Sunday & the 5-day workweek in Israel

Enjoy Your Weekend


With July 4th behind them, Americans can look forward to closing out the summer season with Labor Day on September 5th. All told, they will enjoy ten national holidays; New Yorkers get an additional three days off. Across the Atlantic, Britons will have nine "bank holiday" days in 2012; Germans 11; French 10 and Italians 12. And of course, in each of these countries, people have the leisure of weekends from the close of business on Friday until Monday morning.

In Israel, however, Sunday is the start of the work week. On the face of it, Israelis otherwise enjoy an almost equally bountiful number of off days: eight. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that all but one of these are religious holidays -- Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah and so on – the singular exception being Independence Day.

Ask new immigrants to Israel from Western countries, particularly those who are observant, and they are likely to confess that the absence of Sundays – and having only one non-religious bank holiday – has made for a difficult cultural adjustment.
But Israelis are not obliged to work on Fridays, so isn't that like having a Sunday? Not really. For one, it's a regular school day. Banks are open; so is the post office; building goes on at construction sites and sanitation workers are collecting garbage. There are no reliable figures for how many Israelis have Fridays off, but even for those fortunate enough to have the day to themselves, Fridays can still feel frenetic with sidurim (chores) like supermarket shopping, running errands, and preparing for Shabbat before the shops close early.

For those who take Shabbat in earnest the "day of rest" can take on its own hectic quality with morning and afternoon synagogue services, family meals and lots of socializing. While observant Jews do not travel, secular Israelis without automobiles must make do with taxis or stay close to home because in most places there is little in the way of public transportation; most shops, restaurants and places of entertainment are closed.
Not surprisingly, many Anglo-Israelis along with immigrants from the former Soviet Union, would gladly work part of Fridays, just as they did in the "Old Country," in order to get a breather on Sunday. Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky has long campaigned to make Sunday a day of leisure. His thought is that sharing Sundays off would reduce social and religious tensions and create opportunities for positive interaction between observant and secular Israelis.

Likud Party powerbroker, Silvan Shalom, the vice premier and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's arch political rival has also long been committed to the 5-day workweek with Sundays off. Shalom has argued that Israel needs to be in synch with the global economy. Why have Tel Aviv's stock market closed when everyone else's is trading (on Friday) and open (on Sunday) when world markets are closed? His plan would have Israelis work until noon on Fridays and make up the difference with slightly longer hours Monday through Thursday. There would be a five-day school week with longer hours. The result would be a calmer more harmonious country, Shalom promises.

Now, two Likud Knesset members, Ze'ev Elkin, and Yariv Levin, have introduced legislation along the lines proposed by Shalom. Their angle is that changing demographics – increasing numbers of religiously observant Israelis – has provided a fresh economic incentive for a Sunday that would encourage this sector to spend money on cultural activities, sporting events and at the malls.

Many but plainly not all native-born Israelis would be willing to go along with the idea. Israel's secular majority prefers not working on Shabbat. On the other hand, younger secular people feel as though they already have a normal two-day weekend and have no great desire to exchange Friday for Sunday. Some worry they might lose benefits they now enjoy on Saturday (sporting events, culture, and limited shopping) in exchange for Sundays off. They've anyway found workarounds to mandated Shabbat closings. Many Tel Aviv nightspots are open; 12 percent of Israelis choose to work on Shabbat, and 44% enjoy limited shopping.

While some in the national religious sector have long favored the Sunday option, others are more wary. They like the idea of having a day off to do some of the same things their secular family and friends do, but worry that they will not have enough time, after working a shortened Friday, to prepare for Shabbat or travel to distant family before sundown. Others are dubious that having Sundays off will actually reduce desecration of the Sabbath. And the more insular ultra-Orthodox are vehemently opposed to Sundays on the grounds that it is a Christian rest day. Last but not least, Moslem citizens (some 16% of the population) are also less than keen to have to work on Fridays since it is the only day when believers are obligated to offer midday prayers communally in a mosque.

