Lightning Ascent

With the election of former army chief of staff Ehud Barak as the new leader of Israel's opposition Labor party, the party has significantly increased its chances of regaining power in elections in the year 2000, or even of hastening the premature fall of the Likud-led government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which remains very much dependent on an unsteady alliance of smaller religious and centrist parties. In last week's Labor party primaries, which saw some 70% of the party's 170,000 taking part, General Barak (whose surname in Hebrew means lightning) captured slightly more than 50% of the total vote. He was trailed in the balloting by Dr. Yossi Beilin, a long-standing protege of outgoing party chairman Shimon Peres (28.5%), and by Professor Shlomo Ben-Ami, a Moroccan immigrant with an enthusiastic following in Likud dominated development towns (14.2%). Dr. Efraim Sneh, the former health minister in the Rabin/Peres governments of the mid 1990s, also took part in the poll.

Rapid Rise

More than anything else General Barak's convincing Labor party victory was a testament to the desire of the party's voters to win back Israel's premiership following their shocking defeat in the May 1996 elections. Virtually untested in the arena of public policy (brief tenures as minister of interior and foreign minister notwithstanding) Barak appealed to party voters largely on the strength of his military background, which in Israel, is still regarded as a useful shortcut to political power. Reflecting this pre-occupation with external image, detailed Barak pronouncements on major political issues of the day (Israel's relations with the Palestinians, for example, or its still unresolved conflict between religion and state) were notably missing from the primary campaign.

Be that as it may, some clear directions in General Barak's political philosophy are now apparent. On the question of relations with the Palestinians, he will likely adopt a position more or less in line with that of Yitzhak Rabin, which at the end of the day allows for the creation of a largely de-militarized Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and on about 80%-90% of the West Bank. This contrasts sharply with the 40% of the West Bank currently being offered by the Netanyahu government. On Syria, as well, he is likely to be somewhat more forthcoming than his Likud rival, who continues to oppose a large scale Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, which was captured by Israel some 30 years ago.

Ethnic Voters

In the final analysis though, the key to General Barak's success will probably lie in his ability to win back votes in the poor urban neighborhoods and in out of the way development towns which first abandoned the Labor party in significant numbers in the mid-1970s and have yet to really return. These votes, which are almost exclusively Jewish Sephardi in character, compose approximately 50% of the total of Israel's Jewish electorate.

At least at present there is considerable reason to believe that General Barak will have much better luck here than Yitzhak Rabin did in 1992 or Shimon Peres did in 1996. For one, in marked contrast to both Rabin and Peres, he is not identified with the old generation of the Labor establishment, which many Sephardi Jews still regard as the deliberate purveyors of social and economic discrimination against them. For another, he has already begun to ally himself with Shlomo Ben Ami, whose appeal to Sephardi voters appears to have the potential to create a substantial shift in their prevailing pro-Likud voting patterns; substantial enough at any rate, to swing the election results. Indeed, preliminary soundings from some northern development towns already suggest that the beginnings of such a shift may now be in the works.