In 1992 the Labor Party won by a landslide, with 44 seats. First place and overwhelming victory. Thirty years later, in the 2022 elections, the Labor Party only barely managed to drag itself above the blocking percentage, with four seats, and signed the list of parties elected to the Knesset (the Likud, by the way, also had 32 seats then). In only thirty years, the Labor Party lost forty seats, and its identity.
Since that happy night of “I will steer, I will navigate”, Labor has led the Oslo process, experienced Rabin’s murder, from which it probably never recovered, won again, for the last time in its history with Ehud Barak, and since then has only deteriorated from one state to another. No need to read mandate columns for that. It is enough to compare the leader of the party at the time, who said that “violence is the foundation of democracy” and the new leader who wants to close Channel 14. It is enough to see how the party that once led the settlement in the Land of Israel as a Zionist act, refused to sign a joint resolution against the Hague Tribunal, and opposed to the nationality law.
The slow and bitter dying of the labor party is even more difficult to watch when you see the tremendous legacy of the labor movement, a legacy of over a century, which begins already with the conference of the Poalei Zion Associations in 1901 in Minsk. From 1919 it was a rising power, and from 1933 it dominated the Zionist movement for decades, and of course, it is the movement that led the establishment of the state. Ben-Gurion, Mapai leader bent the entire history.
Since 2001, the Labor Party has begun its slow and bitter death, poetically with the sale of its mythical home at 110 Yarkon St, which was converted into a bourgeois apartment house. The rivalry between Peres and Rabin was replaced by a constant dispute full of struggles. The party abandoned its security ideology in favor of Catholic marriage for the Oslo idea, when even when it was clear that the public no longer supported this path, in 2003 the party elected Amram Metzna from the left wing. After the explosion in the political center, the Labor Party was practically redundant, and was repeatedly replaced as the ruling alternative by the various center parties, and in the 2019 elections it had already collapsed to a single digit number, and in 2020 it had only three mandates, on a joint list. In the following elections, Benny Gantz shaved her head Veteran voters.
Thirty years have turned a ruling party that established a state into a satellite party. And with satellites, comes extremism. It is said all the time that Jabotinsky would not have been elected in today’s Likud, but it is doubtful whether Boji Herzog, who led Labor less than a decade ago, would have been elected in it today, not least Shimon Peres, Fuad Ben Eliezer, Amir Peretz, Haim Ramon, or Yitzhak Rabin. Of course, there is nothing to talk about the mythical leaders of the party, Ben Gurion, Berel Katznelson, Golda Meir, they were defined as extreme right.
Levi Eshkol, the first chairman of the Labor Party in its current incarnation, was denounced by Yair Golan’s Labor Party. Eshkol, who raised the bones of Jabotinsky, began the update meetings with the opposition leader Begin, and in an unprecedented act appeared at the national conference of the Harut movement in 1966, as far east as west from Meir Golan, the man wants to close down media channels that he doesn’t like, and Naama Lazimi, who haunted the Kohalat Forum.
The Labor Party has been eulogized many times. Each time they said “she’s dead, it’s final”. In the years of the second intifada, when Peres left for Kadima, when Barak led it to 13 mandates and then Abandoned her, when it was overtaken by Yesh Atid, when it was not successful in the 2015 elections, and when it was led by Avi Gabbai, this was said in the morning news. Under Amir Peretz, the angel of death was already right at the door. But it seems that now it is safe to say that the party has come to an end. Golan, who leads an aggressive and extreme line, promised from the beginning that he would dissolve the party and Meretz, in order to unite them with the various protest movements. He even ran his election campaign with the future party name, “The Democrats”, a name that was not empty of it in light of the situation on the ground.
Labor 2024 is not even a pale shadow of the glorious movement it once was. From a Zionist, democratic and ideological movement, only a battered brand logo remains, and a lot of venom.
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