The economic impact of making the switch will likely carry the greatest weight. Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz worries that a 5-day work week, with Sunday off, would result in Fridays being fretted away, especially in the short days of the winter months. In effect, Israel would be transitioning unthinkingly to a four-day workweek. Better to transform, officially, Fridays as the start of a two-day weekend, says Steinitz. On the other hand, the country's hoteliers support the Sunday scheme, as does the Manufacturers Association, Chamber of Commerce and teachers unions. Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer has not come out publicly on the issue but is reportedly sympathetic. The same is said of Histadrut Labor Federation chief Ofer Eini.

Following the old adage "when in doubt form a committee," Netanyahu has appointed Eugene Kandel, head of his National Economic Council to chair a panel that is to look into the matter.

No one doubts that frazzled Israelis could use the down time of a real Sunday. Who would not savor sunset on Shabbat knowing that they had the next day off? But creating a real Sunday weekend would require radical cultural adaptations, major revamping of the school calendar and tortuous amending of the nation's labor laws.
The "peace process" seems like an easier undertaking.

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Israel Army Radio Galatz

Radio Waves

Radio in Israel is as ubiquitous as hummus, falafel and politics. During their morning and evening commutes, motorists as well as bus passengers (captive to the listening tastes of their drivers) are likely to be hearing one of seven Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA) affiliated stations or one of two Army Radio outlets. The airwaves are further cluttered (or enriched, depending on one's viewpoint) by almost two dozen other stations catering to varied tastes from Tel Aviv chic to ethnic Mizrahi. This diverse menu of regional, musical, programmatic and language options does not include Arutz-7, whose broadcasts of news, talk and religious music, aimed primarily at residents of Judea and Samaria, have been restricted by government regulators to the Internet.

IBA public broadcasting is supported by a mandatory license fee bolstered by commercial advertising; Army Radio is funded out of the Defense Ministry budget though also complemented by ads. While both networks have come in for criticism over their perceived liberal bias the complaints against Army Radio seem – as we shall see – more egregious.

In May, Israel's cabinet extended Army Radio's right to sell advertising without which it would have been forced to gut its broadcast schedule. Only, however, after Defense Minister Ehud Barak was directed to come up with the beginnings of an oversight plan and to find a new station director. For now, there is no public oversight whatsoever. In fact, the only leverage elected officials presently have over Army Radio is to threaten its right to sell commercial airtime.

Army Radio (known by the Hebrew acronym GALATZ which stands for Galei Tzahal or "IDF waves") was founded in 1951 aimed at conscripts and reservists. The schedule was expanded and a much wider audience sought after the 1967 Six Day War. Broadcasting primarily from Jaffa, the station (like its IBA counterpart) begins its broadcast day with a nod to Jewish civilizational values: IBA starts with a superbly done vintage recording of "Here O, Israel" (Deuteronomy Chapter 6:4-9) while Army Radio currently opens with a three-minute reading from Ethics of Our Fathers.

GALATZ maintains its own independent news operation – it is by no means the voice of the army – in addition to offering current events, economics, music and cultural programming, it is also a platform for Open University academic lectures.

But it is mostly known for its three back-to-back A.M. programs, Boker Tov Israel, Nachon L'HaBoker, hosted by Niv Raskin and Ma Bo'er? with Razi Barkei. Together, they help to reinforce or frame the political and news agenda for the day. These on-air personalities, as well as noontime magazine host Yael Dayan and evening drive time anchor Yaron Wilinski are all civilians though field reporters, technicians, some producers and most off-hours news readers are uniformed recruits. Indeed, many of Israel's best known media personalities got their professional start at Army Radio.
GALGALATZ, GALATZ's enormously popular sister station, was established in 1993. Targeted at a younger, trendier, audience -- soldiers SMS requests for the latest Western and Hebrew pop music -- the station is also known for streaming traffic reports and public service announcements promoting safe driving.

