Whither the Israeli left?

The Israeli left-wing is in tatters following the failure of the Oslo Peace Process, Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year rule, and the dramatic decline of the Israeli Labor Party, Gilad Halpern told a Limmud audience.

An Israel-based journalist, broadcaster, and media historian, Halpern pointed out that the left-wing Labor Party had gone from 54 parliamentary seats in 1965 to just seven in 2021.

He said the party’s first decline occurred in the 1970s and 1980s.

“First of all, geopolitical developments undermined the basic ethos of Israeli society that was promoted by the leadership of the Labor Party. Then, there was the great crisis of the Yom Kippur War [in 1973], which in large part the Labor government of Golda Meir was blamed for. Later, in the 1980s, other political developments arose which led to many questioning the basic assumptions that prevailed in Israel, namely whether Israel was a victimised country fighting for its life or a country with imperious tendencies with some sort of intransigence in its unwillingness to engage with its surroundings.”

All of this caused resentment and disgruntlement, which Likud, a centre-right to right-wing political party in Israel, capitalised on, leading to decline in support of the Labor Party, said Halpern.

“There was a shift in voting from the left to the right. To this day, we see a great separation along ethnic lines in voting patterns between the predominantly Ashkenazi middle class voting for left-leaning parties, and the lower middle working class voting mainly for Likud and other right parties.”

Following the onset of capitalism in the 1980s, Israel, a centralised economy in its early years, experienced a financial crisis which led to a political crisis, said Halpern.

In 1992, “a bump on the road on the way down was Yitzhak Rabin’s victory as leader of the Labor Party. He ran on a rather progressive ticket with the intention of starting the diplomatic process with the Palestinians mainly,” said Halpern, who is completing a PhD dissertation on the Jewish press in Mandatory Palestine. “He enjoyed a rather slim majority in Parliament. His term in office tragically ended with his assassination, but it’s more than likely that had he lived to run for re-election more than a year later, he would have lost.”

When Netanyahu became Prime Minister in 1996, “he made the Palestinian peace agenda impossible and undesirable. This led to the complete decline of the left.”

Around this time, “Israel was a secluded country surrounded by very hostile countries imposing a pretty successful embargo. With this and the thaw in relations with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world, the Oslo Peace Process failed. Until today in the Israeli Parliament, almost nobody talks about the Palestinian peace process.”

Halpern said the Labor Party was saved from extinction by its current leader, Merav Michaeli.

“Young, ideological, socialist politicians are now calling the shots within the party. The question is whether what’s worked so well within the party membership will work well within the larger electorate.”

Although the peace agenda has been neglected entirely, other items on the Zionist-left agenda are still going strong, “such as support for the independence of the Supreme Court and other socially liberal agendas like civil liberties and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights”.