The tragedy of Israeli labor
Cohen, Mitchell
"I'm trying to be optimistic," an Israeli friend said to me after last spring's elections, "but my son goes into the Army next year and I shiver when I think of Netanyahu making life and death...
...Peres failed to do so, even with foreign minister Ehud Barak (former military chief of staff) by his side...
...Rather, it is an inability to define its own project...
...Since the famous handshake between Rabin and Arafat, the peace process has been loudly decried on two fronts in the United States...
...Obviously, then, a peace process can now succeed only if Netanyahu and his confederates betray their own first principles...
...Most social democratic parties in the postWorld War II years sought to expand the state's role in order to foster egalitarianism and curb *I summarize from the argument I made in Zion and State: Nation, Class and the Shaping of Modern Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992...
...Likud apologists have been quick to recall Menachem Begin...
...his position is that of someone who suffers no consequences for his politics...
...It formed coalitions with other parties, nonsocialist and religious, to take control of the national movement, and thereby effectively elevated national politics above its socialist goals...
...Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Likud's ideological godfather, wanted to define Zionism's "final goal" as a Jewish state in the "whole Land of Israel" (including today's Jordan...
...Rosenthal and William Safire read like Likud press releases) and in theAmerican Jewish community...
...They should not...
...six months later it lost to a man who had savagely attacked the slain premier's peace policies and who, before the killing, alleged that Rabin was "personally responsible" for Israeli deaths inArab terror attacks...
...Where the Histadrut was previously conceived as the socialist state-in-genesis, the germ of the future society, it was now to be one pillar—albeit the biggest—of a future state...
...It was, in short, a socialist public sphere within Mandatory Palestine...
...Ben-Gurion didn't fear that his policies would bring such results...
...In 1992, many Russians voted Labor, angry when the Likud jeopardized U.S...
...and Begin also led his country into a disastrous war in Lebanon...
...In fact, the chief of Israel's internal security service, the Shin Bet, reports that cooperation between Israeli and FALL • 1996 • 15 Politics Abroad Palestinian security forces foiled fourteen suicide bombings in the months before the election...
...Jabotinsky opposed wedding left-wing ideals to national needs...
...Instead, Israel's friends should say loudly, clearly, repeatedly: Jerusalem should fulfill all its Oslo obligations, in spirit and in letter...
...The social content of Zionism," David BenGurion insisted in a 1932 speech, "can be destructive, reactionary, steeped in slavery, exploitation, ugliness, and it can be positive, progressive, redemptive, liberating, representing social advance and moral beauty...
...That is true—as far as it goes...
...FALL • 1996 • 17 Politics Abroad entrenched socioeconomic interests...
...Still, under Rabin and Peres a fair deal for the Palestinians was in the offing together with Israel's integration into the Mideast...
...So there was no need to dwell on the killing, let alone Netanyahu's appalling behavior on its eve...
...they remain so today...
...It also demonstrates a meager grasp of diplomacy (nobody secures everything at the beginning of negotiations...
...In a Labor Zionist version of the end of ideology, Peres relentlessly derided Labor's traditional vision and urged the movement to adopt a new grammar of the state, science, and technology...
...Then, on the other hand, we have Said's strange bedfellows—Netanyahu's backers and apologists in the press (the columns of A.M...
...The ideological expression of Labor's turn was formulated by Ben-Gurion, who embodied it more than anyone else, as "mamlakhtiyut," from the word for "kingdom" in Hebrew...
...When the PLO dropped clauses in its covenant calling for Israel's end, Labor dropped officially its opposition to a Palestinian state...
...Sharansky translated this discontent into identity politics, Israel-style...
...The new premier has always opposed trading land for peace, the axiom of the Oslo accords...
...The kibbutz, nowadays, has problems, but no less than the Israeli Labor movement as a whole, which may well be in its twilight...
...the new state could have been used to expand an already autonomous and developed socialist sector...
...Because it seemed initially to have so much going for it—Rabin's legacy, the peace process, a flourishing economy— Labor assumed it had enough momentum to carry the day...
...the idea of Menahem Begin, Jabotinsky's heir, as prime minister was simply not to be taken seriously in the Israel of the 1950s...
