio that Abba Eban, slated for the Foreign Ministry in a Labor government had threat-

ened to withdraw altogether if his name appeared below that of Rabin on the Labor list.

HAWKS VS. DOVES

In the event, Peres elevated a hitherto little-known Knesset member, Shoshana Arbeli-Almoslino, to the number two spot on the list. She displayed three advantages: she is a woman, a Sephardi, and a hawk. Pollsters have found that the pervading trend among the majority of the public is towards hawkishness on foreign policy.

Such Labor doves as Yossi Sarid and Micha Harish often find themselves the objects of bitter attacks on the hustings. With Eban and Haim Barlev (another dove) slated as foreign and defense ministers, respectively, Peres plainly wanted a hawkish figure like Mrs. Arbeli among the “top five” to ward off distrust of Labor from the growing hawkish wing of public opinion.

But this very gambit, in the opinion of some political observers here, seemed to underscore the flimsiness of the policy “consensus” within Labor, a “consensus” that in effect stretches from “Greater Israel” sentiments to the ultra-doves of Labor and Mapam who favor near-total withdrawal and Palestinian political rights.

This is a dilemma which Labor has faced in every election campaign since the Six-Day War. Under Golda Meir the party was always able to strike a delicate balance between hawks and doves. Now, especially in the wake of Likud’s success as the peacemaker with Egypt, that task has become tougher.

In the remaining days until election day the Labor Alignment is expected to pour millions of Shekels into its campaign. The party seems particularly well endowed for this campaign. A group called “Alef” (Hebrew acronym for “Citizens for Peres”) has apparently succeeded in raising large sums abroad, which is legal under Israel’s political financing laws.

Labor has already inserted millions of Shekels worth of full page ads in the daily newspapers, many of them featuring men and women who strayed off to the Democratic Movement for Change in 1977 and are now publicly returning, duly contrite, to the Labor fold.

HUSSEIN WON’T COOPERATE

Labor has been especially unfortunate in the refusal of its prospective Arab peacemaking partner, King Hussein of Jordan, to so much as hint that he would indeed be prepared to negotiate with a Labor government over the future of the West Bank.

While Labor Party leaders claim repeatedly that they know from private contacts with Jordanian and other Arab leaders — for example, Morocco’s King Hassan — that there is real hope for “the Jordanian option,” Hussein himself, and his brother, Crown Prince Hassan, miss no public opportunity to mock at and ridicule that “option.”

It is as if the King wants Labor to look silly by undermining the key plank of its foreign and defense policy. Begin, in his electioneering, need only quote Hussein to back Likud’s contention that Labor’s formula for a political solution is invalid and unrealistic.