Amir Peretz, the new chairman of the Labor Party, is a progressive populist -- but he may be George W. Bush's best hope.
Peretz, who won a surprise, cliffhanger victory over incumbent chairman Shimon Peres last week, is a trade unionist in his gut. He is a masterful negotiator who has pledged that, if he is elected prime minister in the next Israeli elections (likely to be scheduled for spring 2006), he will move his country toward direct negotiations with the Palestinians. Peretz's ideology is directly counter to everything the current U.S. administration believes in, but unlike the current prime minister, Ariel Sharon, Peretz wants to negotiate a final agreement that brings peace to the two sides.
Peretz ran his primary campaign promoting a higher minimum wage in a party that long ago lost its claim to the title "labor." Under Peres, and Ehud Barak before him, Labor's constituency shrank to a base in the well-heeled northern suburbs of Tel Aviv as its leaders championed a neoliberalism closer to Bush's policies than to the policies of the social democratic parties of Europe or to the early roots of the Labor Party. Peretz, on the other hand, hails from the "other Israel," the country's poor periphery, and has led Histadrut, Israel's union federation, since 1995.
In addition to representing poorer Israelis, Peretz represents civilian Israel, never having served in the higher echelons of the military. He calls himself a "social issues general," offering an egalitarian message that conflicts with recent Labor-supported causes, such as the near-complete privatization of the Israeli economy and the introduction of the Wisconsin plan's welfare-to-work schemes in the poorest towns and areas in Israel. He also infuses every argument about peace with a social and economic tinge, noting that the costs of protecting West Bank settlements drain needed money from Israel proper and from dire social needs.
And, perhaps most importantly, though he has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Peace Now movement, Peretz is also a critic of the peace movement's elitism, which has made it too weak to capture majority opinion (full disclosure: I serve on the board of Americans for Peace Now). No Labor candidate can win a majority without taking votes away from the Likud Party; if Peretz can enlarge the shrinking base of the peace camp, he may be able to do just that.
Peretz's family came to Israel from Morocco in the 1950s, when Amir Peretz was four years old. They settled just a few miles from the Gaza border in a transit camp that became the Israeli town of Sderot, which is frequently hit these days by Qassam rockets fired from Gaza by Palestinian extremists. At 54 years old, Peretz is a virtual youngster in Israeli terms. He became mayor of Sderot at age 30, and always aimed to be prime minister. When he took over the Histadrut, he did so to gain a political platform. As the Histadrut chief, he returned a rather battered trade union federation to the center of Israeli life; at the same time, he served in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, remaining directly engaged in the political arena.
I sat with Peretz this past July in his Histadrut office, sharing a quick lunch of roast chicken at his desk. Perched behind his shoulder was a statue of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister. (Ben-Gurion ran the Histadrut himself before leading Israel; in fact, he helped create the Histadrut as a transmission belt to build future national leaders.)
On this day, Peretz had to race off to the Knesset for the final day of the session. Gideon Saar, the Likud faction head, was promoting legislation that would disallow a Histadrut head from simultaneously serving in the Knesset, a bill clearly aimed at Peretz (and at burying a key part of Ben-Gurion's legacy). Peretz lost his last-minute negotiations to stop the bill, partly due to the complicity of Shimon Peres and others in the Labor faction. Since the Labor primary last week, Saar has been making statements in the Israeli papers about Peretz's extremism. Peretz believes that this is out of fear of the threat he represents to the Likud party. "Gideon Saar told me," Peretz said in July, "'we know that you are going to take votes from us.'"
Peretz, who is already being attacked by his opponents for being soft on security, served in the army and was severely wounded -- today, he walks with a limp from a war wound -- but he comes to the political stage with a security message wrapped in a domestic agenda. In speeches this past week to commemorate the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Peretz spoke about continuing Rabin's vision of a two-state solution. He has simultaneously supported returning to the Oslo peace process and abandoning a mediated process in favor of direct negotiations with the Palestinians. Whichever route he takes, he is expected to aim for an agreement that ends Israel's West Bank occupation and shrinks the settlement enterprise substantially.
"I don't think that people can ignore what happens in this country," he argued. "One person told me when he visited his son in the army, his son said that his friend didn't have enough money for the bus and didn't have enough food at home, so he preferred to sell his army vacation ... I'm trying to explain that the free market is not permission to build a slave market in Israel. When I try to explain [to businessmen] that 30 percent of Israeli workers earn less than 2000 shekels a month [about $420], they can't believe it. They think I'm talking about some third-world country."
Peretz's victory in the Labor primary has been compared to the political earthquake that elected Menachem Begin in 1977 and forced a realignment in Israeli politics, making Likud the party of government (except for the brief reigns of Barak and Rabin). Like the Reagan Democrats, Israeli working-class and middle-class voters, many of whom are Sephardic Jews of North African origin or Russian pensioners, voted for Likud only in part for its hawkish policies. They were also looking for a political home that would accept them; the Likud made them feel welcome, even though the economic policies pursued by the Likud through the decades have increased poverty and inequality in Israel to the point where one in three Israeli children live in poverty. Peretz figures that if he can get "five to ten seats from the Likud," he can form a government. He is also trusted and liked by the Israeli Arab sector, which has been burned by the Labor Party and largely votes for specifically Arab parties if it votes at all.
"I can only get stronger," Peretz told me this past summer. "We can start to see the real change in the public that someone who represents a different agenda, that Israel can accept a social issues general … In Israel we need somebody who looks at the peace process with peace glasses because generals look at the peace process with war glasses. They have to see what the security conditions are and I see the peace agreement as the most important security condition."
Jo-Ann Mort, who wrote about Amir Peretz for the American Prospect website and magazine recently, writes about Israel for a variety of publications and is the co-author of Our Hearts Invented a Place: Can Kibbutzim Survive in Today's Israel? published by Cornell University Press.