As for its liberal slant, GALATZ is arguably no worse than any other Israeli radio or television outlet except for the fact that it is, after all, "the home of the soldiers" which might imply bipartisanship. However, according to Dror Eydar, a columnist for the centrist tabloid Israel HaYom, the bias is endemic; manifested by the choice of topics debated, questions asked, semantics employed and interviewees invited.
Even news bulletins are occasionally slanted. For instance, in February 2011, the headlines on two different mornings led with criticisms leveled against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman – as if the views of this inveterate Netanyahu critic were somehow remarkable. Nor has it been uncommon for Army Radio to invite, day-after-day, the same panel of advocacy journalists from Haaretz to provide their analysis of the news. Recently, when the European-funded pressure group "Peace Now" hawked as scandalous a government decision to construct apartments beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines, though well inside metropolitan Jerusalem, GALATZ presenter Micah Friedman framed the issue thusly: “Will the American government soon have a thousand and four hundred new reasons for tension with Israel?” One quantitative study that examined Army Radio bias found that for every right-wing voice aired, there were 1.3 left-wing voices; for every minute allocated right-wing ideas, leftist ideas were allocated 1.37 minutes.

It's not just right-wingers who are uncomfortable with Army Radio's partisanship. Amit Segal, an Army Radio "graduate" now with Channel 2 commercial television news, wondered how GALATZ became so out of touch with the Israeli consensus. And Yediot Aharonot's Nahum Barnea, doyen of liberal tabloid columnists, while lauding the station's "quality programming" in a recent (July 1) Friday piece, argued that GALATZ's connection to the army seemed "anachronistic." You don't have to be a rightist, Barnea granted, to concede that providing Hamas spokesman with freedom of expression in the midst of the Gaza war was "problematic." If nothing else, Barnea concluded, broadcasting enemy views "confuses" IDF soldiers on the battlefield. He also took GALATZ to task for cultivating a journalistic culture that left recruits assigned to the station largely cut-off from the reality under which the rest of the army operates.

Barnea's criticism demolished the notion that discontent with Army Radio is a right-wing affair, but his solution -- delinking the station from the defense establishment – would not necessarily result in a more politically balanced broadcast band. Instead, why not insist that public broadcasting aim for bipartisanship? A properly regulated GALATZ could yet promote societal cohesion, give voice to mainstream Israeli values, while taking care to provide expression for minority views at both ends of the political spectrum.

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Altalena, Irgun and Ben-Gurion --

Ships, their comings and goings, have lately been a fixation over at Israel's flagship left-wing (sporadically post-Zionist) Haaretz newspaper. Adding a new twist to what it means to be "embedded" with the enemy, one of the paper's stable of advocacy journalists, Amira Hass, has been writing adoringly about hooking-up with a pro-Palestinian flotilla that intends to smash Israel's naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

No less earnestly, the paper's front pages have been devoted to beating back challenges to the left's narrative about how the Irgun arms ship Altalena came to be sunk off the coast of Tel-Aviv 63 years ago this month (June 21, 1948) on orders from David Ben-Gurion. Haaretz has been incensed, too, by an Israel Defense Ministry reference to the fallen Irgun members as having been "murdered."

Now, historian Jerold S. Auerbach, author of Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel (2009) has further undermined the leftist canon with Brothers At War, a succinct, emotive, and levelheaded summation of the Altalena tragedy.

Auerbach frames his Altalena account in terms of what he sees as Israel's ongoing identity struggle – "Jewish state, secular state, democratic state, democratic Jewish state, state of the Jewish people" – and the constraints this lack of clarity places on the legitimacy of massively consequential government decisions.

He asserts that this conundrum actually has ancient origins traceable to Josephus whose laments about the "seditious temper" of the Jewish people erroneously framed history's understanding of Rome's victory over the Jews for the past 2,000 years. In modern times, this dilemma manifested itself in the Altalena; in the 1952 Knesset clash over whether to accept German government reparations for the Holocaust; in the 1993 Oslo Accords, and has yet to find resolution notwithstanding the dreadful assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

It persists still over whether left-wing IDF reservists should be required to serve over the Green Line and whether right-wing Orthodox conscripts ought to be required, contrary to the wishes of their rabbis, to obey orders to dismantle unsanctioned West Bank outposts.

