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Photo: Eli Elgrat
Happier times: Braverman and Peretz celebrate Labor's election showing
Photo: Eli Elgrat

Threats and breakdowns

Some things never change over in the Labor Party

Over the past week Amir Peretz has managed to avoid the Qassams aimed at his house in Sderot. But at his second home, the one in Tel Aviv's Hatikva Quarter, the defense minister managed to step on every possible land mine.

 

From a different perspective we can say the Labor Party chairman's colleagues are doing absolutely everything to plant the mines directly under his feet, to destroy any chance he might have to stand up. At the same time, Peretz's winning team – those same politicians that ran around the country posing arm-in-arm during the election campaign is falling apart. The only thing left is a small group of political guerillas, hunting one another: Avishay Braverman vs. Shelly Yacimovich, Danny Yatom vs. Eitan Cabel, and everyone against Amir Peretz.

 

Battles and infighting

 

As it always does, the Labor Party is accomplishing the impossible: Instead of trying to breathe easy for a few months and planning its agenda for the future, the party hierarchy is banging its head against every possible wall, busy with internal battles and infighting. The more kings there are, the more the monarchy crumbles and loses its standing.

 

For instance, take the five MKs (Braverman, Ami Ayalon, Matan Vilnai, Colette Avital and Danny Yatom) who have earned themselves the unoriginal, and not entirely accurate, title "rebels." One senior Labor figure, a man with a terrific sense of humor, calls them "cowboys" (the ackronym of their names forms the word "cowboy" in Hebrew).

 

The official had nothing particularly insightful to say about the group, but the phrase does say a lot about the group, four of whom see themselves as potential party leaders in future.

 

Like in the wild west, the quintet – completely lacking in any political backbone at the moment – has brandished the main weapon it currently has at its disposal: non-stop media appearances, threats about the party's future, even threatening to split from the party.

 

They don’t' want to break away, they know they have no political future outside the Labor Party, but they like to wink. They also like to make threats.

 

Labor spirit

 

A month into the current government, the cowboys are firing wildly. They are wasting ammunition as if they are at war has broken out. Prof. Avishay Braverman, a serious if egotistical man, walked around the Knesset last week predicting Labor could fall below the 10-seat threshold in the next elections, and telling anyone who would listen that he had a long road ahead to save the party, to prevent it from falling apart altogether.

 

It's not Braverman's fault. It's not Ayalon's, either. They have quickly gotten into the spirit of things over in the Labor Party. They joined Matan Vilnai and Danny Yatom, two men who have displayed a lack of true political understanding in the past.

 

Vilnai, for example, dropped out of the race for the party leadership in order to become Shimon Peres' defense minister. And Yatom, for his part, is the same person who called Labor's primary campaign in which thousands of registration forms wound up in the garbage Labor's "cleanest sign-up campaign ever."

 

You say you want a revolution?

 

In other words: Tell me who the cowboys are, and I'll tell you what their chances are to do anything influential. In this case, the rebels/cowboys/recalcitrants are a group of revolutionaries trying to affect a coup d'etat.

 

There is no other way to explain their attacks on their party chairman and defense minister a month after the government was sworn in. There is no way to explain just how this quintet, intelligent as they all may be, can predict what will happen a year or two from now.

 

They see nothing but themselves, their failures, and their frustrations about being left out of the government, and so they criticize Labor's path, a path that they, too, supported whole heartedly until March 28.

 

No patience

 

That's the problem with the Labor Party, say senior officials frustrated by the infighting. "We can't do nothing. They are continuously trying to pull the rug our from under our feet, to destroy, to break us apart. No one has patience for anything.

 

"Already, they are trying to axe Amir, looking for new elections. We haven't even finished with these elections, and we're on the way to the next ones. We can't go on like this."

 


פרסום ראשון: 06.12.06, 13:25
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