Populist Bids Israeli Voters Back to Labor

[TomClash]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032501001.html

KIBBUTZ MISGAV AM, Israel -- Amir Peretz is everything that previous leaders of Israel's Labor Party were not: North African by birth, populist in his politics, dynamic on the stump. Even the moustache that his opponents cite as evidence of everything from ethnic radicalism to a resemblance to Joseph Stalin sets Peretz apart from the Israeli founding fathers whose party he took over last year.

Many Israelis of Peretz's background turned against Labor decades ago. To punish a governing party that in their eyes had become an elitist enterprise unconcerned with the plight of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, known collectively as Mizrahi Jews, they turned to the more hawkish Likud Party. Peretz is trying to win them back.

In the campaign leading to Tuesday's national elections, Peretz has focused on returning Labor to its roots, promising to raise the minimum wage, patch up Israel's fraying social safety net and pursue negotiations with the Palestinians at a time when a unilateral withdrawal from the occupied territories is in vogue. Along the way, Peretz, a former leader of Israel's largest trade-union federation, is finding new enemies in old friends and new friends in old enemies. As the Mizrahi Jews weigh whether to return to Labor, many of the Ashkenazi Jews -- those of European descent -- who dominate the party are unconvinced that he is the man to lead the party into elections.

"There are two genies in this campaign: the nationalist and the ethnic," Peretz, 54, said in an interview Thursday during a campaign swing through Galilee. "Both genies are working against the social revolution I have in mind. And I am trying my best to kill them both."