ISRAEL: The Struggle of Peres and Rabin

• Share

A bitter battle for the Labor Party leadership

G rowing popular dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Menachem Begin's government would seem to present the opposition Labor Party with a golden opportunity. Polls show that Labor would win an absolute majority of seats in the Knesset if elections were held today. Nonetheless, there is a possibility that the party, which ruled Israel from 1948 to 1977, may throw away its big chance to return to power. Reason: it is bogged down in a vindictive leadership battle that Israelis refer to simply as "the struggle."

The intensity of the feud has few parallels in other democracies. In one corner is aggressive, right-of-center Shimon Peres, 57, the former Defense Minister who is trying to retain the Labor Party leadership he inherited in 1977. In the other is cautious, centrist, former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, 58, who was discredited by scandal 3½ years ago, but has been battling ever since to regain the leadership. Peres and Rabin have served in Cabinets together, and they even live within two blocks of each other in the same Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Aviv. Yet the two men are barely on speaking terms. They

confine their mutual encounters to essential party business and seem almost to have difficulty uttering each other's names. Rabin accuses Peres of being willing to wreck the Labor Party for his own ambitions. Scoffs Peres about Rabin: "Our party does not have the concept of the messiah!"

The two antagonists were headed for a showdown this week as 3,101 delegates cast secret paper ballots for one or the other at the party's three-day convention in Tel Aviv's huge modern Mann Auditorium. Whoever wins will have a good chance of becoming Prime Minister at the next election, due in the fall of 1981 if not sooner. The loser could be relegated to years of political eclipse.

A tally of potential delegate strength indicated that Peres could win up to 70% of the convention votes. National polls, however, show that Rabin—with an abiding image as an essentially trustworthy leader—is the preferred choice for Prime Minister in the country as a whole (with a 24% approval rating, compared with 22% for Peres and 12% for Begin). If Peres wins decisively in the convention, say with more than 2,100 votes, Rabin may have to abandon any further challenge to his archrival. If the outcome is close, Rabin will have a powerful say in the makeup of any future Labor government.

Part of the bad blood is a basic personality clash. Rabin is a moody, taciturn introvert who is visibly uncomfortable with crowds. Peres is an outgoing gladhander who exudes an easy charm and tosses off aphorisms in at least four languages. Their public antagonism dates back to the aftermath of the 1973 Middle East war, when the two emerged as the most promising of a new generation of Israeli leaders. A career soldier for 27 years, Rabin was a former chief of staff who had made his mark with patient staff planning; he enjoyed the support of the Labor Party's broad, centrist faction. Peres, a political activist since the age of 16, was a precocious, widely traveled administrator who had been named director-general of the Defense Ministry at 29, and soon became a dominant figure in the party's right wing.