...The outcome: Netanyahu prevailed by 0.9 percent of the vote, despite Labor's lead in seats...
...Yet while Rabin or Peres was premier, creative progress was possible...
...Likud's candidate played down "Greater Israel" ideology and instead sought to translate the issue of personal safety into national defense...
...nor had they undergone the struggle for statehood under the left's leadership...
...But the "Rabin generation" proved to be a figment of wishful imagination...
...Add the religious and Likud tallies and you have a Likud government...
...the majority of his own Likud voted against the treaty and it passed Parliament thanks only to Labor party support...
...In the end, Ramon didn't reform, let alone reinvent, the Histadrut as much as denude it...
...Said was once Arafat's arch-apologist (especially to the left), but he turned on him the moment the FALL • 1996 • 19 Politics Abroad PLO's head sought a real compromise...
...This didn't result in universalizing Labor's values throughout the society...
...like Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO, they stonewalled until the walls crumbled...
...Israelis were afraid to take the bus, to stroll in town, to go to the movies...
...Led by Rabin, Peres, and Beilin (who was central to Oslo), it opened the way to a dramatic transformation ofArab-Israeli relations...
...Not only did religious voters mobilize for him— thanks partly to intense efforts by Ariel Sharon— but he hurt Labor by encouraging his friend Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky to launch a party of Russian immigrants...
...Ben-Gurion's policies inevitably weakened Labor's organizational base...
...Ben-Gurion fought to transfer to state hands the Histadrut's education system, its labor exchanges, and its health system (he failed in the latter case...
...Initially, Israel had four "trends" in education—labor (under Histadrut auspices), "general" (that is, centrist), and two that were religious...
...Pressure on Britain was fine, but Labor had less faith in its efficacy...
...it is a movement that effectively dismantled the foundation of its own power, and thereby disarmed itself...
...The first major confrontation between the 16 • DISSENT Politics Abroad Zionist left and the right occurred in the 1930s...
...But he didn't translate the means he celebrated—science, technology, efficiency—into the idea of a just society...
...Compromise with the Arabs was unthinkable...
...it shouldn't have its own enterprises, schools, health system, and so on...
...You didn't have to choose Likud or Labor to support their respective leaders for prime minister...
...Within it were trade unions, economic enterprises, cooperatives, and an array of welfare institutions (health and educational systems, labor exchanges, workers' kitchens...
...The End of Labor Ideology...
...The Israeli opposition—Labor, Meretz, Peace Now— must be given a voice and supported...
...Last winter, after the Rabin assassination, Labor had a thirty-point lead in polls...
...The state and social democracy became distinct...
...He advocated "pure" nationalism...
...Perhaps more important, however, was the impact on Labor's ideological hegemony...
...Within Labor there was talk that a "Rabin generation" had been born...
...Can it...
...He did make peace, but under enormous American pressure...
...For Said, Oslo was worthless from the start because the Palestinians didn't get everything immediately...
...IfArafat is undone and then Hamas and the Likud are the "sole representatives" of their respective sides, the consequences will be disastrous...
...In 1996 they were unhappy with Labor's record in providing jobs and housing...
...But Jabotinsky did pose a considerable challenge and nearly seized the Zionist mantle...
...Because of the Histadrut's achievements, Israel had the opportunity for a different, perhaps unique social democratic experiment...
...In the 1920s, they saw the Histadrut (the General Confederation of Labor), with Ben-Gurion its first head, as their principal vehicle but also as the embodiment of their egalitarian goals...
...This time we depended on TV while the right-wing mobilized at the grassroots...
...Here a vital issue was education...
...But in the old system no party ever won a majority, necessitating coalition governments dependent on small (usually religious) parties that made extortive demands for their support...
...Israel was bogged down there until extracted by Shimon Peres when he became premier of a national unity government in 1984...
...Leaflets calling for a "Netanyahu-Sharansky" split vote appeared in immigrant quarters...
...Unsettled Future In the end, Labor's defeat is Israel's tragedy, no matter how it is explained...
...So the head of government no longer depends on coalitionsquabbling for his office, although his cabinet, requiring a vote of confidence, does...
