JERUSALEM
FOR the first 30 years of its 55-year existence, the government of Israel was in the hands of the Labor Party, whose leaders also dominated the political world of Jewish Palestine before the establishment of the state in 1947.
In the 25 years following its first loss to the right-wing Likud Party in 1977, the Labor party has been in and out of power – more out than in, actually. But in many ways Labor remains the dominating presence in Israeli politics.
That may be coming to an end. Tomorrow, Israelis go to the polls, and when the dust settles, it is very possible that Labor will no longer be one of the nation’s two leading parties. According to some projections, Labor may win as few as 16 seats in the nation’s 120-seat parliament. Another party of the left, the anti-religious Shinui, may claim as many as 20 seats.
This is an astonishing fall from grace. And all the more astonishing because this election would not be taking place if Labor had not bolted a government of national unity a few months ago.
The unity government was a coalition of all major political parties under the head of the Likud Party, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. It was formed because the terrorist war being waged against Israel made it necessary for the country’s fractious politicians to make common cause on behalf of the Jewish state.
But after a year, Labor decided it could no longer countenance being in a subordinate position to Likud and Sharon, and so it torpedoed the national unity government. Sharon called a new election, and tomorrow Labor may well reap the whirlwind. In other words, Labor forced an election at the end of which its electoral power may be reduced by 33 percent.
There’s almost no precedent for this act of political suicide.
What happened? An analogy to recent American politics may shed some light.
You know how, after the November elections, many Democrats explained their losses by saying that their party had not gone far enough in opposing George W. Bush? Well, that was precisely the attitude of the Labor Party after it left the government in the late summer.
At the time, it was headed by Benyamin ben Eliezer, who was considered one of the party’s “hawks.” Ben Eliezer was the Defense Minister in the unity government. After Labor pulled out, Ben Eliezer was kicked out of the Labor leadership in favor of Amram Mitzna, a former general who is now the mayor of Haifa.
Imagine that the Democratic Party took a good look at 9/11 and decided that its chief spokesman and representative should be the George McGovern of 1972, who believed America was wicked and needed to isolate itself, lest it do more harm to the world. That’s what the Labor Party did in choosing Mitzna as the terror war was running hot and heavy.
Mitzna believes Israel should withdraw to the profoundly unsafe pre-1967 borders that every Labor politician at the time believed were a death trap. He wants to pull back, acquiesce in the notion that no Jew should be permitted to live in the new Palestinian state and build a fence to protect Israel (which will work really well against shoulder-fired missiles).
Amazingly, the Labor Party actually believed that this would appeal to Israeli voters. But from the moment Mitzna stepped forward, all the evidence suggested otherwise – that voters were frightened by his headlong rush to grant the terrorist regime run by Yasser Arafat a sovereign state from which to design and implement terror attacks far worse than any we’ve seen so far.
And yet the delusion persisted. It was fed in part by Labor and leftwing glee at stories about corruption in the Likud party and suspicions of illegal campaign contributions to Sharon, which did seem to have some effect on the polls.
But Labor and Mitzna overplayed this modest hand. Mitzna announced that Labor would not again join a national-unity government. That may sound like small beer, but this preemptive refusal to consider making a sacrifice once again for the sake of a country at war was deeply distasteful. “That idiocy cost us five seats in less than two weeks,” one party member told the paper Ha’aretz.
It turned out Mitzna was not acting entirely on principle. He believed he and Labor would benefit from such a promise – that Labor could take some votes away from a farther-left party. Mitzna and the Laborites live in a world so parochial that they cannot imagine there are voices other than those on the far left (where they are) and the far right (where they imagine all their enemies to be).
In Israel, a party that tilts left on matters of national security during a time of war is about to be humiliated. If the Democrats want to avoid a similar fate in 2004, they should study the Mitzna campaign.