As I'm writing this, the final count has yet to be made in Israel's general election of Tuesday. But one thing is clear: Labor has polled fourth in the election — its worst electoral position in the entire history of the State of Israel and the only election in Israel's history where Labor wasn't either the first- or second-highest polling party. Israel may be heading for a national unity government, but Labor may not be a necessary partner for a parliamentary majority.
For Israel's first thirty years of existence, it was a de facto socialist state, with Labor and its antecedents always winning elections and almost never bringing the right wing into any coalition. So what happened that left once almighty Labor now licking its wounds? The party is moribund, quite clearly, when it polls behind Yisrael Beiteinu, the immigrant party of right-winger Avigdor Liberman. Is this the decline and fall of the left in Israel? Or does it betoken some larger trend away from leftism?
The political-historical aspect is easily understood. After Golda Meir's government was "caught by surprise" in October 1973, a government commission's findings forced her resignation. Yitzhak Rabin formed the next Labor government, stepping into the prime ministry after winning the party primary. He ruled until May 1977, when elections — which he had called — ousted him in the face of a banking scandal centered around his wife, Leah.
For the first time since independence, a right-wing party, Menachem Begin's Likud, won a plurality and formed a government. Begin's win was a combination of the political, military, and moral failures of Labor and Begin's heavy reliance on non-Ashkenazi voters. (Despite enormous Sephardi and Mizrachi support for the Likud, which continues down to today, there still has never been a non-Ashkenazi Prime Minister.) With the exceptions of decisive Labor victories for Rabin in 1992 and Ehud Barak in 1999, Israel has been ruled either by the Likud or national-unity governments, with the exception of the last three years, during which it's been led by the centrist Kadima party.
The larger historical scenario also must be assessed. The original Zionists drew its immigrants largely from Poland and the Russian Empire. These were not religious Jews; they tended toward secularism and many were involved in the Jewish Bund, the international socialist organization of Jewish workers — sort of the Jewish Wobblies. And while these Zionist immigrants to Palestine came largely from urban backgrounds, they saw their mission as agrarian pioneers. Thus the kibbutz movement of collective farming was born.
There was opposition to so-called Labor Zionism, of course, personified in Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionist movement, but in Israel's first election (held in February 1949 after a provisional government ruled from May 1948), the Revisionist Herut party, led by Begin, polled a miserable 11.5% of the vote. Mapai (The Party of the Workers of Israel) and Mapam (The Party of United Workers) — both socialist with Mapam further to the left and with Soviet sympathies — polled just over 50% combined. David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister, formed a government without Mapam, citing their pro-Soviet leanings, and instead formed his government from the United Religous Front, the center-left Progressive Party, the Sephardic and Oriental Jewish Party, and two mandates from Arab Israelis from Nazareth.
Ben-Gurion led governments through 1963, when he retired, with the exception of the period of 1954 and 1955, when Israel was led by a fellow member of Mapai, Moshe Sharett. The Prime Minister between Ben-Gurion and Meir, Levi Eshkol, was also from Mapai, though he was also the first Prime Minister to form a national unity government, bringing Begin's Gahal (Bloc of Herut and Liberals) into the government with the breakout of the 1967 War. Thus began the abandonment of the Left in Israel. Although Golda Meir had strong socialist credentials and Yitzhak Rabin was raised by a Marxist mother ("Red Rosa" Cohen), they tended toward hawkishness and refusal to accommodate the Palestinians. (This was, it must be noted, matched by the Palestinian rejection of Israel.) This hawkishness dominated the Begin years and those of his successors, Yitzhak Shamir of the Likud and then-hawkish Shimon Peres of Labor.
At the same time, the agrarian spirit of the original Zionists was dying out along with the original Zionists themselves. Kibbutzim were converting from agriculture to producing industrial goods. The voting base of Israel went from having at its heart socialist Ashkenazim to more conservative Sephardim and the growing national-religious pro-settler bloc. The socialist banner, such as it is, was taken up by Meretz, formed prior to the 1992 elections as a coalition of left-wing parties and now the standard-bearing party of Social Democrats in Israel. However, while Meretz polled particularly well in the elections of Rabin and Barak, their showings have been otherwise quite poor. Meretz will hold a mere 3 seats in the next Knesset. Socialism (in this case communism) is upheld by only one other party, the mixed–Jewish-Arab Hadash Party, which itself only holds 4 seats.
Thus looking back to when Rabin won re-election in 1992 and even more so when Ehud Barak was elected in 1999, these men were not "Labor" in the sense that it had traditionally been understood. Like Tony Blair in the U.K. or Bill Clinton in the U.S., Rabin and Barak represented Israel's own version of "New Labor" or "New Democrats" to a large extent. This was a Labor Party that was now pragmatic with regard to issues of peace and security but that didn't care much about socialism. So the drift away from leftism in Israel can be seen as part of a worldwide turn toward "centrist" politics and parties that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union, though assessing cause and effect is difficult.
So it would appear that the demise of Israel's Labor party is part of a larger trend worldwide — a move away from socialist economic policies. But what does this mean for the peace process? When the traditionally dovish left no longer plays a significant role in Israeli politics, is the only alternative perpetual war? See my last diary for the answer to that.