Haim Ramon: Hard Labor

By Larry Derfner

MK Haim Ramon, who for a while had the momentum in the Labor Party leadership race, strode into the crowded room at party headquarters in Rehovot.

Scanning the nearly 100 people who'd come to hear him, he saw a caricature of a Labor crowd - a lot of white hair, nearly everyone Ashkenazi. The sort of Israelis, he would say later, who were the only voters the party could still count on - "those who vote Labor out of decades of habit."

As Ramon, wearing a bright blue shirt, moved up the aisle to the front, no one applauded. Two or three aides and party officials broke the unseemly silence by clapping loudly, and a few people in the audience joined in out of politeness.

Ya'acov Sendler, the seventyish chairman of the branch, tried to warm up the crowd, by declaring that its party was in "critical condition," facing a situation of "do or die." He apologized for the crowded conditions, blaming the national party bureaucracy for deciding that Rehovot Labor no longer needed its old, roomy headquarters, and could make do, and save on rent, by moving into this office suite on top of the Superpharm.

Noting that 'Eitan and Haim' and one other member now made up the branch's staff, Sendler told the audience that "anyone who wants to join should see me afterwards."

After eyeing Sendler impatiently, Ramon was introduced and took the microphone. He smiled his trademark goofy, but endearing smile, which has gotten a bit jowly by now. He talked nonstop for nearly two hours. His analysis of the party's standing was even more bleak than Sendler's.

"We're disappearing, we don't fill any role in the State of Israel. We've lost our relevance to the public," he said. "A while ago I asked myself, 'If the elections were being held tomorrow and I had to go out and tell people why they should vote for Labor, what would I say?' I couldn't come up with an answer."

He said he's running to provide that answer, to present the public with an alternative to the current government which has "failed miserably in every sphere." In Ramon's pitch for support, he added - twice - that even if he didn't, somehow, manage to lead Labor back to power in the general election a year from now, he would certainly make a much better opposition leader than either of his opponents, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the former defense minister and Labor chairman, and Amram Mitzna, the mayor of Haifa.

"Even people who don't support me will agree with that," he said.

Everyone agrees. Opposition leaders are known mainly for making speeches in the Knesset, and no one in Labor can make a speech like Ramon.

Proudly, he told his listeners that he had been a "one-man opposition" in Knesset to the Netanyahu government.

FILING out of after the speech, Moshe Brookmyer, 73, an Israel Electric Corp. retiree, said he was backing Ramon for his political experience. He called Mitzna an unknown, and said he had soured on Ben-Eliezer after the former defense minister embarrassed himself in Washington by leaking the contents of his conversation with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

"Rice won't talk to him anymore, and she's right. A guy who does something as foolish as that can't be prime minister," said Brookmyer.

He has no illusions about Labor's chances against Likud, whether under Ariel Sharon or Binyamin Netanyahu.

"'Unless something out of the ordinary happens, the Likud is going to win. The country has moved to the right," he said. But he has to keep hoping, so Brookmyer points to what happened to Churchill after World War II. "Churchill won the war, but afterward he was voted out because of the [British] economy," he said.

Asked if this meant that for Labor to win the next election, Sharon first had to win the war against the Palestinians.

"That's right," the pensioner replied.

With no end to that war on the horizon, the November 19 Labor primaries, which will decide the party's candidate for prime minister, shapes up as a campaign for the leadership of the losing side.

Ramon and Mitzna both want to take Labor out of Sharon's coalition, so if either of them wins, the Labor race will likely turn out to be for the leadership of the opposition, now headed by Meretz's Yossi Sarid.

If Ben-Eliezer wins, the primary will almost certainly end up confirming him for several more years as leader of the junior partner - with the emphasis on junior - in a Likud-led national unity government.

The smart money is on Ben-Eliezer. He controls the party machinery, is considered Labor's "king of the grassroots," has the strongest ward heeler in deputy defense minister (and Negev construction contractor) Weizman Shiri, has the Druse bloc vote sewn up, and makes the warmest - if not suffocating - personal appeals for support. Moreover, for all those Laborites who want to stay close to the source of power, to get the 'jobbim' and patronage that go with being in the government, who fear being left out in the cold of the opposition, Fuad is their man.