Put another way: Is the bigger threat to the Jewish commonwealth zealous Jews who reject disputed governmental decisions on divisive issues or the chronic failure of successive Israeli governments to foster consensus positions?

Where to begin the telling of Altalena calamity? Auerbach reasonably starts by differentiating the two Zionist camps; one led by Ben-Gurion which controlled Zionist officialdom and was inspired by a Jewish national renewal rooted in notions of socialist utopia; the other motivated by Ze'ev Jabotinsky and carried forth by his disciple Menachem Begin whose vision was one of a society based on middle-class entrepreneurial values. Long before the Altalena, Auerbach points out, there was a record of bad blood between the two camps exacerbated by the mysterious murder of Chaim Arlosoroff, bitter disputes over whether and how to confront the heartless British policy of closing the gates of Palestine prior to and during the Holocaust and over how best to respond to Arab brutality against Palestinian Jewry in the years before Israel's independence.

The Altalena (Jabotinsky's pen name) was purchased in America by Irgun operatives and, ultimately, loaded at Marseilles, France with desperately needed weapons and munitions along with a "melting pot" of 940 recruits for the nascent Hebrew fighting force in Palestine. As far as its American Jewish captain knew, his mission had the "acquiescence of the Israeli government."

Begin had indeed been negotiating directly with Ben-Gurion's man, Israel Galili, over how to disburse the ships weapons and troops. The Altalena's mission was unfortunately tracked from the start by various intelligence agencies and its secrecy blatantly exposed in a BBC news broadcast.

A series of disastrous miscommunications, logistical blunders and lack of internal Irgun discipline led to the ship's arrival seemingly at the wrong place and at the wrong time while the Begin-Galili talks were still in progress. In fact, Auerbach writes, Galili informed Begin on June 16: "We [i.e. Ben-Gurion] agree to the arrival of the vessel. As quickly as possible." And in his diary entry that day Ben-Gurion wrote: "Tomorrow or the next day their ship is due to arrive." So it was Ben-Gurion himself who ordered the ship to land at Kfar Vitkin (near Netanya) to avoid UN aerial surveillance.

As the Begin-Galili talks proceeded, some of the weapons and almost all of the personnel on board were unloaded near Netanya. By then, Ben-Gurion had allowed himself to be convinced that Begin was planning a putsch against his authority even as the Irgun leader – perhaps naively – felt certain the weapons negotiations would succeed in the fullness of time. But there was no time. Ben-Gurion edgily ordered the Haganah (now the IDF) to start shooting. Six Irgun men and two soldiers were killed before the ship fled Netanya south and ran aground off the Tel Aviv coast not far from Palmach headquarters!

Ben-Gurion insisted on unconditional surrender or else. Yitzhak Rabin, age 26, was appointed on the spot to command the beach fighting. When the Altalena crew hesitated perhaps because of poor communications with Irgun headquarters, Palmach commanders ordered an all out attack on the ship. Even though the crew raised a white flag, Rabin's snipers continued to pick off targets bobbing in the waters. Begin, who had earlier boarded the ship expecting a deal with Galili, barely escaped with his life. The ship went down along with 300 Bren guns, 500 anti-tank guns, 1,000 grenades and millions of bullets that could have been used during the War of Independence.

Auerbach's conclusion, citing historian Ehud Sprinzak, was that there had been no "mutiny on the right" no intention to defy the legitimate authority of the land and certainly no intention by Begin to challenge Ben-Gurion militarily with a putsch. Begin had only wanted enough men and guns earmarked to carry on the fight for Jerusalem's Old City (which Ben-Gurion had abandoned) and thought he had Galili's tacit approval.

Begin abhorred the idea of a Jewish civil war and ultimately, swallowing his pride, ordered his Irgun men into the IDF on September 20, 1948. It was Ben-Gurion's "quasi-totalitarian" personality that led the socialist leader to "a reprehensible abuse of state power," as Begin later plausibly asserted.