...Though Labor may be enfeebled as a self-conscious social democratic movement, its government of 1992-1996 was revolutionary in foreign policy...
...Beilin, Peres's chief protege, champions mamlakhtiyut when it comes to the Labor movement, but then advocates neoliberalism for the Israeli economy...
...History doesn't tell us that courageous Likud makes peace...
...Why, he's "pragmatic"—didn't you know?—and not so different from Rabin and Peres after all...
...So how did the Likud win...
...But that is just what Ben-Gurion, one of the Histadrut's original architects, did not do...
...So, rather than weakening small parties, as its planners hoped, the new system encouraged split voting to their advantage...
...In the end, having eschewed institution building for diplomatic gestures, Jabotinsky's war against the left foundered precisely on Labor's formidable institutional network, then busy integrating immigrants into the country, consolidating a growing constituency and fortifying itself...
...Labor's television ads presented images of McDonald's and Pizza Hut—the "good" things Peres's peace would bring...
...Both major parties lost mandates while the religious parties gained...
...They turned out in unprecedented numbers to vote for Peres, despite considerable outrage at the botched Israeli retaliatory raid in Lebanon in April, with its high civilian toll...
...He began selling off the Histadrut's economic enterprises and abolished the long-standing rule that Histadrut membership was required to join its health system...
...In the past, when Labor had to recuperate after an electoral loss, it could always lean on the Histadrut's formidable apparatus...
...Of course he hasn't been living under occupation...
...the state"—the means—increasingly became a thing unto itself.' The rise of Nazism greatly reinforced this trend: there was a desperate need for a refuge, for a state that would accept any and every hunted Jew...
...Nobody expected it to come smoothly or without opposition—nobody who knows the region, anyway...
...Most Histadrut leaders, however, had no such inclinations...
...Netanyahu was also abetted by a new election law...
...the youth, shocked at the murder of a national hero by a religious right-winger, seemed about to turn left...
...it reports that Labor has to pick up the pieces, even when a Likud leader does the right thing, as Begin did in response to Anwar Sadat's initiative...
...In the past, Israel's premier was the leader of the largest party in the 120-member Knesset, the latter elected by proportional representation...
...Assassination deprived Labor of a vital electoral asset— leadership by a military hero who had embraced compromise with the Palestinians...
...The ideology of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party is a species of fundamentalist nationalism...
...The noisiest dispute, as today, was over "foreign policy"—but it didn't determine the contest...
...The difference between our 1992 and 1996 campaigns was startling," comments Pini Shomer, head of organization and the labor councils for the Histadrut...
...Then Hamas, as if bidding perversely on Likud's behalf, launched its murderous suicide attacks...
...Yet at this time Ben-Gurion chose to undo his own movement's education system...
...Labor's leaders insisted that they were not only building a state but a certain type of society...
...When Ramon left the cabinet to became head of the Histadrut, routing its myopic old guard in internal elections, he carried out this program— which was essentially what Jabotinsky advocated in the 1930s and what Peres espoused in the 1950s and 1960s...
...Oddly enough, Likud had another factor in its corner: Labor's campaign...
...For one thing, a mobilized labor movement with a sense of purpose...
...On one hand there are critics like Edward Said, who long presented himself as a "moderate...
...In fact Israel may be the only case in socialist history in which a social democratic movement came to power and nationalized its own institutions rather than bourgeois property (of which there was relatively little then...
...Israelis grew weary of such blackmail, and so a new system was designed by four Tel Aviv University law professors...
...The fate of the Histadrut itself is a vital part of this story...
...instead, Labor values were subsumed by national (or "statist") ones, and this, in the end, helped lay the groundwork for the eventual rise of the nationalist right...
...How Likud Won Will Labor have to pick up the pieces this time...
...We now have to lead a political and ideological opposition to the Likud government, especially in social and economic affairs, but in a much weakened condition...
...Japan is extolled for recognizing that the essential issues are science, technology, and efficiency...
...you could vote for Netanyahu or Peres directly and then for another party in the Knesset ballot...