But whoever wins the Labor primary would go into the general election as a distant longshot.

"'For the last year-and-a-half, our polls are consistently showing that only 40-50% of the people who voted Labor in the past are planning to vote Labor again in the next election," said opinion pollster Rafi Smith.

Labor's main problem is that the Israeli public as a whole blames it for the war. Labor's leaders risked Israel's security with the Oslo Accords, they trusted Arafat, they gave the Palestinian Authority tens of thousands of weapons, and it all blew up in the Israeli people's face, according to the popular view. So the Labor Party has become one of the most discredited brands in the country. To all but the dwindling Left, it connotes tried-and-true failure, a party of aging yuppie elitists, university-educated idealists who turned out to be too smart for their own, or anybody else's, good.

Ramon fits into this sad image pretty well. At 52, with 19 years in the Knesset, he's been there forever. Before entering the Knesset he headed Labor's Young Guard, and before that he was student body president of Tel Aviv University on the Labor ticket. He's a politician through and through - a talker, a charmer. He's also a lawyer.

Since the war began he's soured badly on Arafat.

"If Sharon and I had a contest for who could say the worst things about Arafat, I'd win," he said in Rehovot.

He has raised the banner in Labor for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and most of the West Bank, for uprooting scores of isolated settlements and putting up a wall between Israel and the Palestinians. During the Oslo years, though, Ramon was one of the most ardent voices for the peace negotiations. Before Oslo he led the party's dovish young generation, even ahead of Yossi Beilin. So in the electoral politics of Israel today, Ramon carries a lot of baggage.

Yet he is the new hot item in the Labor race, which probably says as much about Labor - and about its previous hot item, Mitzna - as it does about Ramon. His momentum comes from gaining the recent endorsements of dovish Labor MKs who had been sitting on the fence between Ramon and Mitzna, such as Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, former finance minister Avraham 'Baiga' Shohat and former Peace Now leader Tzali Reshef.

Mitzna, who entered the race two months ago as Labor's latest great white hope - a dovish ex-general untainted by the muck of national politics - has bogged down under the weight of a police investigation into his campaign contributions, but more so because of the underwhelming force of his presence, speaking style and message. When Mitzna didn't "take off," undecided Labor doves began pointing toward Ramon.

IN REHOVOT, Ramon showed again that he is a glib, astute critic of Israeli politics - a politician with something to say. If neither he nor Mitzna takes over the Labor Party, he said, "Then we'll deliver the State of Israel into the hands of the right wing for years to come. Israel will be like it was in the Fifties, when there was just Mapai and its smaller satellite parties, only this time it will be the Likud and its smaller satellite parties, one of which will be Labor."

He went easier on Mitzna than he did on Ben-Eliezer, saying Mitzna was a good mayor, but hopelessly out of his depth in trying to make the jump to national Israeli politics.

"In the last two months he hasn't shown any particular political genius, and that's putting it as gently as I can," Ramon said.

As for Ben-Eliezer, Ramon said he had allowed Labor to be swallowed whole by Sharon. The defense minister, he said, "only does something if Sharon agrees to it. He doesn't confront Sharon on anything."

This was the argument that launched Ramon's campaign, when, at the Labor Party convention in Tel Aviv on September 30, he woke up the assembly by roaring at Ben- Eliezer and his allies that they were Sharon's "lambs, and we know what happens in the end to the lambs on Sharon's farm!"

It was an echo of Ramon from his glory days in 1994, when he fired up a party convention by likening the old- timers of the Histadrut to suicidal "beached whales." Soon after that he snatched the leadership of the Histadrut from the Labor machine, heading the Ram (for Ramon) ticket that toppled Labor for the first time in the Histadrut's 70-year history. The poor boy from Jaffa, whose father had suffered economically for lack of the all-important Histadrut member's "red card," whittled the union empire down. He also pushed through the National Health Law, which reformed the provision of health care in Israel. In the days when Labor was on top, he was the party's wonder boy.

