Party leaders have persuaded Haim Oron to take up the challenge of leading the shrinking left-wing movement out of the doldrums

The rumpled, gray-haired men arriving at former Meretz leader Shulamit Aloni's home in up market Kfar Shmaryahu could have been picked out of a who's who of Israel's left-wing intelligentsia. They included luminaries like political gurus Elazar Granot and Yair Tsaban, academics Nissim Calderon and Dan Jacobson and novelist Amos Oz.

The late November meeting of these eminent Meretz elder statesmen had been called to urge veteran Knesset Member Haim "Jumess" Oron, 67, to run for the dovish party's leadership. Tsaban told the story of how Granot, then leader of the small left-wing Mapam party, had handed him the No. 1 spot on its 1988 Knesset slate because polls showed the party would do better with Tsaban at the helm.

Oron, a gangly, highly respected but low-key kibbutznik, who had never sought the leadership, would need the same kind of "the-party- needs-you" persuading. Despite fairly advanced plans to retire from politics, Oron mulled over the request-cum-fiat for a few days and in early December announced his candidacy. That meant that four of the party's five Knesset members - Yossi Beilin, the incumbent, Ran Cohen, Zahava Gal-On and Oron - would be running against each other in leadership primaries scheduled for next March. It also meant that Beilin would have no chance of winning, and soon afterwards he announced his withdrawal from the race.

The Meretz old guard had rallied out of a sense of crisis. The breakdown of the Oslo peace process, the second Palestinian intifada and the "big bang" in Israeli politics which spawned a governing centrist alliance between left-leaning Labor and right-tending Kadima had all hurt Meretz. And the old guard did not believe that Beilin was the man to reverse the trend. The party, which garnered 12 Knesset seats in 1992, won only five under his leadership in 2006 and has been languishing in uninspired opposition ever since.

In appealing to Oron, the elders made a two-pronged argument: Without stronger leadership, Meretz could easily become defunct; on the other hand, recent developments, failure of the Kadima-Labor coalition to make the most of new peace prospects with the Palestinians or to deal with pressing socioeconomic issues like health, education and fairer distribution of wealth have opened up new opportunities for a peace and social justice-oriented party like Meretz.

Meretz leaders argue that, although the party is small, its issues are huge: peace with Israel's neighbors, the nature of Israeli democracy, reconciling economic prosperity with social justice, religion and state, independence of the Supreme Court. Whether Israel moves towards or away from the party's liberal vision will have a major impact on the country's future, they say. Aloni maintains that a Meretz revival is crucial now because its larger sister party, Labor, under former prime minister Ehud Barak, is rapidly moving away from once-shared humanistic and egalitarian ideals. "Barak is one of the most dangerous people in Israel today," she charges. "He is pulling Labor to the right, which makes Meretz very, very important."

But can an election, a new leader and a sharper agenda revive Meretz's flagging fortunes? Or to put it more bluntly: Is there still place for a dovish social democratic party in a 21st century Israel driven by a privatizing economy and facing implacable foes like Hamas, Hizballah and Iran? Has Meretz run its historic course or are its best years yet to come?

Meretz was founded in 1992 through a three-way union of Aloni's Citizens' Rights Movement called Ratz, the left-wing, socialist Mapam and the free-market, anti-corruption Shinui. Under Aloni's leadership, it emerged from the 1992 elections as the third largest party in the Knesset with 12 seats. It had four cabinet ministers in the 1992 Rabin government and played an influential role in peacemaking, civil legislation and educational reform. "Without Meretz, the Rabin government would never have been formed. And the rest is history," says Oron.

From then on, however, the party found itself on a mainly downward curve. In the 1996 elections, Meretz won only nine seats, and Yossi Sarid ousted Aloni as leader. In 1999, with ten seats, it joined a Labor-led coalition under Ehud Barak but was tainted along with Barak by the failure of his peacemaking efforts and the ensuing violent intifada. In 2003, after two years of suicide bombings, Meretz mustered just six seats and Sarid resigned as leader. Under Beilin in 2006, the tally was down to five. Worse: Where Meretz had over 40,000 registered members in 1999, the current membership numbers just 14,000.

From the outset, Beilin had been beset with leadership problems. Architect of the Oslo peace process, he is widely perceived in Meretz as a supremely talented political thinker, but not cut out to be No. 1. "Beilin is very smart, but not every smart person is capable of being a party leader," says Aloni. The day after the 2006 election, there were already calls for his resignation. Since then he has soldiered on under a continuous barrage of criticism from party activists including would-be successors like Cohen and Gal- On. Both fault him for failing to galvanize and lead public opposition to last year's second Lebanon War. "On the first day of the war, instead of standing firm against it as leader of the peace camp, he called for an attack on Syria," Cohen recalls. "I was there in the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Security Committee when he did it, and I almost had an apoplectic fit."

Beilin, an outsider who only joined Meretz after leaving Labor in 2003, could hardly have made a bigger internal party blunder. "Meretz," says Gal-On, "should have slammed the war from day one and demanded Olmert's ouster in its aftermath without waiting for Winograd or any other commission." She maintains that Meretz held back, initially because it was afraid that toppling Olmert might bring the Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu to power, and then because it thought the prime minister might be about to cut a deal with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas. "And because we failed to demand Olmert's ouster and actually protected him even after the corruption scandals surfaced, we lost our relevance as an opposition party," she declares.