...There was, of course, considerable resistance to mamlakhtiyut within Labor, and Ben-Gurion's ideas never won the day fully...
...A decision was made to merge them into a single state ("mamlakhti") system, but the religious parties resisted...
...During his tenure—he quit the Histadrut to rejoin the cabinet after Rabin's assassination and then ran Labor's election campaign—membership fell from a million and a half to seven hundred thousand...
...Meanwhile, a group of younger Labor party leaders, most notably Yossi Beilin and Haim Ramon, agitated furiously against "oldfashioned" socialist symbols, values, and institutions, especially the Histadrut...
...Indeed, the idea of "the state" became more and more reified in Labor Zionist thinking...
...loan guarantees for the sake of West Bank settlements...
...Zionism's purpose, for him, was best achieved by massive pressure on Britain to secure a Jewish national home in Mandatory Palestine...
...In addition to the premier, the most ardent proponent within Labor of mamlakhtiyut and foe of the old social democratic ethos was Ben-Gurion's young protege, Shimon Peres...
...It's hard to blame her...
...But Peres wanted a victory on his own terms and not due to Rabin's memory...
...it was therefore also preoccupied with building a community in Palestine immigrant by immigrant, kibbutz by kibbutz, "cow by cow...
...I'm trying to be optimistic," an Israeli friend said to me after last spring's elections, "but my son goes into the Army next year and I shiver when I think of Netanyahu making life and death decisions for this country...
...The issue before his generation, he said in 1960, was "not to know what we want to be, but what we want to do...
...It didn't save Labor in 1996—even though Labor had run the state for four years and, despite Hamas bombings, had a great deal to show: Israel was no longer isolated in the world, relations with Washington were excellent, Arab embassies had opened in the Jewish state, Jews and 18 • DISSENT Politics Abroad Palestinians were on their way to a modus vivendi, there was an economic boom, the country had been bolstered by mass immigration...
...Now the right has the strong advantage...
...Reform was badly needed, but it had to come with an eye to the future...
...Indeed, the way was opened to a new Mideast...
...To prevent him from taking control of the World Zionist Organization, Labor committed itself to a historic compromise...
...Ramon was chairman of an organization he didn't like," observes Pini Shomer, himself an advocate of fresh thinking at the Histadrut...
...just as meager as his grasp of history when he insists that little differentiates left and right in Israel since both, finally, are Zionist demons...
...though secular, it claims "eternal rights" to "historical" borders, and aims to identify such "rights" with "security...
...He too was branded intransigent, they say, yet he made peace with Egypt and yielded Sinai...
...It needed to rethink and to reinvent itself as a social experiment—as a social democratic public sphere for a new millennium...
...So all of Israel's friends should unite behind him and hold their tongues...
...20 • DISSENT...
...Last time Rabin came four times to my home town, Bat Yam, and so did various Knesset members...
...Netanyahu turned this situation to his advantage, aided by Arthur Finkelstein, a shadowy New York political operator with a record of negative campaigning on behalf of Alfonse D'Amato and George Pataki...
...The Histadrut, he demanded, should be nothing more than a trade union...
...Peres wanted to strengthen Arafat while Netanyahu wants to weaken him...
...They blustered loudly and often demagogically against Labor's peace process and now rush to clean up Netanyahu...
...Labor, having led the way to national independence, was considered the natural governing party though it never won more than 40 percent of the vote...
...Had this been in effect in 1996, Peres might still be in office, as Labor came in first with thirty-four seats to Likud's thirty-two...
...A Zionism totally void of all social content, either good or bad, is a meaningless abstraction, lacking any living or concrete content...
...This time mobilization didn't take place...
...The Israeli left—the Labor and Meretz parties and the Peace Now movement—is deeply demoralized...
...Israeli Arabs have a better sense of things...
...What was missing...
...Sharansky won seven seats...
...Indeed, a Big Mac was never the insignia of Zionist social democracy—the kibbutz was...
...The source of its crisis is not security issues, however central they were to the election...
...So the solution he and Ramon (then health minister) advanced for the Histadrut's many problems was not social democratic innovation but divestiture of everything except its trade union role...
...a state was a good in itself...
