The Israeli Labor Party: Peacemaker or Likud II?

Abstract

It vwas around 10:45 P.M., 20 February 1992. The polls had just closed following a mild winter day in which 70 percent of 150,000 members of the Israeli Labor party had voted in an American-style primary for the leader of the country's largest opposition party. In a few hours Israeli television would announce the results of the primary-the first ever held in Israel-which pitted Shimon Peres, the incumbent party chairman, against his rival of nearly two decades, former Army Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin. The two former prime ministers and party elders were battling for primacy for the fifth time in eighteen years. At Peres's Tel Aviv election headquarters, Member of Knesset (MK) Abraham Burg, one of the party chairman's young advisors and the one who coined his campaign slogan, We Win With the Best Man, pointed to the results that had just arrived from Labor's branch in Ramle, indicating that Peres had won there with a 56-percent majority. The 68-year-old Peres, sitting under a painting of Israel's founding father and his political patron, David Ben-Gurion, wrote down the new figure, trying to calculate whether the totals might bring the 69-year-old Rabin below the 40-percent threshold, forcing a runoff. In that case, many of the votes that went to the other candidates, especially to Israel Keisar, the secretarygeneral of the Israeli trade union (Histadrut), could fall to Peres, making him a more formidable opponent in a two-way race with Rabin.1