Auerbach's sensitive re-telling of this tragic chapter in Israel's early history concludes with the unhappy, though sadly correct, assertion that Israel's "problem of legitimacy" remains unresolved.

How can Israeli decision makers emphatically steer clear of future Altalena's in implementing wrenching policies that have monumental consequences for the country's survival and character? Auerbach argues simply that they can't. In connection with dismantling settlements, my reading is that he believes the right to disobey orders is scared.
Yet surely for most Israelis, in the unlikely event that a Palestinian leadership emerges ready to make genuine peace, the legitimacy of the deal could be appreciably bolstered and the moral justification of violent disobedience diminished by some combination of Knesset vote plus national referendum.

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Druse (Druze) in the Arab-Israel Context

A Druse physician from the Golan Heights, who works at an Israeli hospital, was one of 24 members of his community arrested for pummeling IDF troops with rocks during so-called Naksa Day protests. Just a few miles south in Daliyat El-Carmel, located on the slopes of Mt. Carmel, the Israeli Druse community is planning a memorial museum that will tell the stories of the 400 Druse soldiers who fell in defense of the State of Israel. In Lebanon, meanwhile, the Druse leadership has become an essential constituent in the Hezbollah-dominated government.

Just where do Druse loyalties lay?

An understanding of their history can help answer that question. The Druse are a breakaway stream of the Ismaili strain of Shi'ite Islam, followers of an ascetic Egyptian ruler named Al-Hakim (996-1021) in whom they see manifestations of the divine. (Al-Hakim was a descendant of Muhammad's son-in-law Ali revered by the Shi'ites.) Influenced in part by Greek ideas, Al-Hakim's persecuted followers broke away from orthodox Islam and eventually coalesced in the mountainous regions of Lebanon, Syria and Israel awaiting his messianic return and salvation (reincarnation being fundamental to their dogma).

Druse keep their religious practices mostly mysterious. Unlike Muslims, Druse Arabs do not observe Ramadan nor make pilgrimages to Mecca and do not proselytize. They venerate Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses as a main prophet. Marrying-out is considered an unforgivable breach of communal solidarity. Indeed, strong ethnic identity, martial skills and mutual aid are part of the Druse canon. Today, there are perhaps 2.5 million Druse living mostly in Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel with smaller communities dispersed as far away as North America and Australia.

In predominantly Sunni Syria, the Druse are mostly concentrated in the southwest abutting Jordan and between Aleppo and Antioch in the north-west. They comprise perhaps four percent of the population. After the First World War with the arrival of the French, the Druse were encouraged to maintain their own autonomous region. Druse attitudes toward the French were conflicted though the community ultimately embraced emergent Arab nationalism.
Syrian independence in 1946 was accompanied by long decades of political convulsions. During the early 1950s for instance, Adib ibn Hasan Shishakli, the military dictator, pursued a Syrian nationalist line yet violently persecuted the Druse whom he perceived as a threat. Shishakli's overthrow paved the way for yet more turmoil during which factions within the Ba'ath Party competed violently for control.

By the time Hafez al-Assad (Basher's father) took power in 1970, the Druse had been purged from positions of influence in the party, army and security services. However, the Assad dynasty, itself rooted in the Alawite minority, relied on the Druse, and true to form, the Druse displayed remarkable loyalty to the regime. In recent years Bashar may have become more distant from them, perhaps because he wanted to draw closer to the Sunni majority, according to Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University. Druse fidelity has begun to crack only as anti-Assad demonstrations have gained inexorable momentum and security forces have targeted the Druse. Kedar speculates that if Syria does disintegrate, the Druse could seek to restore their earlier autonomy.

Watching from the other side of the border, Israeli Druse parliamentarian, Deputy Galilee and Negev Development Minister Ayoub Kara (Likud) has tried to muster Jerusalem's support for some kind of intervention on behalf of the Syrian opposition only to be rebuffed. Lately, he's turned to the Turkish authorities asking to be allowed to lead an Israeli aid mission to the Turkish-Syrian border.

