David Wurmser, a specialist on Israel, is director of institutional grants at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. During 1988-94, he was project officer at the United States Institute of Peace.
Viewing Israeli politics through a narrow lens of foreign policy, commentators outside Israel tend to see the difference between the Likud and Labor Parties only in terms of their stands on the peace process. This same outlook leads them to see Israel’s religious nationalists as a pivotal force and to believe that the Labor Party’s future hinges on negotiations with Palestinians and Syrians.
But this reverses the real situation: foreign-policy differences in Israel, as in almost every country, emerge primarily from its internal debate. And those internal issues tend to grow in importance as foreign threats fade. Just as Winston Churchill discovered in 1945 and George Bush in 1992, victory abroad grants a society the room to engage internal issues. For Israel, this means that a successful peace process will expose and stimulate socio-political differences. That has dire implications for the Labor Party, which is threatened with unraveling as Israeli society adopts bourgeoisie citizenship and rejects Labor’s European-socialist legacy.
LABOR’S DIVISION
After the Declaration of Principles (DoP) was signed in September 1993, Yossi Sarid, a member of Israel’s Labor-led government, declared that the agreement would secure the Labor Party’s leadership of Israel for the next quarter-century “and leave Likud floundering in opposition for 25 years.”1 Labor’s police minister recently added: “Likud has lost its ideological infrastructure, its existence,”2 and a Labor analyst wrote that Likud’s “greater Israel ideology now is following communism and apartheid to destruction.”3 But Labor’s delight is yielding to confusion and foreboding. It now trails Likud in the polls, its leaders bicker publicly over responsibility for an impending electoral loss (as if it were a foregone conclusion), and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin contemplates the lessons of America’s 1994 congressional election for his own fortunes, which he sees as parallel to those of Bill Clinton. In short, the Labor Party is in disarray.
This state of affairs results not from mismanagement, as some assert,4 but from an identity crises that dates back to 1977. As Israel passed from a movement to a country, from a social experiment to a society, it abandoned its European, socialist origins for a more individualist future. This trend, so threatening to Labor, culminated in the 1977 elections, when Israel thanked the Labor Party for the memories and bid it farewell. The party was unsure how to proceed. Some in the leadership argued for adapting to the new circumstances, others held that the party should try to change the country. The former would have it abandon the safety of socialism, the latter would have it repackage socialism in the form of supranationalism. The Labor Party split over this issue, with one camp led by Rabin and the other by current foreign minister Shimon Peres. Years later, their divisions are still causing Labor’s undoing; it no longer is a party unified behind a clearly defined ideology.
RABIN’S POPULISM
Rabin and his camp seek to replace Labor’s socialism, whose appeal is spent, with a more market-oriented outlook. Just recently, he unleashed the following blistering statement against Israel’s socialist-bureaucratic character:
There are black holes in Israel’s economy that in one way or another are all tied to the Labor movement; for example: Kupat Holim [the national health insurance system belonging to the Histadrut, the national labor union], the military industries upon which the government spent a billion dollars only because the compensation for firing workers was so high, and the Settler-Kibbutz Movement, which also will cost the government millions.5
At other times, Rabin has called for a break-up of the Histadrut, a severing of its links to the state, and the privatizing of some of its industries.
