19 January 2011 By
Jonathan Cook Ehud Barak, Israel's
defence minister,
appears to have driven the final nail in the coffin of
the Zionist left with his decision to split from the
Labor party and create a new "centrist, Zionist"
faction in the Israeli parliament. So far four MPs,
out of a total of 12, have announced they are
following him. Moments after Barak's press
conference on Monday, the
Israeli media suggested that the
true architect of the Labor party's split was the
prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who, according to
one of his aides, had planned it like "an elite
general staff [military] operation". Netanyahu has pressing reasons
for wanting Barak to stay in the most rightwing
government in Israel's history. He has provided useful
diplomatic cover as Netanyahu has stymied progress in
a US-sponsored peace process. Barak had been happy to oblige as
the government's fig-leaf, so long as he was allowed
to hold on to his post overseeing the occupation of
the Palestinians. But as Labor became little more than
a one-man show, it was racked with revolts, its MPs
and handful of
cabinet ministers
regularly threatening to pull out of the coalition. Netanyahu, however, has a larger
purpose in seeking to draft the Labor party's obituary
-- one related to the cementing of a domestic
consensus behind the right's vision of a
Greater
Israel. The prime minister is
hoping to unpick the last strands of the Israel
created by the founders of
Labor
Zionism. Labor's impact on
Zionism
was truly formative. During the 1948 war, the party's
leaders established Israel as a
socialist state
-- even if it was of a strange variety that worried
almost exclusively about the welfare of its Jewish
majority and carefully engineered systematic
discrimination against the fifth of the citizenry who
were Palestinian. For the next three decades Labor
ran Israel virtually as a one-party state, centrally
directing the economy and its major industries through
the party's affiliated
trade union federation known as
the Histadrut. Labor's political power rested on
its
economic power. Most of Israel's
middle and working classes relied for their employment
on state corporations, the security industries, the
civil service and government firms -- and that ensured
votes for Labor. But as Israel's economy began to
wane, so did Labor's electoral fortunes. The rightwing
Likud party -- home to Netanyahu -- won power for the
first time in 1977, championing both the settlements
and economic privatisation. These moves further
weakened Labor. The party recovered only in the
early 1990s, under former general
Yitzhak Rabin, who reinvented it
as a "peace
party". Rabin adopted the
Oslo
accords that, it was widely assumed,
would eventually lead to Palestinian statehood. The Oslo process had its own
economic, as well as political, logic. The Labor
party, which had lost its chief rationale following
economic privatisation, now promised that regional
peace would open up lucrative new global markets,
especially in
China and
India.
The ultra-nationalism of
Likud was presented as a barrier
to trade and growth. But peace failed to materialise,
and the settlements' continuing expansion steadily
eroded the Palestinians' belief in Israel's good
faith. Labor's last shot at peace-making was the
Camp David summit
of 2000. When Barak, as prime minister, failed to
reach a final-status agreement with the Palestinians,
claiming there was "no partner", he killed off
Israel's fickle
peace camp and made his party
politically irrelevant again. In the following years, Barak
continued to undermine Labor. In joining Netanyahu's
government, he visibly abandoned Labor's two official
missions: to protect the poor and defend the peace
process. With Netanyahu's help, he now
appears to have finished off Labor for good. His
centrist party
known as Atzmaut or
Independence -- working inside
the government -- will replicate the platform of
Israel's large opposition party, Kadima. Atzmaut's ideology, Barak has
already made clear, will depart from Labor's. At his
press conference he denounced his former colleagues as
representing "the left and post-Zionism". Avishai Braverman, a dovish and
disgruntled Labor minister until Barak's split,
responded bitterly that the new party would be "Likud
A at best and Lieberman B at worst" -- a reference to
Avigdor Lieberman, the
ultra-nationalist foreign minister. Labor's breakup highlights both
the continuing shift rightwards in Israel and Barak's
obssessive placing of his personal ambitions above all
else. The defence ministry has become his personal
fiefdom. What will now become of the
Zionist left in Israel? The few remaining Labor MPs
will probably either knock on Kadima's door, a natural
home for a growing number of them, or unite with the
tiny other left party, Meretz. Together, the surviving
left will struggle to match the paltry number of Arab
MPs. At the next election, the Zionist left may all
but disappear from the parliamentary stage. Its demise, however, should not
be lamented. It has been in terminal decline for
decades. What its disappearance may do is
free up the political landscape for a real left to
emerge in Israel, one less tied to the onerous legacy
of Labor Zionism and prepared to collaborate
creatively with the Palestinian national movements.
That is an outcome not considered in Netanyahu's
scheming. Labor's failure offers a potent
lesson for this new left. The old party's success was
dependent on offering the Israeli public not just a
political vision but an economic one too. Israelis
will not welcome the compromises needed for peace
unless they believe there are material incentives to
make such sacrifices worthwhile. The new left already understands
the power of the stick of
international sanctions looming
over Israel. But it must also offer a carrot to the
Israeli public: a vision in which an Israel at peace
with its neighbours will bring about a better quality
of life. That will be the first,
formidable task facing the post-Barak left. Jonathan Cook is a writer and
journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel.
His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East" (Pluto
Press) and "Disappearing
Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed
Books). His website is
www.jkcook.net. Comments 💬 التعليقات |