On the Golan Heights, a very small number of Druse accepted Israeli citizenship when the Knesset applied Israeli law to the territory in 1981, while most remained loyal to the Assad regime. On the whole, though some Druse have been arrested for spying for Syria, most have simply sought not to fall afoul of either Jerusalem or Damascus knowing that control of the Heights could flip in any peace deal. Israel has been generally sensitive to the Druse predicament. In mid-February, for instance, 12,000 tons of apples grown by Druse farmers near Majdal Shams were exported to Syria despite the de facto state of war between the two countries. At the start of the anti-government protests in Syria, some Golan residents demonstrated in support of Assad. But as the demonstrations gained traction more Golan Druse have turned against Assad and expressed solidarity for the opposition.

The Druse need to coldly calibrate their alliances is nowhere more pronounced than in the failed state of Lebanon. There's been no verifiable census there in decades, but there are believed to be hundreds of thousands of Druse in Lebanon with a stronghold in the Chouf Mountains. After his father Kamal was assassinated (in all likelihood by the Assads), Druse leader Walid Jumblat actually drew closer to Syria. Over the years he has switched sides intermittently most recently in March 2010. Nowadays he backs Lebanon's new hegemon, the Shi'ite Islamist movement Hezbollah, clients of the Assad dynasty though ultimately beholden to Iran.

Emphasizing his Arab credentials, Jumblat has aligned the Druse with Arab "leftists" -- essentially nationalist secularists – through his Progressive Socialist Party. His anti-Israel rhetoric has been unwavering. The Druse have been sympathetic to the Palestinian Arabs, permanent "refugees" in Lebanon, and have advocated for them being granted the right to own property. This has not guaranteed the Druse immunity from attack by uncompromising Palestinian Islamists.

All the same, earlier this month Jumblat lauded the Golan Druse who collaborated in Syrian-inspired Palestinian efforts to storm across the Golan boundary with Israel. He has long urged his coreligionists in Israel not to serve in the IDF. Yet as the Assad regime wobbles, possibly weakening Hezbollah, the Lebanese Druse are becoming more assertive. A Druse member of the Hezbollah-dominated new cabinet recently resigned to protest the dearth of patronage posts allocated to his community.

Which brings us back to the 127,000-strong, overwhelmingly loyal, Druse citizens of Israel. Their young men have long been conscripted into the army where many have served with distinction. A Druse journalist, Rafik Halabi, was news director for Israel's Channel 1 during the 1990s. By 2001 a Druse had been named to Israel's cabinet (by Ariel Sharon). Patronage delivered by the Likud to the Druse town of Daliat el-Carmel has encouraged many locals to join the party. However, the acculturation process has not been effortless. Since many Druse schools teach the sciences in Arabic, Israel’s education ministry has been trying to encourage a shift to Hebrew so that graduates can better integrate into Israeli higher education. The Netanyahu has (belatedly) budgeted substantial sums for the socio-economic developing of the community. Efforts are also underway to prepare Druse young people for jobs in Israel's hi-tech sector.

This is not to suggest that Israel could not do much more to reward Druse loyalty or demonstrate greater cultural sensitivity. Earlier this year, the government defused simmering tensions by reaching a compensation deal with Druse landowners whose properties had been confiscated for a planned natural gas pipeline.

The seemingly Machiavellian character of Druse loyalties reflects what it means to be a minority people in a mostly intolerant Muslim Middle East. Just as the Druse have found it strategically prudent to concentrate mostly on high ground away from urban areas, their political strategy toward outside powers has been one of "adaptability and fluidity" according to the University of Haifa's Gabriel Ben-Dor. The Druse prefer to be loyal to the country in which they reside. At the same time, their survival depends on a knack for aligning with what Lee Smith has called the Strong Horse, offering an artful political barometer for gauging the ever-shifting balance of power in the region.

Does Israel's Labor Party Still Live?

Laboring On

Whatever became of Israel's Labor Party some five months after its leader Defense Minister Ehud Barak abruptly quit to establish his breakaway Atzmaut (Independence) Knesset faction?