In questioning what amounts to the socialist core belief of the Labor Party, Rabin has tapped into a powerful populist sentiment. The party stands for the Establishment and represents a style of political behavior that most Israelis find unappealing: the use of government institutions and apparatus for partisan political, financial, and even personal purposes.6 For example, during the 1994 local and municipal elections campaign, an Israeli minister boasted in a rally in Kiryat Gat that the town would “receive a huge sum of money” from the housing ministry if it elected a Labor Party mayor. Following the elections, the town did receive just such a “huge sum.”7
Rabin made the party apparatus his main target on coming to power in mid-1992. Over the years, the Labor Party directly or through affiliated organizations (the Histadrut, the United Kibbutz Movement) has acquired control over large sectors of the economy, such as the national health care system (Kupat Holim), one of the world’s largest industrial concerns (Koor Industries), the country’s second largest bank (Bank HaPoalim), its largest builder (Solel Boneh), its largest dairy and produce company (Tnuva), the national bus company (Egged), 84 percent of Israel’s agricultural production, and even the national teachers college (the Kibbutz Seminary). Further, the taxpayer subsidizes many of these organizations, which then transfer monies to the Labor Party for campaigns.8 These funds have been skimmed for partisan purposes in primary and election campaigns, and also used as a tool of political pressure. In 1994, the United Kibbutz Movement alone received billions of dollars in bail-outs, as did the Kupat Holim.9 Were these monopolies sold, and major sectors of the economy opened to true competition, the Labor Party’s financial and institutional base would be greatly weakened.
But Rabin and his allies are bedeviled by a Hobson’s choice. On the one hand, reducing the party apparatus undermines the vast mechanisms of power in Israeli society that Labor enjoys. On the other hand, the leadership of this huge apparatus is not loyal to Rabin because of the threat he poses to it.
As a result, Rabin has not even tried to reform the party from within. Instead, he has sought to use populism to overpower the apparatus. While remaining in the party, he has replaced the apparatus with the power of the prime minster’s office. He has neutralized it with such steps as emphasizing personality politics, adopting a system of primary elections, and supporting direct elections for the prime ministry. The peace process has a key role here: delivering peace and prosperity would give Rabin simultaneously the popularity to stay in power and the prestige needed to redefine the Labor Party.
Trouble is, such peace and prosperity have yet to materialize; worse, though Rabin clearly is not enamored with his party’s socialist character, he has yet to formulate his own vision of Israeli economy and society. He has sought to replace ideology with personality, but even that demands a vision to energize the politician and appeal to the electorate. Rabin has failed to provide an energizing alternative to socialism, dooming his efforts to wrest power from the old-guard apparatus.
Rabin’s lack of vision explains some of his weaknesses. Rather than ambition masquerading as principle, Rabin’s principles appear to masquerade as ambition. He often buckles, letting Peres and his cohorts define the party position on peace, economics, and social issues. He initially supported, then abandoned his free-market-oriented finance minister with such a flair that a Hebrew neologism has come into use to describe his economic policies -- zigzug.
PERES’S VISION
Rabin’s goals for Labor are not shared widely in the party. Indeed, following the 1977 election that ousted Labor and ended the party’s exclusive grip on all facets of Israeli society, many in the Labor apparatus chose not to alter the party to adapt to a changing Israel. They opted instead to flee into the familiarity of David Ben-Gurion’s shadow and retreat into nostalgia for the Israel that existed before 1967: the Israel of kibbutzim, of agriculture, of European socialism, and of the French connection. For these party apparatchiks, Israel’s occupation of territories following the 1967 war led to its international isolation, triggered France’s embargo, tore Israel from its social-democratic allies in Europe, and shoved it toward a distinctly un-socialist America.10 That France abandoned Israel was a particularly severe blow for Labor, which sees France as the great culture, the civilization upon which Israel should be modeled.11 The 1967 war also led to a cultural drift within Israel, the country’s abandonment of socialism, and -- worst of all -- its rejection of Labor in 1977.
To remedy these unhappy developments, the party apparatus, led by Peres, hopes that by “liberating Israel from the occupation”12 it can salvage the party’s position in Israeli society. It will do this by rekindling the close ties that once existed with European socialists and thereby integrating the country into a much larger political and economic grouping. As Peres understands it, “The Middle East needs a Jean Monnet approach today,”13 meaning the Frenchman’s vision of regional integration. That vision boils down to a supranationalism driven primarily by economic objectives but with an impact that transcends economics. Just as Europe overcame its war-torn, nationalism-ravaged past only by moving away from nationalism and toward political unification, so can the same take place in the Middle East.14
Integration is especially enticing for Israel’s Labor Party, as it offers a prospect of formalizing links to European social-democratic movements.15 The founding of the Willy Brandt Centre for European Studies at the Beit Berl Ideological College, Labor’s intellectual headquarters, prompted Aaron Seidenberg, director of the college, to note in an official Labor Party publication that the Brandt Centre’s mission is to move Israel away from the growing Americanization that gnaws at Labor’s political fortunes and return it to its socialist European roots.
