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Amir Peretz talks to a supporter as he visits the central market during election campaigning in the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona,Thursday. (AP)
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It's all about the moustache: a baby grabs for it, Friday. (AP)
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| By Associated Press March 26, 2006 |
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| Amir Peretz and his wife Ahlama shake hands with diners at a restaurant during a pre-election campaign tour of the docks in Tel Aviv, Israel, Friday. (AP) |
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When Amir Peretz took over Labor late last year, he was hailed as a savior who could bring working class Middle Eastern Jews into the foundering party of Israel's aging European-bred elite.
But as Labor prepares for Israel's election Tuesday, it faces a flight of the very European voters who form the party's core.
Labor defectors say they left because of Peretz's inexperience and fears that he is a secretly a hard-core socialist, as well as their belief that the new, centrist Kadima Party has the best chance to break the stalemate with the Palestinians.
Party veterans say a key reason for the flight is what the Israeli media have dubbed "the ethnic demon," the refusal to consider a Jew of Middle Eastern origin for prime minister.
They point to the preoccupation with Peretz's humble beginnings in the Israeli backwater of Sderot, his lack of a university degree and his shaky command of English.
"I think in the basis of it, it's difficult for them to accept that someone from Morocco will become prime minister," said Gidon Ben Yisrael, a veteran party activist and parliamentary candidate.
Polls show that while Labor is attracting roughly the same national support as in the last election - about 20 seats in Israel's 120-member parliament - its traditional voters have fled in droves.
Nearly 40 percent of those who voted Labor in the last election have left, pollster Rafi Smith said. Traditionally pulling three times as many votes from European, or Ashkenazi, Israelis as from those of Middle Eastern, or Sephardi, origin, the party is now attracting votes from both groups in roughly equal numbers, Smith said.
Peretz, Israel's first Sephardi candidate for prime minister, is undaunted. Traveling on a campaign bus around the country, the former union leader tries to win over new voters with a platform focusing on raising the minimum wage, increasing education funding and guaranteeing pensions for the elderly.
At the same time, a Labor phone bank has called more than 70,000 retirees who failed to renew their party membership after Peretz took over. And party leaders are playing up polls showing Labor finishing a distant second to acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima Party to persuade wary supporters that their vote for Labor will not propel Peretz into the premier's office, Ben Yisrael said.
"The battle to get them back is very strange," Peretz, 54, said in an interview with The Associated Press on his bus after a round of handshaking and bear hugs with voters in a Jerusalem shopping district. "I was sure that the veteran party members would be happy that I got them new voters."
Ashkenazi Jews have always been the dominant force in the Labor Party, which led Israel to independence in 1948 and controlled the government for the nation's first 29 years. Sephardi resentment toward Labor dates back to the 1950s, when Labor governments sent the new immigrants to small towns in underdeveloped areas.
In subsequent decades, the immigrants were looked down on, and an ethnic divide developed. The hardline Likud Party harnessed the immigrants' resentment to wrest power from Labor in 1977 and become the dominant party for much of the last three decades.
Peretz, who was born in Morocco and moved to Israel with his family when he was 4, hoped to change that. In November, he stunned Labor and its core supporters in the tony suburbs of Tel Aviv by defeating veteran leader Shimon Peres in the primary to choose the party's candidate for prime minister.
Peres' brother Gigi lashed out at Peretz as a "foreign body" in the party and said Peretz and his supporters "came over from North Africa, took over and shot them (Labor activists) in the back."
Weeks later, Shimon Peres bolted Labor for Kadima, bringing thousands of Labor veterans with him.
One of those was Rafi Lehavi, a 57-year-old who was active in Labor politics for 30 years. Lehavi, a former union chief who is now chairman of the Kadima headquarters in the Tel Aviv suburb of Raanana, said he did not like Peretz's track record as head of the Histadrut trade union federation and worried about his lack of governing experience.
Peretz, the former mayor of Sderot, has been in parliament for nearly two decades but has never held a Cabinet post.
"I couldn't support Amir Peretz as the future prime minister. Maybe in the future, maybe with more training in the government," Lehavi said.
Peretz's Moroccan roots had nothing to do with the decision, he said. "I didn't leave because of his origin. I don't believe in him as a leader."
Ben Yisrael brushed off concerns about Peretz's lack of governing experience, pointing to Labor's last candidate, Amram Mitzna, a former mayor of Haifa who had no national political experience.
Sephardi Jews have broken through many social barriers in recent years, even capturing the president's office and the post of defense minister. But those positions are not directly elected and many Israelis - especially traditional Labor supporters - are not ready to see a Sephardi Jew in the top job, Israeli analysts said.
"It's not easy to break the taboo," political analyst Yoel Marcus wrote in the Haaretz daily.
Peretz said the transformation of the party's core corrected an odd electoral distortion that had poor Sephardic Jews voting for the fiscally conservative Likud and well-to-do Ashkenazi Jews voting for Labor.
"For the first time, the Labor Party is getting support from places it should have received support traditionally: places where there are workers, retirees ... development towns," he said. "I am sorry that in parallel ... there are also those who have left us. I hope at the last moment they will return."
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