Wracked by infighting, fuming over being tethered to the diplomatic policies of the Netanyahu government, and headed by one of the least popular politicians on the scene, the once-dominant Labor Party seemed moribund. Barak had surprised colleagues in January 2010 by pulling out before they could oust him; taking along four comparatively right-leaning loyalists. Barak got to retain his cabinet seat while Labor ministers Yitzhak Herzog, Avishay Braverman and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer had no choice but to go into the opposition. In 2006, Labor lost several luminaries including Shimon Peres, Haim Ramon and Dalia Itzik to Kadima.

Now, tabloid pundits were quick to write Labor's obituary. Yediot's Nahum Barnea, doyen of left-leaning columnists, said the party had actually "died" during Barak's short failed term as prime minister in 2000 but had only now been buried. His colleague Sima Kadmon wrote that "the public doesn't believe the Labor Party can be revived." The perennially caustic Ben Caspit at Ma'ariv adjudged Labor to be "a pile of rubble." Barak had dealt Labor "the final blow" wrote another anti-Netanyahu Ma'ariv columnist Shalom Yerushalmi.

These writers had captured the popular sentiment: A poll in Yediot the day after Barak's exit found 53% of Israeli voters thought it heralded "the end of the Labor Party." Yet even then there was a glimmer of hope: the same poll revealed that Labor would manage to retain 8 of its 13 Knesset seats were immediate elections held.

Forecasts of Labor's demise appear to have been exaggerated. Since Barak's leaving the party brought back former general-secretary Micha Harish to be its temporary chairman and tasked him with overseeing Labor's revival. Tens of thousands of new members have been recruited as part of a dynamic race on for the party's leadership. David Ben-Gurion's grandchildren, Orit Etzioni and Moshe Ben-Eliezer, have publicly invested in the movement he once led. Even rudderless, recent polls continue to show the party capturing at least eight seats.

Of course, how Labor will ultimately fare in national elections (expected before 2013 when the current Knesset's term expires) will depend on what position it stakes out on the political spectrum and that, in term, very much depends on who becomes the party's new leader. The field includes MK Isaac Herzog, son of Israel's sixth president Chaim Herzog; MK Shelly Yachimovich, a former left-oriented journalist; Amram Mitzna, a rehabilitated previous party leader; millionaire entrepreneur Erel Margalit; MK Amir Peretz, another renewed former party leader and Shlomo Buhbut, a local government politician.
Labor is hardly likely to ever again become a ruling party. One reason is that its leaders and functionaries continue to shill for Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas in promoting the message that no diplomatic progress can be made because of the Netanyahu government, and not – as most Israelis believe – through any fault of the Palestinian Arabs.

Each of the leadership contenders claimed to have signed-up thousands of new members ostensibly pledged to vote for them in the September 12th party primary and subsequent run-off contest. By that yardstick, Peretz claims to have brought in the most signatures followed by Herzog and Yachimovich. Assuming the petition claims are true, Labor's membership base could emerge as the second biggest behind Likud.

With a leader – Mitzna, Herzog, Yachimovich or Perez – preliminary polling suggests that Labor could, at least hypothetically, capture 17-19 mandates. Yet when the dust settles much depends on whether the party, which still defines itself as social-democratic, can be positioned at least within shouting distance of the center-left enabling it to pick up votes from Kadima. That will not be easy.

Mitzna says outright that he's returned to politics to mobilize the "peace camp." Perez professes that he would not require the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state; Yachimovich prefers to take vague stands on security issues and to focus instead on promoting greater government involvement in the economy. Margalit supports an interim Palestinian state now along the parameters of the security barrier. Herzog has been arguably more judicious while still calling for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. All these positions are essentially out of kilter with public sentiment.

So while the obituaries were premature, for Labor to avoid being permanently relegated to the margins of party politics alongside Meretz whoever wins its September primary would be wise to navigate toward Israel's post-Oslo center.
As for Barak's new party, were elections held today, Atzmaut would not to cross the electoral threshold.

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