Israeli Society has a very strong Anglo-Saxon orientation, especially American, and we are inclined to forget that we are, in fact, at the rear entrance of Europe. Our whole political and intellectual tradition (the latter in the sense of social thought) are of European origin, not American. This is especially true about the Labor movement. . . . Europe is much more central to [Israel’s] consciousness, and yet, we seem to cling to the American world.
Seidenberg goes on to operationalize this outlook in the schools.
Toward this end, the Israeli government emphasizes the merits of the European Union (EU)'s educational system for the Middle East, an emphasis that has recently been a strong focus of Peres’s diplomatic efforts.17 For example, in the communiqué released from the much-publicized February 2, 1995, quadrilateral summit in Cairo, the otherwise sparsely elaborated text included a paragraph devoting “special attention” to strengthening education in the region under the tutelage of the EU.
In Peres’s vision, then, peace entails not merely resolving the Palestinian problem but returning Israel to Europe. How is this to be done? By transforming the Middle East into an economic community with Europe-like interstate relations, thereby making Israel irresistible to Europe. Israel’s economy can serve as the portal through which European ideas and trade enter a massive Middle East Economic Community (MEEC). This new role breaks the isolation that has plagued Israel and helps it assume its natural role as Europe’s extension. Peres explains:
Socialism, in other words, is rooted in Europe, and in Labor’s view, that’s where Israel belongs. War tore Israel out of Europe and cast it into America’s orbit; peace can make Israel part of Europe again, provided that Europe is headed for a supranational community of social-democracies where national identity is supplanted by materialism; and that Israel is properly indoctrinated by similar, post-nationalist thought and serves as the vanguard of the economic community in the Middle East. Israel would then return to its natural leadership: the Labor elite.
In and after 1967, Labor allowed the pursuit of particular national rights to define it rather than be guided by its older tradition of being a vanguard party that educates and defines Israeli society. Thus, for many in Labor (especially Peres), peace provides not only an identity but a coherent political, economic, and cultural strategy for survival through the transformation of Israeli society and resurrection of older Labor traditions. It is not naivete but the despair of a passing elite that propels Shimon Peres’s drive for peace.
War tore Israel out of Europe and cast it into America’s orbit. Peace can make Israel part of Europe again.
Peres’s vision has several problems. First, it is not popular. Labor ran in 1992 under the Rabin banner, making practically invisible any mention of the party, its symbols, or other politicians, and instead promoting a new, yuppie-based party with a populist orientation. Somewhere between 1992 and 1994, however, the Israeli population realized that not Rabin but Peres still defined the party. It finds the philosophy that informs the party’s core to be old, tired, unrealistic, and weak.
Secondly, Peres’s vision is out of sync with the very global historical currents he claims to discern. The peace process, even as a means to a larger end, seems to have run into difficulties with a wide lack of exuberance, not to speak of the violence that has set in. Attempts (such as the Casablanca summit) to create a brave new world inspire not enthusiasm for an EU-like Middle East but Arab paranoia about Israeli economic hegemony.
Thirdly, social democracy and Monnet’s regional supranationalism face a bleak future even in Europe. Although elites are moving toward integration, they generate a strong impulse toward subnational forms of identity. And Yugoslavia, while militarily contained, continues to send unsettling intellectual ripples throughout Europe. The Zeitgeist that Peres so eloquently holds out as a model is dying in the hills of Sarajevo.