...They were, on the whole, more tradition-minded than Labor, which was secular...
...It can very roughly be translated as "statism...
...In the 1950s, however, there was mass immigration into the country, much of it North African and Mideastem Jews...
...The nationalist right was then marginalized...
...Campaign chief Haim Ramon opted for a noncombative strategy that deemphasized the assassination...
...Indeed, Labor mobilized its Histadrut ranks for elections, to loud protests from the right...
...The premier can, nevertheless, be removed by a majority vote of no-confidence, while ministers can be ousted only by a vote of seventy...
...Netanyahu exploited the novel structure well...
...Fewer and fewer Palestinians were subject to occupation, and Israelis were being welcomed to more and more Arab capitals...
...This didn't make Japan socialist, Peres admitted, upholding his own commitment to social justice in the form of economic democracy...
...In 1952-1953, the last academic year before the merger, 43.4 percent of Israel's students went to Labor schools...
...the state was a necessary means to that end, not an end in itself...
...It adopted, for all practical purposes, the program of the Peace Now movement...
...This makes Israeli Labor much like social democratic movements everywhere...
...Rabin, with his long army career, could have countered him...
...The prime minister is elected directly, but the Knesset is still chosen by proportional representation...
...Yet there is a distinctive dimension to Israeli Labor's fate...
...There should be no new settlers in the territories...
...And Peres, according to Netanyahu, was "worse than Neville Chamberlain...
...The Histadrut, for many, many years, was in dire need of radical reform...
...In contrast, Labor's mainstream rejected irredentism and embraced compromise, ultimately a partition of Palestine into Jewish andArab states...
...No wonder that "Labor values" began to wither...
...What Jabotinsky called the "unity of the land" was a "spiritual fact," but spiritual and political facts ought not to be conflated...
...Mamlakhtiyut, he still maintained, had "saved" Labor...
...Ben-Gurion needed the religious for his government coalition, so he yielded, integrating only the labor and general systems into a national system and leaving religious schools intact...
...Some 60 percent of first-time voters (the young and immigrants) opted for the right...
...The essential issue for Israeli social democracy, Peres insisted in a 1983 interview, was how to "bake a cake," not how to divide it...
...It is true that Israelis, preoccupied with security, were divided about the risks in the peace process...
...This is an election law from Chelm," says a veteran Israeli political scientist, referring to the mythical East European Jewish town whose inhabitants always get things wrong...
...nor will the Histadrut have the same wherewithal to help post-election Labor...
...It is remarkably ill-conceived...
...The State and Social Democracy It may seem odd for a Labor party to deploy McDonald's as a campaign symbol...
...The short-term prospects aren't hopeful...
...Jabotinsky derided this, but his scorn was keenest when it came to Labor's egalitarian aspirations, what were called "Labor values...
...The PLO, however difficult or trying the new circumstances, should continue to pursue its goals peacefully...
...This divorce between means and ends was still at the center of Peres's thinking after he became Labor party head two decades later...
...they hadn't had the same formative experiences as the (mostly Europeanborn) Zionist left...
...Outside Jewish history," warned Labor's David Ben-Gurion "the Land of Israel has no specific existence as a geographic and political unit...
...In 1982 he wrote a series of articles on "New Socialism" for the Israeli daily ha-Arets...
...Once Israel was born, it became Ben-Gurion's guiding concept as premier: the traditional institutions of the Labor movement—especially those of the Histadrut—were to be subordinated to the state...
...He accused Peres of "contracting out" Israeli security to Yasir Arafat...
...And Washington should press the peace process forward forcefully, allowing no wiggle room for the Likud's grand illusion—that there can be peace without real compromise...
...In other words, just when a fundamental change in the cultural character of the society commenced—the Jewish population rose 211 percent between 1948 and 1964—Labor relinquished, while the religious parties kept, a principal means of socialization...
...A brief look at some history will illustrate what I mean...
...Netanyahu is the first Israeli premier to owe his office to murder— of Rabin by a Jewish fanatic and then of scores of Israeli civilians by Muslim fanatics...
...perhaps it dissipated when Jerusalem's Bus 18 exploded...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
