Who is responsible for the strange death of Israel's Labor Zionism? - by Jonathan S. Tobin

To understand contemporary Israel, the Diaspora must ponder how the Palestinians reduced the once dominant party of government to a position of irrelevance.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
15 February '19..

Elections in Israel are less than two months away, and so far the campaign has been dominated by two main stories. One is speculation about whether Israel’s Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit will indict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prior to the voting. The other is the rise of former Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz and his new centrist party. But there is another angle to the election that deserves some attention: the virtual collapse of the once dominant Labor Party and the marginalization of the parties of the left.

The slow-motion collapse of the movement that was primarily responsible for building the state began with its first electoral defeat in 1977, when Menachem Begin led the Likud to victory after 29 years of unbroken Labor-led coalition governments. Since then, Labor has had its ups and downs. Up until 2000, the parties of the left and those of the right were in a state of near equilibrium as Israel was seemingly split down the middle on the issues of peace with the Palestinians and West Bank settlements. Labor won clear victories in both 1992 and 1999 under Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak after Likud faltered in power. But since the outbreak of the Second Intifada, the war of terrorist attrition that destroyed faith in the Oslo process and its hopes of an end to the conflict with the Palestinians, Labor has become increasingly irrelevant.

That has never been more obvious than now as polls show that the contest is between Netanyahu’s Likud and the parties of the center, led by Gantz and Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid, with Labor no more than a marginalized afterthought.

(Continue to Full Column)

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