THE RAMON AFFAIR
Ultimately, Peres and Rabin each have a domestic goal in mind: securing the continued predominance of the Labor Party fashioned in his own image. To achieve this outcome, ironically, both rely heavily on a matter of foreign policy: the peace process. For Rabin, the peace process is a means to destroy the apparatus; for Peres, it is a way to save it. Both have made the process so central to their politics that they are ready to let it dominate all domestic issues. But putting the peace process ahead of all else has high political costs. Popular irritation over such subordinating of domestic matters to Likud’s settlement drive contributed in no small part to Labor’s 1992 victory. Yet, when Labor came to power, it did likewise on a series of issues. For example, in order to bring the Sephardic orthodox party, Shas, into Labor’s coalition (necessary to push through unpopular concessions on the Golan Heights), Rabin agreed to change Israel’s Basic Law (in effect, its constitution) to ban imports of non-Kosher meat, although doing so made a mockery of Labor’s 1992 campaign pledges. Moreover, he agreed to subject all Supreme Court decisions on social issues to a Shas veto. Eli Dayan, the Labor Party’s parliamentary faction chairman, said on this issue: “If you care about peace, you must make sure that Shas gets into the coalition now, regardless of the price.”19 The peace process, in short, defines Labor.
But peace is not saving Labor from its travails. The DoP has secured neither Rabin’s nor Peres’s fortunes. In fact, it has accelerated Israel’s turn inward. Labor’s festering split erupted finally into an acute, perhaps terminal crisis in March 1994, when Haim Ramon, the minister of health, resigned from the government and campaigned to head the Histadrut, an act that resulted in his expulsion from the Labor Party. This sequence of events marked not only the start of open conflict between Labor’s two main factions but also revealed who controls the party: the apparatus led by Peres. It bears close scrutiny.
In December 1993, Ramon had joined with others to propose a reform of the massively indebted and corrupt Kupat Holim. He warned that the status quo would lead within months to the financial collapse of Kupat Holim, requiring a government bail-out.20 Ramon wanted to separate Kupat Holim from Histadrut, so that Israelis seeking health insurance would no longer have to pay union dues to get it. But this would dry up so much of the Histadrut’s revenue, Finance Minister Shohat noted, it “would no longer have the necessary revenue to survive.”21
Rabin himself supported Ramon’s plan. “The time has come,” he said, “that health will not be used as a political instrument for politicians. Health is an official responsibility, not a partisan tool.”22 But parliament rejected the plan thanks to efforts by Labor’s chairman, Nissim Zvilli, supported by Peres, who said that separating the two systems would cripple the Histadrut.23 In protest, Ramon resigned from his post as minister of health, then blasted “the operators of the Bolshevik Histadrut apparatus”24 and announced his challenge to the official Labor Party candidate, Haim Haberfeld, in the Histadrut elections, to be held in May 1994.
The party’s apparatus reacted bitterly, even shrilly, to Ramon’s moves. It stripped him of his party membership and launched a ferocious, personal, political, and even illegal campaign to discredit him. Labor politicians heaped abuse on Ramon, saying “his moves will harm the peace process,” which, as leading Labor politician Ephraim Sneh added, is tantamount to the annihilation of the Labor Party. And Haberfeld called him a “neoliberal yuppie who never did an honest day’s work.”25 Ramon responded by accusing the Labor Party of Bolshevism26 and of being undemocratic.27 On the eve of the election, the government secretly passed $60 million to the Kupat Holim fund to use in the campaign against Ramon.28
Rabin was largely ineffective in his efforts to mediate the conflict. He pleaded with Ramon not to resign from the party; he demanded that Ramon not challenge the Labor Party’s candidate; he sympathized with and supported Ramon but failed to sway the party. He hoped the party would still not expel Ramon, but all to no avail. In the end, Rabin had to join the apparatus’ pressure on Ramon, saying on the Histadrut election’s eve: “The power of the party, more than anything else, will determine the fate of the state.”29 Clearly, Rabin and his followers control the prime minister’s office but not the party, its apparatus, or even the foreign ministry.
