by Ilan Pappe
December 13, 2005In 1977 Menachem Begin, then head of the Likud, created a revolution and removed the Labour Party from power. Begin's was a social revolution, based on promises of social change and on giving the working class, which the Labour Party had alienated, a sense of belonging. Begin carried out a social revolution, but used the 'train ticket' he received from the people to travel to the Occupied Territories. I would like to be the Menachem Begin of the Labour Party, to give it back its social values and the support of the people. If the people give me the same 'train ticket' they once gave Begin, I intend to travel with it towards peace.
Amir Peretz, interview with labourstart.org, November 2005
When you drive south from Tel Aviv towards the Negev, the landscape becomes progressively more arid, the human surroundings progressively more impoverished. There is some reasonable housing -- isolated kibbutzim or other forms of collective settlement -- and here and there a prosperous bit of suburbia; but mostly it is a depressing journey, not alleviated by the 'development towns', Israel's answer to Ebenezer Howard's 'garden cities': ugly, uniform buildings, five to ten storeys high, reminiscent of housing estates in the former Soviet bloc, put up in haste to accommodate the influx of Arab Jewish immigrants languishing in the Maabort, the unbearable transition camps which received them on their arrival in Israel. Some communities -- the Iraqi Jews, for example -- made it to more affluent areas, but the North Africans were not among the more fortunate and in the 1950s most of them settled in these towns.
Life in the region was and still is very difficult. The main problem is the local economy, which is wholly dependent on a very few factories: sweatshops connected to the food and textile industries, sometimes to the military complex. This is where Israel's most underprivileged Jews work. Statistics for the mid-1990s show that half the local population earns the minimum wage, a third lives below the poverty line, and nearly 50 per cent of high-school leavers fail to matriculate. These were the people responsible for the Likud victory in 1977 and for the success of Shas, the ultra-Orthodox party, in the 1990s.
Amir Peretz arrived in one such development town, Sderot, a few miles away from the Gaza Strip, as a young child from the town of Bojad in Morocco, where he was born Armand Peretz in 1952. Until 1983, when he was elected head of the local council, his story was fairly typical: he worked as an unskilled labourer in a nearby kibbutz, served in the army and was badly wounded in the 1973 war. Confined to a wheelchair for a time, he managed -- with great difficulty -- a farm in a nearby moshav, until he left the hard scrabble behind: first for university and then for politics. Most of his peers who chose politics as a way out of their predicament ended up in the Likud; he opted for Labour, and -- what was extraordinary -- Labour's left wing.
He first came to public prominence in 1988, as a member of the Eight -- a left-wing group within the Knesset, headed by Yossi Beilin, which advocated a full Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories and a two- state solution. Peretz was a dream come true for the Ashkenazi-dominated Labour Party: to have within its highest ranks a 'Moroccan' who held such views was in those days almost unthinkable.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=9320
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