October 31, 2002	Thursday	Sha’aban 24,1423

TEL AVIV: The Israeli Labour Party joined Ariel Sharon’s government last year hoping to rein in the strong-willed leader from taking too tough a stance on a Palestinian uprising and digging up the track to peace.

Now many Labour activists fear the ageing general may be driving them on to their own political demise.

Ahead of party primaries set for Nov 19, centre-left Labour is scrambling to find a new message for an Israeli public which no longer subscribes to its once-rosy view of Middle East peacemaking after two years of violence.

Labour’s image crisis came to a head this week, when party leader and Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer threatened to pull out of the government after a vote on the 2003 state budget on Wednesday, hoping to patch up his appeal to left-wing voters by opposing allocations to Jewish settlements.

At stake is the outcome of a general election due in up to a year’s time which could reconfigure Israel’s political map, law makers and political scientists said.

If Labour fails to find a suitable platform, the party which once held a decades-long monopoly over government could be split from within and lose broadly to its peers to the left and right.

“What will happen in the left-wing depends on what happens within Labour,” Haim Ramon, one of three candidates for the party’s leadership, said in an interview.

Ramon is a long-time Labour moderate who opposed its entry into right-wing Likud leader Sharon’s government. His views put him roughly between his rivals: the hawkish Ben-Eliezer, and Amram Mitzna, the dovish mayor of the northern city of Haifa.

“If Fuad (Ben-Eliezer) is elected, apparently there will be a new social democratic party, there will be serious changes in the political map and Labour could become the third or fourth largest party in terms of size,” Ramon said.

He was referring to nascent plans by Israel’s main opposition Meretz party, long a bastion of the country’s left-wing elites, to broaden its ranks into a social-democratic faction that could draw some of Labour’s disaffected doves.

“Many people may move in the direction of Meretz, so there is a potential for a transfer of votes from Labour both to the right and the left,” said political scientist Avraham Diskin.

ANGRY DOVES: Labour’s doves have been at bitter odds with their party since it joined Sharon’s government. Some, like Yossi Beilin, were architects of the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords in the 1990s and view Sharon’s tactics as a sure way to crush their efforts to resolve 54 years of conflict.

Their rancour is also directed at Ben-Eliezer and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, the living symbol of Israel’s left, for allowing Sharon to draw on the international legitimacy Labour earned as peacemakers as he sent troops into Palestinian cities and besieged their one-time negotiating partner, Yasser Arafat.

Israeli forces mounted those operations following Palestinian suicide bombings that killed dozens of people and shifted the public mood in Israel to the right.

“I have a feeling that he (Sharon) thinks of the Labour Party like the sheep on his farm,” said Ramon at a party convention late last month.

“We are a government of mutes, following the track made by Sharon the shepherd, keeping silent. Everybody knows the end of the sheep on Sharon’s farm. I don’t want that end for Labour.”

Support for Labour has dropped even further since its last electoral defeat in February 2001, when prime minister Ehud Barak was trounced by Sharon after failing to clinch a peace deal with the Palestinians in mid-2000.

The bloodshed that had ensued caught many Israelis by surprise and led them to accuse Barak and Labour of under- estimating the readiness of the Palestinians to resort to violence in a drive towards statehood.

That image has yet to fade during Sharon’s tenure and the Likud leader remains widely popular, even as violence intensifies and a domestic recession deepens.

An October survey by Israeli pollster TNS Teleseker for Army Radio showed Likud, with Sharon at its head, sweeping the next election with up to 46 per cent of the vote in contrast to a maximum 20 per cent for Labour, depending on who is chosen as leader.

The poll surveyed 500 Israelis, with up to 18 per cent of those questioned saying they had yet to choose a favoured party.

Likud’s hold on the 120-member parliament would be further buttressed by religious and Russian immigrant parties which tend to side with its right-wing policies.

Labour is currently parliament’s largest party with 25 seats compared with Likud’s 19.

WHAT CAN THEY OFFER?: Labour’s advocacy of a return to peace negotiations finds little favour among Israelis as the uprising rages, despite a general consensus in favour of a Palestinian state in most of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

As a result, its candidates are struggling to identify the policies they can offer in the interim.

Ben-Eliezer’s gamble appears aimed at shoring up his internal party ratings, where he trails as the least favoured candidate for the primaries, by homing in on left-wing support for dismantling Jewish settlements on occupied land.—Reuters