Even a spell in the opposition may not help rebrand Labor as Israel's "social democratic party."
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFBarak pshh 224.88(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski )
Kicking off the Labor Party's campaign for the 18th Knesset on Monday, party chair Ehud Barak denounced "piggish capitalism."
"We differ from other parties because we understand that it's time to do away with the capitalistic greed that the Right has been a proponent of, while offering solidarity, sensitivity and social responsibility."
Playing to the proletariat has worked for Barak in the past. In the 1999 campaign, which saw him defeat the Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu, the Labor leader predicted that Netanyahu's government "will fall because of the trampled honor of the unemployed, because of one child's crying into his pillow at night, and another child, and another child, and another child..."
It's an approach that may not work now.
Ten years on, Labor aspires to represent the working man and woman; it maintains its membership in the Socialist International. Yet the party is so closely identified in the public mind with many of Israel's top entrepreneurs, industrialists and moguls as to make an anti-greed electoral strategy problematic.
Over the years, for instance, Labor has raised money abroad from the Bronfman family, from Swiss industrialists Nissim Gaon and Bruce Rappaport, from Slim-Fast diet company founder S. Daniel Abraham and the late Swiss-British billionaire Octav Botnar. Local benefactors have included Gad Ze'evi, Muzi Wertheim and Stef Wertheimer.
These supporters may see themselves as progressives, but could voters reasonably think of them as enemies of "capitalist greed"?
As for the party leader himself, it's true that Barak was raised on a kibbutz - Mishmar Hasharon - but he has since graduated to an entirely different life-style, exemplified by his spacious home on the 31st floor of Alfred Akirov's Tel Aviv tower. It's an apartment purchased for $2.5 million in 2006, which Barak is now trying to sell for $11 million. Plainly, the Labor leader has engaged in capitalist enterprise (serving on corporate boards and the like).
We do not begrudge him his comfortable lifestyle. He would do well, however, to explain to Israelis where enterprise ends and greed begins.
Labor's origins are traceable to the Zionist socialism of the Mapai Party, which dominated our politics and our economics first through the pre-state Jewish Agency, and then in government.
Today's Labor Party encompasses the remnants of the neo-Marxist Achdut Avoda Party as well as David Ben-Gurion's splinter Rafi Party. The factions merged in 1968, though the Labor Party as we know it now emerged only in 1991. Ever since, it has struggled to refine its identity. In 2003, several of its more dovish luminaries quit to join Meretz; and in 2006 others who in the wake of the second intifada saw themselves as centrist or pragmatists quit to join Kadima.
WHERE DOES all this leave Labor now? Polls show the party garnering 11 Knesset seats, compared to the 20 it holds now. The global economic crisis notwithstanding, voters are telling pollsters that security tops the economy as the issue that most animates their preferences. Assuming Shaul Mofaz plays a critical role in Kadima's campaign and Moshe Ya'alon - another general - runs with Likud, Barak's appeal to voters on security grounds is diminished.
The ethnic and working-class vote is likely to go to Shas; sincere neo-Marxists troubled by "capitalistic greed" will probably be more comfortable voting Meretz. Thus Barak's "capitalist greed" rhetoric is unlikely to be Labor's salvation.
Britain's Labor Party spent its "wilderness years" (1979-1997) - while Margaret Thatcher and her successors kept the Conservatives in power - reinventing itself as New Labor. The Israel Labor Party never gave itself much time for that. When it wasn't ruling the country for 29 consecutive years, it was, for roughly 17 years, a coalition partner. Arguably, the party became little more than a vehicle for seeking office.
At this stage, it's far from obvious that even a spell in the opposition could rebrand Labor as Israel's "social democratic party." In its post-Amir Peretz incarnation, it is outflanked on its economic left by Meretz and Shas, while the center is held by Kadima.
Should Kadima flourish under Tzipi Livni - championing, moreover, a centrist approach to negotiation with the Palestinian Arabs - many will wonder whether Labor, led by Ehud Barak, has any future at all.
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