While Zvilli and Peres won the battle over the apparatus, they lost the war over the hearts of the Israelis. Ramon trounced Labor by a margin of nearly 3 to 1 and, for the first time ever, the party apparatus lost control of the Histadrut. To make matters worse, Kupat Holim did run out of money in July 1994, as Ramon had predicted, and he found the same dire situation in other Histadrut-run organizations. The United Kibbutz Movement alone was $2.6 billion in debt.30
Labor’s actions show how the party faithful fears that conceding the need for change implies an existential crisis. This unwillingness to acknowledge reality has ominous implications for the party. It means, first, that young politicians must secure their political futures outside their mother party. Yossi Beilin has already called for the establishment of a new movement on the left in Israel.31
Secondly, Ramon’s successful, populist act probably marks a watershed in Labor’s history and may have roused a demon that will consume the party. Ramon is directly challenging the very existence of the party apparatus, for as soon as he got into office at the Histadrut, he struck hard, selling off large sectors of the organization (including its daily newspaper, Davar), and transforming it from a statist-entrepreneur to a pure labor union. As of spring 1995, citizens who sought access to health care no longer had to subsidize the Labor Party.
Thirdly, Ramon’s staff has opened files and investigated the Histadrut’s conduct. It uncovered a scale of graft, fraud, and influence-peddling far beyond what anyone imagined. Hundreds of millions of dollars appear to have been skimmed from union dues, corporate accounts, and service industries, and channeled to the Labor Party. The findings led the state investigator in the spring of 1995 to begin making inquiries. These have already led to several indictments, with investigations underway of individuals at the highest levels of the Labor Party, including current cabinet ministers.
Ramon’s victory has led to a legal, public-relations, and financial nightmare for the Labor Party apparatus. The loss of its clientele structure, its state support, and its system of influence-peddling will strike at the heart of the Labor party apparatus’ resources and, therefore, its political power.
FAILURE IN BOTH CAMPS
The peace process has failed both camps of Labor. For Rabin, peace has neither brought the security for Israelis nor triggered the economic windfall that he needs. He therefore lacks the populist sympathy necessary to control the party’s apparatus, for the power of his office is too meager to surmount it and the rest of the government.
For Peres, Arabs failed to play by the script. He sees peace not separating Israelis from Arabs but achieving regional integration. Otherwise, there will be no MEEC, and Israel will be the portal to nowhere. Thus, Peres suffers from a disconnect: while he pushes peace as a marriage, the Arab and Israeli populations seek a divorce. That is why both sides applauded the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Further, the popular Israeli impulse is to draw closer to the West, especially the United States.
The peace process vexes Peres in another way. While designed to move Israel closer to an integrated Europe, only the prestige, inclination, and tempting pecuniary offers of the United States are sufficient to tempt the Arab world to peace. The MEEC -- expected to be linked to Europe through Israel’s economy -- and regional development -- expected to be fueled by European investment and development assistance -- can emerge only after the United States has fulfilled its role. A paradox bedevils the old-guard Labor vision: it needs the United States to propel a peace process designed ultimately to replace America’s predominance in the Middle East with Europe’s social democrats.
This paradox matters. Fundamental differences between European socialists and Americans on the center and right of the spectrum have operational significance. Israel has since 1992 tracked closely on a number of issues with European, specifically French-socialist, initiatives, even when these go against U.S. policy. For example, Peres openly equates the American use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima with the Nazi Holocaust, long a favorite comparison of the European left;32 Jacques Neriah, an architect of the DoP, echoes the French call to open a dialogue with Iraq.33 Persistent rumors of contacts, and statements on the need to draw Iraq into the peace process by prominent government officials, former and current, prompted the United States to reprimand Israel and issue a series of stern warnings.34 These attempts to curry favor with the EU at the expense of ties with the United States came to a head in the realm of trade relations in June 1995, when the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, delivered an unprecedentedly blunt and bitter public rebuke to the Israeli government about its trade preferences with Europe, saying, “We were your friends all these years, yet you prefer trade with Europe!”35
In 1995, Labor is in trouble. It teeters between two camps: one that builds edifices without a guiding principle, another that pursues the apparition of supranationalism. Its crisis is revealed by Ramon at the Histadrut, the party’s subordination of all domestic matters to the peace process, and conflict between Peres’s bid to integrate with the Palestinians and Rabin’s effort to separate from them. Nothing seems to be working the way it should. While he has succeeded at controlling the party, Peres has failed to reverse the erosion of social-democratic culture through the peace process; nor has Rabin succeeded in mustering the personal and institutional popularity to move Labor away from its haggard past. Ultimately, with an ideology that appears both obsolete and immutable, Labor appears unable to survive for long in its present shape, and unable as well to change from within.
