Former Health Minister Haim Ramon threw the Labor party into turmoil with his decision this week to run against his party’s incumbent candidate for the post of secretary-general of the Histadrut labor federation.
Ramon, 46, has been regarded by many as the Labor Party’s best hope for the future as the generation of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin begins to step down.
But with this week’s decision, Ramon appears to have put himself beyond the party pale by setting up a non-party list that is specifically intended to stop Haim Haberfeld, the incumbent Histadrut boss and the party’s choice for another term when elections are held in mid-May.
The controversy that Ramon has stirred up is seen as being ill-timed, since Labor currently needs to present a united front against the onslaught mounted by right-wing opposition to the peace process.
Announcing that he would run on a separate, independent list in the upcoming Histadrut elections, Ramon said that he would be joined by two other young Labor politicians – the popular Amir Peretz, who has a considerable following in the development towns where he makes his home, and Samuel Avital, who has a base in the moshav movement, a stronghold of Histadrut votes.
Ramon said that he, Peretz and Avital intend to remain Labor Party members.
Not included in Ramon’s independent list are the five other members of what was regarded as an octet of young and able Labor leaders, including Knesset members Avraham Burg, Yael Dayan, Hagai Meirom, Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin and Arab Knesset Member Nawaf Massalha.
Meirom and Burg said that their only quarrel with Ramon is that “we feel we must accept the party’s democratic decision, even if we feel pained by having to vote for Haberfeld.”
A poll conducted last week showed Ramon beating Haberfeld in the countrywide Histadrut elections.
Haberfeld is regarded by the younger generation of the Labor Party as a “political dinosaur,” whose attitude to the Histadrut has, they believe, already brought the huge union into disrepute with employees and employers alike.
Announcing his decision to run on an independent list, Ramon said, “In the last two elections, Labor campaigners were instructed by (now Foreign Minister) Shimon Peres to hide the Histadrut far away from sight,” lest the party be too identified with the “discredited” Histadrut.
This is not the first maverick move for Ramon. In February he resigned as health minister after the Labor Party and the Cabinet rejected a health care reform measure he had strongly backed.
Instead of the compromise measure eventually agreed to by the Cabinet, Ramon, with wide support across party lines, had proposed a national health bill that would make health insurance for all Israelis mandatory.
Ramon’s proposed bill would have severed the connection between Histadrut and Kupat Holim Clalit, the country’s largest health fund.
Some 70 percent of Israelis are insured under Kupat Holim. That insurance automatically makes them members of the Histadrut, and part of the insurance premiums they pay goes to the labor federation.
When Ramon’s national health bill was rejected by a national conference of the Labor Party in late January, he had argued that the Kupat Holim-Histadrut connection was the single most potent cause of Labor’s unpopularity with the Israeli public and also that it was the major cause of Kupat Holim’s inefficiency.
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