The "Struggle" of Peres and Rabin

By Jordan Bonfante

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 3 1/2 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.

After Golda Meir's resignation as Prime Minister in 1974, Rabin defeated Peres for the party leadership, but by only 44 votes. Rabin was compelled to include Peres in his Cabinet as Defense Minister, but only with what he called "a heavy heart." Rabin did his best to keep Peres in his place. When the Defense Minister delivered a briefing, for instance, Rabin would show his impatience by swiveling round in his chair. Rabin also named General Ariel Sharon, the hero of the 1973 war, as his special military adviser, a role that clearly undercut that of the Defense Minister.

The feud turned into something of a national spectator sport, with innumerable tales of shouting matches and table thumpings at staff meetings. Peres was not only guilty of "exaggerated pretensions," Rabin later charged in his memoirs, but also of "trying to disrupt the workings of the government" and even of "lies and untruths." Peres was somewhat more circumspect in his criticism. But after the dramatic Israeli raid on Entebbe in 1976, the Defense Minister let it be known that Rabin had been "forced" by the Cabinet to authorize the raid. Peres privately spread the word that he considered Rabin to be a "weak" Prime Minister who should be replaced.

When the party nomination for Prime Minister came up in February 1977, Rabin scraped through with another narrow victory.

He was forced to step down in April, when a scandal exploded over the discovery that he and his wife had held an illegal foreign bank account in Washington, D.C. Peres was quickly chosen as Labor's replacement candidate for Prime Minister, only to be resoundingly upset by Begin in the election five weeks later.

For all the sparks of their personal friction, Rabin and Peres have no significant ideological or policy differences. Both advocate tough budget cutting and tight foreign currency control to fight Israel's punishing triple-digit inflation. On matters of foreign policy, both want to maintain close relations with the U.S. and honor the Camp David agreements. Rabin and Peres subscribe to the "Jordanian" option, under which most of the occupied West Bank would revert to joint Jordanian-Palestinian control.

Unless they settle their feud once and for all, neither man may get a chance to test those policies in office. "By the time the [Rabin-Peres] battle is over," Jerusalem Post Columnist Philip Gillon commented recently, the winner "will have as much hope of beating Begin as a celluloid dog would have of catching an asbestos cat in Hades."

--ByJordan Bonfante.

Reported by David Aikman/Jerusalem

With reporting by David Aikman/Jerusalem

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