I'll be interested to see how Amir Peretz goes...certainly he does look like a genuine alternative outlook. Plus the moustche.....that's a damn fine moustache.
Do you think Israelis are any prospect of giving a genuine lecturn pounding lefty a go? One that speaks arabic better than english? a non european?
Well, such questions are what makes it a must-watch. The Russians might be anti-communist, but that's not because of the Soviet welfare-state but more because of them not being rich like other folk. In Israel they're not rich and don't have the welfare-state they're used to. Peretz speaks to them,
but he doesn't do it in Russian. He needs Russian allies to do that, and of course he's got them within and without the Labour Party. One thing socialists are very well-versed in is organising, and another thing is leverage.
Peres lost out to Peretz because his world-view was fixed 50 years ago. The idea that a million or so Russians immigrating in the 90's was a major phaenomenon passed him by. His world had shrunk to Labour and nation-founding cliques, and the trappings of power without any substance, long before. The pundits were shocked. Why, FCOL? Because their world coincided far more with the Peres Bubble than with the Histadrut.
The Histadrut was Ben-Gurion's second vehicle (his first was the Party). Just as you'd expect from a socialist. He leveraged it into Founder of the Nation status for himself. The Histadrut became the governing body of the Hagganah, the future IDF, within the Yishuv. In 1948, Ben-Gurion was the government and he was the army. Apart from the Irgun, which was subsumed into the IDF in 1949 lest it become an alternative power-base to The Party.
Irony dictated that Likud, spawn of the Irgun, saw off The Party. The Party ignored the Mizrahim influx politically, assuming they would naturally become Party People by the superior example of their Ashkenazi Rationalist brothers. Meantime they were expected to do the crap work, which used to be done by Palestinians but they ... weren't there in such numbers any more. And there weren't yet many Russians available, and Western Jews didn't seem keen on leaving their comfortable lives - they give generously, of course - to do crap work in some Eastern Mediterranean Shangri La.
Late, drunk, positively
quivering with anticipation. It's gonna be a roller-coaster of spills and thrills, far more interesting than that nonsense a year ago.
