Likud party operatives reportedly approached Labor-Gesher chairman Amir Peretz last week to offer him several tempting proposals in exchange for joining a coalition led by Binyamin Netanyahu.
According to a report in Channel 13 News, Peretz refused a phone call from Netanyahu and turned down several attractive offers, saying he would not enter into negotiations with the Likud under any circumstances.
One of the enticements reportedly offered to Amir Peretz was the role of finance minister in a Likud-led government, as well as two other ministries for his party.
Peretz was reportedly given the option of “choosing almost anything you want.”
The Labor party leader was also reportedly offered a raise in the minimum wage from 5,300 to 6,000 shekels a month and a mandatory pension law.
Last Wednesday, Peretz commented on the results of the election with a public message to Netanyahu.
“Save your time on phone calls to me. I served as prime minister, defense minister and a mayor – I am not looking for a job. Nobody should try to tempt us, you have nothing with which to do so. We promised and we will keep that promise – we will not sit with Netanyahu.”
Labor, the current incarnation of what was once Israel’s ruling Mapai party, was never a truly revolutionary movement but rather a champion of bourgeois social democracy. In addition to a long record of utilizing colonialist tools to achieve their objectives and siding with forces of imperialism since even before the establishment of the state, Labor Zionism has consistently failed the Israeli proletariat.
Despite his much-touted experience as a union organizer, Amir Peretz has betrayed the interests of the very class he claims to represent – not only in terms of accepting an inherently exploitative capitalist system but also in failing to even attain benefits for workers within the confines of that system.
Peretz is not even a principled social democrat. One could theoretically make the argument that there’s value in the reformist approach of working within the system to blunt capitalism’s edges and attain moderate material gains for the working class. But by rejecting Netanyahu’s desperate offer, the Labor party leader has failed to do even that.
Israelis seeking a party to work within the system for the interests of the working class would be better off supporting Shas than Labor. Shas leader Aryeh Deri has committed himself to the fight for an increased minimum wage to 6,300 shekels over the course of the next Knesset.
Shas’s recent election campaign also highlighted Deri’s efforts to reduce transportation costs and raise the state child support payments that Netanyahu slashed when he served as finance minister in Ariel Sharon’s government.
But Shas has a multitude of issues it finds important and can likely be brought into a coalition without Netanyahu having to compromise his “free market” agenda. He would be less likely to make such concessions to Deri than to Peretz.
The opportunity to effectively undo decades of Netanyahu’s neo-liberal reforms while making the prime minister begrudgingly watch from the sidelines should certainly be more politically valuable to Amir Peretz than the short-term benefits of being seen refusing to even negotiate with the Likud. But Peretz has once again shown himself to be a petty and irresponsibly short sighted politician.
A 6,000 shekel minimum wage and pension law would have been significant gains for Israel’s working class and would have greatly improved the lives of millions. By snatching the opportunity, Peretz could be hailed as a national hero even greater than Moshe Kahlon when he broke up the cell phone monopolies and lowered the monthly cost of living.
But Amir Peretz clearly puts his public image as an enemy of Netanyahu before the material needs of the nation’s working class. In the country’s next national election, the proletariat should take revenge by finally erasing the Labor party from Israel’s political map.
