Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin are marshaling their forces for a crucial showdown that will decide the leadership of the Labor Party.
Both men convened meetings of their supporters Monday.
Peres, the party chairman, managed to draw only five Labor members of the Knesset. More than half of Labor’s Knesset faction is known to support Rabin.
But an impressive number of local party leaders showed up to back Peres, especially from development towns in the Negev and Galilee.
Addressing them, Peres said it is still possible that in the long term, a national majority will develop “that favors a peace which does not impair security.”
Peres also believes there is a chance for Labor to build good relations with the Orthodox parties, which are now members of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud-led coalition government.
Supporters of former Defense Minister Rabin, convinced the momentum is with him, announced they will formally request the party’s Leadership Bureau on Thursday to schedule elections for chairman as soon as possible.
Peres says he is willing to face a challenge by Rabin. But he points out that, having been reelected chairman in 1988 for the full term of the present Knesset, his incumbency should continue until the term expires in 1992.
The Rabin bandwagon, nevertheless, has been joined by most former Labor Party ministers. It got a strong boost over the weekend from former President Yitzhak Navon, who was deputy premier and minister of education in the last Likud-Labor unity government.
SUPPORT AMONG PARTY RANK AND FILE
Navon said he believed Rabin’s leadership would facilitate an electoral victory for Labor, which Peres was never able to achieve.
The only former ministers to attend a Peres strategy session last Friday were Haim Bar-Lev, Avraham Katz-Oz and Moshe Shahal. Shahal, who was formerly energy minister, said later that he favors the retirement of both Peres and Rabin to make room for a younger leader.
Bar-Lev, the police minister in the unity government, attended Monday’s meeting of Peres supporters. He said he opposes a Peres-Rabin contest now, in the interests of party unity.
Other well-known figures backing Peres include Knesset members Yossi Beilin and Eli Dayan, and Nissim Zvilli, head of the Jewish Agency’s Settlements Department.
Sources in the Peres camp contend that claims of a groundswell of support for Rabin are exaggerated. They maintain that despite a slippage among his former Cabinet colleagues and in Labor’s Knesset faction, Peres support remains strong in the Leadership Bureau and in the Central Committee, which has final say on procedural questions regarding the contest for chairman.
The Rabin camp is calling for a showdown by the end of July in either the Central Committee or the 2,000-strong party convention, which last convened before the November 1988 elections.
Those bodies have been considered Peres strongholds. But some of Rabin’s supporters are counseling him to challenge Peres on his turf.
WIDESPREAD DISAFFECTION WITH PERES
Other Rabin supporters advocate primary elections, in which all rank-and-file Labor Party members could participate. But that inevitably would delay the contest for months while a new membership registration drive is held. Advocates of this strategy are demanding that the primaries be held by mid-September.
A leading Rabin supporter, Knesset Finance Committee Chairman Avraham Shohat, was quoted Sunday in the Laborite newspaper Davar as saying that Rabin enjoyed “an overwhelming majority.”
While independent observers were careful not to write off Peres prematurely, many see Navon’s support of Rabin as reflecting disenchantment with Peres among all factions of the party–doves as well as hawks.
That sentiment, bluntly put, is that Peres, who has led Labor through four failed election campaigns, must be considered objectively unlikely to achieve a victory at the ballot box.
But Peres argued at his strategy session last Friday that the party should not be influenced by the vagaries of popularity polls.
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