Tel Aviv (AsiaNews) - In the primaries for the leadership of Israel's Labour Party, which were held on Wednesday, 9 November, the winner is Amir Peretz, the Chairman of the General Confederation of Labour. The 53 year old Peretz, a combative trade unionist of modest family origins, defeated the venerable outgoing Party leader, the 82 year old Shimon Peres, who has been active in the Party for some sixty years, and was more than once its leader. Peretz is now, instead of Peres, the Party's candidate to head the Government if it wins the next general election.
Many commentators have described Peretz, both before and after his victory, as the last hope for the Labour Party. The Party, which was once upon a time the bearer of the noblest ideals of democratic socialism, already decades ago changed, in effect (like certain other parties of the left elsewere) into a representative of the better-off classes, and earned rejection and even hatred by the very workers it had once set out to represent. The latter, the less well off working classes, have instead increasingly chosen to vote for either the secular or the religious nationalist right wing.
The intra-party election campaign was bitter and ferocious. It was a war between social classes, a competition for the soul of the Party. The majority who voted for Peretz seem to have accepted the argument that, without returning to its roots as truly the party of the workers, Labour - once the country's all-powerful ruling party, now just a medium-sized one - was doomed.
Peretz's victory posits an immediate challenge to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, leader of the major right-wing party, Likud: Peretz has stated that he would lead Labour out of the governing coalition (in which Peres is now Deputy Prime Minister). If so, Sharon may be forced to resign, bringing forward the elections that would normally take place in November next year.
In any case, the next general election in Israel will now be fought by three much more clearly defined formations: The reborn left, led by Labour and its candidate Peretz; the nationalist right, led by Likkud; the "centre", led by the "Shinui" party, which has today become the only unmistakable representative of the (non-religious) better-off.
And What of the Catholics in Israel? Catholic voters are too few to elect even a single member of parliament (even if they had their own party and all voted for it, which has never happened). It is the case though that, as a generl rule, their interests are better served by a centre-left government that would be more attentive than the right (although often not that much more attentive) to human and civil rights (particularly religious freedom) and to the rights of minorities.
Concerning the Church as an institution though, Israel has never had a Prime Minister more attentive and respectful than Ariel Sharon. A Catholic personality reminds that it was, after all, Sharon who accepted the Church's demand to cancel the decision of his Labour Party predecessor (Ehud Barak) to build a mosque right in front of the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, says the churchman. "Even for this alone," he concludes, "Sharon deserves to occupy a place of honour in the history of Church-State relations in Israel."