THE TURN downhill for Ramon came on May 29, 1996, or rather in the pre-dawn hours of the following day, when Binyamin Netanyahu overtook Shimon Peres in the voting for prime minister. Ramon had been chief campaign strategist for Peres and Labor, and Ehud Barak, who had joined Labor in a hurry to become its leader, immediately blamed Ramon for the loss. Ramon offered a faint-hearted defense, making no attempt to throw the blame back on Barak - as if this was beneath him. Barak's accusations stuck.

The shocking election loss, Ramon's first important defeat, seemed to take the wind out of him. He stood aside as Barak took over the party, and he later accepted an ill- defined cabinet post in Barak's government.

On the popular Hartzufim TV political satire, Ramon's "talking head" was shown mounted on Barak's wall, grinning and croaking in compliance with the boss's orders.

It has been suggested that Ramon will fight on behalf of an idea or a policy, but not strictly on his own behalf - probably a fatal characteristic for a politician who wants to be prime minister, certainly in Israel.

During his appearance in Rehovot, Ramon came across as an outstanding debater, a man who could make people agree with him. But he was unable to reach out to the voters and say, "I need your help." He didn't impress as a leader out to galvanize people into following him. While he has an ego, it isn't raw or very possessive - not by the standards of big-league politicians.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post in his office in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, which he chairs, Ramon addresses doubts as to whether he has the necessary "fire in the belly" - to use an American political expression - to fight all the way to the top. The sort of "scale the mountain or die" attitude that drove, for instance, Netanyahu and Barak.

"In Israeli politics they call it obsession,'' he says dismissively. He takes it "as a compliment" that he seems to lack an obsession for power.

"'There was a prime minister who didn't have it who was better than all those who did. His name was Rabin. Rabin said, "Becoming prime minister for me is an option, not an obsession.''

In a clear reference to Netanyahu and Barak, he says, "If you're obsessed with becoming prime minister, you're going to stay obsessed while serving as prime minister. Obsession isn't something you can turn on and off. 'I consider it very critical that I become prime minister, but not for my own sake. And I think it's about time that Israel had a down-to-earth human being as prime minister."

Asked if he thought Sharon had the obsession, Ramon says no, that Sharon, like himself, seems motivated by principle, not ego. Mitzna is the same, he says. Ben- Eliezer? Ramon doesn't go so far as to say Ben-Eliezer is obsessed, but maintains, "He wants very, very much, on a personal level, to become - I don't know about prime minister - but to remain defense minister - and in this battle he'll do almost anything to achieve it."

WHEN asked why Labor's great experiment, the Oslo Accords, ended in blood and destruction, Ramon places the blame firstly on Yasser Arafat for resuming the political tactic of terror, secondly on Barak for bringing a doomed "all or nothing" strategy to Camp David, and thirdly on Netanyahu for consistently undermining the peace process.

"'The Oslo Accords were never given a chance to succeed," he says. If Barak had taken his advice and made the promised third withdrawal from the West Bank, kept Jerusalem off the table at Camp David, and instead gone after a more modest, interim agreement to keep the peace, the peace process would likely have stayed on track, Ramon speculates. Thus, he feels no responsibility for its failure.

On Monday, opening day of the new Knesset session, the mood at the meeting of Labor's Knesset faction was worse than glum. Seated around a rectangle of tables, MKs made bitter, sarcastic remarks as Peres tried to encourage them, like an old football coach giving a pre-game pep talk to a team that knows it's about to get trampled.

The talk turned to Sharon's holding onto control of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, even though the coalition agreement called for it to be in Labor's hands.

"He'll leave us the Children's Channel," said a deadpan Avi Yehezkel. When the gripes turned to the intractability of the settlement outposts, and the IDF's assassination of the wrong man in Beit Jala, Peres said these were questions for the defense minister to answer. And the defense minister was elsewhere.

Addressing Labor's political prospects in this year before the general election, Peres said in his most grandfatherly tone, "I don't think a death sentence has been passed on the Labor Party. Things can turn around. The economic situation is very harsh. In politics I've seen the dead come back to life."

Now the Labor MKs were groaning through their laughter. On the opposite side of the rectangle, across from Peres, Ramon sat with a cynical smile on his face. He didn't bother to make even a sound.

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