The Peretz shock wave, Friday, November 11, 2005

The surprising Peretz victory shoved aside all other news, from the al Qaida attack in Amman, which killed an Israeli-Arab businessman who was at one of the three hotels attacked by Moussa al Zakari’s suicide bombers, to the shouting of Quartet envoy James Wolfensohn about Israeli and Palestinian failure to reach an agreement on the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

The latest hitch in the agreement remains Israeli insistence that live TV transmissions of the activity at the crossing be made available to its security forces. The Palestinians regard that as an infringement of their still informal sovereignty in Gaza.

Egypt, the third party negotiating over the border arrangements, is ether indifferent to the issue or waiting for an opportune moment to step in with a compromise solution. In any case, the stalled Rafah talks, like the slowed down transshipments of goods in and out of Gaza at the now defunct Karny and Erez junction industrial zones, has Gaza suffocating under 80 percent unemployment, a near halt to all commercial activity, and a growing sense that the occupation is not over, it’s just being run remotely by Israel keeping Gazans under lock and key.

While much has been made in the last 24 hours about Peretz’s social(ist) agenda and how it is already making inroads into the traditional Likud and Shas electorate, it is Peretz’s dovish positions that could end up being the starkest difference between him and Sharon, who is already showing signs of adopting Peretz’s social agenda.

Peretz was one of the first members of Peace Now, helped found B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, is a signatory to the Geneva Accord, which is a draft peace treaty signed by non-official Israeli and Palestinian public figures, and most of all, he openly favors entering final status negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

For the last five years, since the fall of 2000 when the intifada broke out, such dovishness has been stricken from the political discourse in Israel, as Israelis demanded security from suicide bombers and other forms of Palestinian terror even if it meant not only perpetuating the conflict, but deepening it, too.

Peretz wisely focused on the social agenda during his campaign, and while he didn’t evade questions about his views on the Palestinian issue, he did not put it at the top of his agenda. But his victory speech, delivered extemporaneously at party headquarters early yesterday morning, included a specific reference to peace making, in which he said that ‘the economy serves man, man serves peace, and peace serves the economy.’ It was the first time in years that any mainstream politician – and certainly any candidate for prime minister – spoke hopefully about peace, rather than obliquely about the need for a vague political process that can’t be continued ‘until there’s a partner.’ Peretz believes the PA is a partner for peace talks.

A key sign that Peretz is being taken seriously as a contender against the still titanic Sharon, is the way he has come under attack from both Likud politicians like Gideon Saar and Yisrael Katz – both practiced hatchet-men for the Right – but also from ostensibly mainstream journalists like Maariv’s Dan Margalit, who practically openly called on Peretz to abandon his dovish positions if he wants to get elected.

But Peretz, who is known to treasury officials as a hard-nosed but responsible negotiator for the unions, is not known to back down on issues of principle. He is, say industrialists who have encountered him across the negotiating table, an excellent negotiator, who knows how to cut a deal. According to Akiva Eldar, who covers the peace process for Haaretz, Peretz as prime minister would mean the roadmap becomes irrelevant since one of the first things he would do as prime minister would be to call up PA President Mahmoud Abbas and invite him to talks leading to negotiations.

The conventional wisdom today is that elections could be as early as March, but no later than the end of May. Sharon and Peretz will meet this coming week, presumably to discuss the date. Peretz will then have to bring the decision to quit the government to the party’s institutions. That could take a few weeks.

There’s no doubt the Peretz victory has invigorated not only the Left – Yossi Sarid of Meretz is openly talking about Meretz merging with Labor – but filled the entire political arena with the hope that these coming elections will indeed see a redrawing of the political map. One thing is growing evident – if Sharon is sincere about dragging the Likud to the Center (or forming a Centrist party) so that he continue the political process – then even if Peretz does not lead Labor back to its historical role as the ruling party, it will be Labor (and the Left) that will end up as Sharon’s natural allies. The Right effectively discredited itself with its hysteria over the disengagement. The latest polls show it barely capable of rustling up 30 percent of the Knesset in elections – if they were held today. And there lies the rub. Leading up to the Peretz victory, not a single poll predicted his win. Only one poll, the night of his win, predicted a narrow win for him over Peres – all the other polls showed Peres winning by a landslide. So there’s no trusting the polls in Israel nowadays. But according to Peretz, he doesn’t need polls to tell what the man in the street is thinking for he is their authentic representative, the first such grass roots leader ever to make it to the lofty position of chairman of the Labor Party and its candidate for prime minister.

Peres, by the way, finally called Peretz this morning to congratulate him on his victory and to offer support, for now scotching talk about him joining a new Sharon party. But as this week proved, predictions in Israeli politics are at the risk of the predictor.

Yitzhak Rabin's Last Speech, which he delivered at the Tel Aviv peace rally on Nov. 4 1995

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