For 29 years, the party of Israel’s founding fathers identified with and embodied, in every way, the state as the “home of the Jewish nation.” Twenty-nine long, intense, dramatic years, running from the founding of the State of Israel up to 1977, when the Likud, the historic right-wing party led by Menachem Begin, won the elections for the first time. The Labor Party, or Mapam, was the party, to name just a few important figures, of David Ben-Gurion, Abba Eban, Golda Meir, Chaim Weizmann, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres. It was the party of Zionist pioneering, the one that bet on the possibility of “squaring the circle”: combining democracy and the socialist model of the kibbutz with Jewish identity, but in an inclusive, welcoming way. That party no longer exists, and it hasn’t for some time, even before it disappeared as an acronym, replaced today by the Democrats of Yair Golan, a former reserve general. He’s a decent man, but one who has nothing of the generals who led Israel in the great battle for peace, some losing it along with their life – Yitzhak Rabin.
Changing the name of the “company” is not enough to regain consensus, to regain a soul, an identity, and a solid social representation. This is a lesson of history that, in truth, does not concern Israel alone. But the decline of the Israeli left also tells us a lot. To those of us – and I speak for myself, but I don’t think I’m the only one – who lived with hope and true friendship through the era of peace of the courageous men of the Oslo-Washington Accords, immortalized in history with the handshake, on the White House lawn in September 1993, between former enemies who now found themselves on the same side of the fence: Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. Between them was Bill Clinton, the last US president who seriously attempted to find a political solution to the eternal Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That hope died on that cursed night of November 4, 1995, at 9:30 PM, when a young Jewish zealot, Yigal Amir, mortally wounded Rabin. Amir was the one who killed him, but his hand and his mind were ideologically armed by the hate campaign unleashed by the right and its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, against “Rabin the traitor”, the man who had dared to shake hands “soaked in Jewish blood” with the number one enemy of Israel and its people.
What happened immediately afterward is history. The history of the hawks who, in the Holy Land, fly in pairs: the Israeli ultranationalist right and the diehards of Hamas. In Israel, the season of blood began, with the “shahids” blowing themselves up, like bomb men (or women), on buses, in pizzerias, in nightclubs – every day, normal places, transformed into battlefields. Those who died were mostly young people, girls and boys like those massacred by Hamas terrorists at the Rava music festival on October 7, 2023.
Benjamin Netanyahu presented himself then, and ever since, as Mr. Security, the man who would annihilate Hamas. That didn’t happen then, nor now. A year later, Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister of Israel for the first time, defeating the Labor “dreamer,” the leader with great vision but little popular empathy: Shimon Peres. The prevailing historical-political narrative, even in Italy, is that Peres lost (by less than 30,000 votes) because he was less credible than his opponent on the issue of security. But that is not the case. Or at least, it is only partially.
At this point I would like to include some personal testimony. Two months after the electoral defeat, I accompanied Umberto Ranieri, then Undersecretary of State to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, to Israel and Gaza, to prepare for the visit of Massimo D’Alema, then president of the party and of the bicameral parliamentary commission, in October of that year. We met Shimon Peres in his office in the Knesset. He had not yet fully recovered from the most stinging defeat in his long and glorious political history. Shaken but lucid, Peres did not deny the influence of repeated Palestinian terrorist attacks on the vote. But – and here is a crucial point in our reconstruction – Peres offered a reflection that explains much of the left’s decline: “We had not understood that Israel had become something other than what we had built in the past”, he told us. “We hadn’t reckoned,” he continued, “with the profound demographic, social, and therefore also cultural transformations of Israel, which had been fundamentally changed by the waves of new Jewish immigration. Hundreds of thousands of people came from Russia, Arab countries, Africa, from realities light years away from the original genesis of the pioneering Israelis, the Ashkenazi, Jews with European roots and linked to an idea of democracy, including social democracy, which was the foundation of the kibbutzim experience and the electoral successes of the Labor Party.”
“We hadn’t understood that ‘our’ Israel had become a minority in its own country.” Moreover, it was a minority perceived by Israel’s dispossessed as people with their noses in the air, people who would have invited a Palestinian into their home but never one of their own, a Sephardi, the lowest on the social ladder. Demography is a political science that helps us reach places where geopolitics dare not tread.
Over the past thirty years, Israel’s demographic composition has increasingly shifted toward the Sephardic population, the ultra-Orthodox, or Israeli Arabs. The Israel we knew and loved through the books of David Grossman, Abraham Yehoshua, and Amos Oz – the secular, open-minded Israel, attentive to civil rights and minority rights – became increasingly entrenched in the redoubt of Tel Aviv, with a few appendages in Haifa. The left failed to grasp, and therefore represent, the changing Israel. It transformed itself, to use a metaphor so popular in Italian political science, into a “limited traffic party”, incapable of engaging with the lower classes, to whom the right offered not so much economic benefits – but also those, as happened with the West Bank settlers – as something or someone against whom they could direct their discontent, if not the hatred they had cultivated over time. Here too, Israel’s history speaks volumes to the events of the former Bel Paese.
Another lesson: a left that plays catch-up, incapable of proposing a vision, a project pragmatically and ideally alternative to that of the right, is a left inexorably destined for marginalization, if not extinction. This is what happened in Israel. The left thought it could win by personalizing the political battle, summed up in the slogan “Everyone but Bibi”, which brought together a diverse coalition that had nothing in common except being anti-Netanyahu, as if Israel would automatically change from this to that with his elimination. Such logic might pay off in the moment, it may even help you win, by a small margin, but governing is another matter. Especially governing a country in a permanent state of war, marked by the “trench psychology” that has increasingly become the psychology of a nation.
Perhaps you can win once by running “against”. But you govern “for.” To envision a peace in security that requires recognition, not delegitimization, of a Palestinian counterpart. To strengthen the public education system by diverting funds from ultra-Orthodox yeshivas. To make the Israel of startups prevail over the Israel of sacredness, of Torah fundamentalism.
The left needs to be capable of swimming against the grain. This doesn’t mean a left that is merely a witness, purist, and therefore ineffective. None of that. The Israeli left’s defeat lies in its inability, in thought and consequently in action, to combine idealism and concreteness – an inseparable pairing if one is to avoid reducing idealism to ideology, and concreteness to a tired managerial dimension, perhaps with “clean” but inept hands.
The rest is a corollary, made up of personal jealousies, internal power struggles, and the inability to hold together the pieces of what remains of a democratic-progressive front. This failure is reiterated today, when, six months before the most dramatic elections in Israel’s history, the leaders of the Democrats and the centrist forces of Lapid and Gantz are questioning the advisability of uniting with the Arab-Israeli parties in a common front – in Italy, they would call it “un campo largo” – to try to counter the warmongering, messianic right wing of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich.
These leaders and parties have been displaced by the massive street demonstrations that have marked Israel over the past three years, first against the Netanyahu government’s judicial coup and then in the criminal handling of the hostage situation in the hands of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Displaced and forced to play catch-up.
Resilient Israel is found in human rights NGOs – B’Tselem and Peace Now – in newspapers and websites with stiff spines – Haaretz, Meron Rapoport’s Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972 – in the refuseniks, and in the families of hostages who transformed unspeakable pain into determination to hold those in power accountable for the tragedy of October 7th and the subsequent massacre of Gazans. What remains of the Israeli left has so far failed to demonstrate this courage. Nor have the centrist forces, those who at most condemned Netanyahu and his associates for their “excesses” in Gaza, but nothing more.
This organized society is still the hope for avoiding the “suicide of Israel”. The left’s has already happened.
Cover image: Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and comrades of the Labor Party, 1977
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