| Meanwhile in Other News, Israel's Labor Party is Finished
The party of Ben-Gurion, Eshkol, Meir and Rabin led Israel for decades. Now it has fallen so low, become so discredited and irrelevant, that even its demise barely makes a headline. Under one name or other, Labor oversaw the founding of modern Israel and led it through its first three turbulent decades of statehood — somehow steering the nascent state through the unwinnable War of Independence to the astounding success of the Six Day War, and shaping the nation’s education and health systems, its infrastructure and economy, its foreign relations and its domestic priorities. It then entered what must now be recognized as a protracted but terminal decline with the shock of the Yom Kippur War.
What is striking about Labor’s demise is the speed of its final acceleration into the political grave. Having first lost power to Menachem Begin’s Likud in 1977, it was still strong enough to win back the national leadership under Yitzhak Rabin in 1992. Discredited by the Arafat-orchestrated suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, having legitimized the PLO leader with the Oslo Accords, and shattered by the assassination of Rabin, it nonetheless managed a final, brief spell at Israel’s helm under Ehud Barak in 1999-2001.
And as recently as the 2015 elections, under Isaac Herzog, it won 24 seats (under the Zionist Union rubric) to Likud’s 30, forcing Netanyahu to scramble to assemble a majority coalition. What a vote-winner the widely derided Herzog looks in hindsight, with Labor since reduced to six seats under Avi Gabbay a year ago, and then to five and finally three under Peretz in our last two elections.
The marginalization and now the subsumption of Labor is a function, first and foremost, of middle Israel’s lost faith in the possibility of an accommodation with the Palestinians — a conclusion unsurprisingly drawn from that strategic onslaught of suicide bombers twenty years ago.
Labor has mustered no credible alternative approach, and no articulate counter, to Netanyahu and his insistence that Israel has no partner with whom to negotiate. And thus the final, broken representatives of David Ben-Gurion’s pioneering party are now to find themselves part of a government committed to the unilateral annexation of the settlements and the Jordan Valley — expediting not only the demise of Labor, but also, quite possibly, of the two-state solution for which the party stood.
Labor’s passing was hastened by the arrival of Benny Gantz, who pulled away much of its electorate in building the most potent alternative to Netanyahu in years, an alliance dominated by ex-IDF chiefs that challenged the Likud leader’s Mr. Security credentials.
So farewell, then, to Labor. Farewell to the party of Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir, and those perennial rivals Rabin and Shimon Peres. Farewell to the party that founded and shaped modern Israel.
Excerpted by Chuck "Zvi" Tannenbaum from an April 27, 2020 article by David Horovitz in The Times of Israel |