CONCLUSION
Israel has been turning inward as it passes from the founder generation to the succesor generation. Labor tapped Israel’s introversion in 1992 by promising the solitude of peace. But this turn inward only refocused Israel on what it disliked about Labor. A grim-faced but unnamed Likud member said immediately after the 1992 election that “Labor is invigorated and hungry for clout and funds. Labor now adds control of the government to its control of the socio-economic, cultural, and media establishments. Its entrenchment in power will be formidable.”36 But the Histadrut elections of 1994 tell a different story. Israelis have tired of this style of politics and have begun to display strong, anti-establishmentarian sentiments. Labor mastered the traditional mechanisms of power but lacks an appealing, informing idea upon which to build new mechanisms. Thus, a paradox: at the peak of its institutional power, Labor faces collapse.
For Israel, this makes the current political situation particularly volatile, for Likud also faces a leadership crisis. It has been unable effectively to formulate a positive program to lay claim to the populist vote it so ably won in 1977. With no ideological crisis on domestic issues, Likud has an opportunity to regain its footing and potentially tap the increasingly introverted sentiment among Israelis. However, it has not done so. This leaves the Israeli political system on the edge of upheaval; new parties will likely emerge and seize large numbers of parliamentary seats.
For the United States, this shake-up means that policy toward Israel should not be tied to any one Israeli faction, especially not the shaky Labor of Shimon Peres. Further, Peres frequently belittles those who insist that the nation remains the primary unit of interstate relations,37 and Washington has no interest in forwarding this ideology. Advocating the supremacy of supranational institutions negates the underpinnings of U sovereignty, while eliminating nationalism may not, as Monnet and Peres believe, leave the world in the hands of a benign supranational bureaucracy. Americans have no reason to salvage the wreck of Eurosocialism that lies at the heart of Peres’s vision.Instead, Washington should focus more on fostering the intellectual ties that bind the countries together. For example, the Israeli electorate’s impulse toward expanding civil society, implied in the anti-establishmentarian sentiment against Labor and, to some extent, Likud, ought to loom larger for American policy makers than Israel’s foreign policy.
1 Yedi`ot Ahronot, Sept. 3, 1993.
2 Mideast Mirror, June 6, 1995.
3 Davar, July 3, 1992.
4 Hirsch Goodman, “Come Home, Mr. Prime Minister,” The Jerusalem Report, Jan. 12, 1995, p. 50.
5 Yitzhak Rabin, as quoted in Menahem Rahat, “If You are Already Eating Ham, Then at Least Taste the Fat,” inMa’ariv, Aug. 26, 1994. The kibbutz is a socialist settlement; the Settler-Kibbutz Movement is usually known as United Kibbutz Movement, an organization founded in 1927 as part of the Labor Party.
6 Inspector General Miriam Ben-Porat’s reports provide many examples of these abuses of government power. The latest report (no. 44), dealing with 1993, notes how, among many other government violations, the Housing Ministry funnelled 1.4 million shekels to an organization named “Union of the Palmach Generation” to construct a headquarters for itself. Not only is Housing Minister Benyamin Ben-Eliezer a member of that union, but so too are the finance minister and the prime minster. Similar abuses in Ariel Sharon’s housing ministry damaged Likud’s reputation (such as appeared in Report 43 covering 1991 and 1992), and led Israelis to feel disillusioned.
7 Ma’ariv, May 19, 1994.
8 Most recently, the primary campaigns of 1992, the Labor Party list for the national elections in 1992, and the Labor Party candidate for the Histadrut election of 1994.
9 Ma’ariv, June 6, 1994; Al HaMishmar, Aug. 1, 1994; and Yedi`ot Ahronot, Aug. 12, 1994.
10 “Bringing Back European Tradition,” Spectrum: Israel Labour Movement Monthly,vol. 12, no. 1 Jan./Feb. 1994, p. 21.
11 Shimon Peres, Battling for Peace (New York: Random House, 1995), pp. 182-93. Peres notes with great adminration in his autobiography how Mitterand successfully “explained socialism as a cultural as well as a political and economic doctrine,” and he hails him as one of the most erudite figures in the world, someone to whom he can refuse nothing (pp. 182, 186).
12 Shimon Peres, The New Middle East (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1993), pp. 57-58. Susan Rolef, a Labor Party commentator and editor of Spectrum, puts it differently: “the main problem with developing Judea and Samaria is that . . . it takes Israel back to Massada--to choosing between surrender or suicide” (The Jerusalem Post, May 11, 1992).
13 Ibid., pp. 72-74.
14 Ibid. Supranationalism has always been a component of the socialist agenda; in all Marxist thought, be it Leninist or social-democratic, nationalism is eventually to be transcended by a new identity driven by economic forces.
15 In this context, it is worth noting that Peres has indicated a desire to become secretary-general of the United Nations (Leslie Susser, “Peres Sets his Heart on the UN Top Job,” The Jerusalem Report, Mar. 23, 1995).
16 “Bringing Back European Tradition,” p. 21.
17 Alouph Ben, “Peres Proposes that the European Union Would Lead the Development and Educational Structure Reformation Project,"Ha’aretz, Jan. 31, 1995, p. 6.
18 Peres, The New Middle East, pp. 69, 98-99.
19 In Zvi Timor, “To sue for Peace with Syria, the Coalition Needs Shas,"Al HaMishmar, Sept. 27, 1994, as quoted in Mideast Mirror, Sept. 27, 1994.
20 Ha’aretz, Dec. 14, 1993.
21 Al HaMishmar, Feb. 2, 1994.
22 Davar, Jan. 7, 1994.
23 Ha’aretz, Dec. 14, 1993.
24 Devorah Namir, “Ramon: If the Bolsheviks in the Histadrut will Torpedo the Health Care Bill, I will go Home,"Yedi`ot Ahronot, Jan. 27, 1994, p. 7.
25 Spectrum: Israel Labour Movement Monthly, Jan./Feb. 1994, p. 8.
26 Nehamah Douak, “We View This As A Labor Defection,"Yedi`ot Ahronot, Apr. 21, 1994, p. 5.
27 Ha’aretz, Apr. 22, 1994.
28 Yedi`ot Ahronot, Apr. 25, 1994.
29 Menahem Rahat, David Zohar, and Dalia Mazouri, “Rabin: The Peace Process Demands a Labor Slate Running the Histadruth"Ma’ariv, May 5, 1994, p. 27.
30 Yedi`ot Ahronot, Aug. 12, 1994.
31 Yossi Beilin, as cited in an article by Yehudah Tzur inAl-HaMishmar, May 23, 1994. A detailed account of Labor’s fears of such a movement can be found in Nehamah Douak, “The Ramon Crisis,"Yedi`ot Ahronot, Apr. 19, 1994.
32 Mideast Mirror, May 24, 1994.
33 Yedi`ot Ahronot, Dec. 14, 1994.
34 Ha’aretz, Dec. 21, 1994; Dec. 29, 1994.
35 Yedi`ot Ahronot, July 6, 1995.
36 The Jerusalem Post, July 3, 1992.
37 Peres, The New Middle East, p. 72.