Beilin, 59, author of 12 books, has invariably been a politician ahead of his time. He launched the Oslo process before talks with the PLO were legal, secured an agreement with Abbas in 1995, played a leading role in the 2003 Geneva model peace deal with the Palestinians and, on becoming Meretz leader in 2004, advocated negotiations towards a final peace deal with the Palestinians even if it couldn't be immediately implemented - precisely the formula adopted in the current Annapolis process.

Ironically, his preoccupation with peacemaking proved to be his Achilles heel in the peace party. Colleagues accuse him of showing little interest in socioeconomic issues, which people like Cohen say should now be at the forefront of the Meretz agenda. Beilin, the critics say, seems to accentuate the dissonance between Meretz's effete Ashkenazi image and its wider working-class goals. "He does not instill confidence in anyone who needs to improve earning, pension, health or education standards," says Cohen.

But there are deeper reasons for Meretz's decline than Beilin's perceived leadership deficiencies. Meretz was struck a crippling double blow on the peace front: first by discreditation of the peace process on the grounds that there was no Palestinian partner; and then, ironically, by the fact that its peace agenda, two states for two peoples, was almost universally adopted, leaving Meretz with no special peace message.

Meretz also lost ground to trendy one-issue parties like Shinui in its anti-haredi reincarnation in 1999 and 2003 and to the Pensioners in 2006. It also lost out in successive elections to Labor led by Meretz-like doves with strong socioeconomic credentials: Amram Mitzna in 2003 and Amir Peretz in 2006. In both cases, even hard-core Meretz activists crossed over to the larger party in the hope of making it strong enough to form a government. It failed both times, and both leadership doves were soon ousted. "Meretz has lost out time and again to transient shooting stars," says Meretz legislator Avshalom Vilan, the party's only Knesset member not to challenge Beilin for the leadership.

Tsaban, who in the late 1990s and early 2000s was chairman of Meretz's "Strategy Team," which analyzes election results and public support, offers a sociological explanation for the party's decline: Over the past decade, he observes, it lost large numbers of well- intentioned middle-class do-gooders. In the early 1990s, Tsaban says middle-class people felt secure enough to vote for a party dedicated to working-class goals. But when the staunchly capitalist policies of the last few governments started to hurt them, they became less generous and tended to look out for themselves. "One of the big mistakes Meretz made then was that it did not take aboard the two issues that join the weaker and the middle classes in the most natural and significant way: health and education. And I think this is what we should now," he avers.

The consensus in Meretz is that given the changing political landscape, the party will be well-advised to highlight its socioeconomic platform. A few years ago, Tsaban gathered a team of experts to produce a workable model for a modern, economically viable welfare state for Israel. He believes that something along these lines - presented as the ultimate alternative to today's uncaring society with its wide gaps in income and dysfunctional social services - could become Meretz's new calling card.

All three candidates for party leader agree. Oron, candidate of the party elders and the kibbutzim, can boast a long record of socioeconomic action. In two decades of Knesset activity, he has been involved in legislation initiatives on national health insurance, capping wages in the public sector, women's representation on boards of directors and rights for the disabled. He has also been at the forefront of battles in the Knesset's Finance Committee against cuts in government spending on public services.

Born in Givatayim near Tel Aviv in 1940, Oron served as a paratrooper before joining Kibbutz Lahav in the Negev. In 1964 he became secretary of Hashomer Hatzair youth movement and in 1968 secretary of Hakibbutz Ha'artzi, the Mapam kibbutz roof organization. One of the founders of Peace Now in 1978, he was elected to the Knesset on the Mapam slate in 1988, and then on the newly-founded Meretz ticket in 1992. Treasurer of the Histadrut Trade Union in the mid-1990s, he served as agriculture minister in Barak's government from June 1999 to June 2000. He was active in the framing of the Geneva Initiative in 2003, and this year, through meetings with imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, members of Abbas's close circle and Israeli government ministers, Oron was instrumental in creating conditions for the Annapolis process.

Sarid, who also backs Oron's candidacy, describes him as "serious, smart and thorough," and says he tends "to become an authority on anything he deals with."

Oron is convinced Meretz will bounce back strongly, mainly because of voter volatility on the center-left. He believes it can pick up votes from Labor, Kadima, the Pensioners, the disaffected and young first-time voters. "I don't think voters on the center- left are in closed boxes. The hard-core support for each one of the parties is much smaller than it used to be and there are huge groups of floating voters we can target," he says.

If he becomes leader, Oron says he intends to create a strong leadership team to help pull in the votes. "It's not a one-man show, and I believe that one of the leader's biggest tasks is to unify groups of people around him," he says.

The strongest challenge to Oron is expected to come from Cohen, the Meretz Knesset member most identified with social legislation. Born in Baghdad in 1937, he made aliya in 1950, grew up on the left- wing Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, became a colonel in the paratroops and now lives in Mevasseret Yerushalayim, an upper middle-class neighborhood outside Jerusalem. First elected to the Knesset in 1984 as a member of Aloni's Ratz, Cohen has pushed through key legislation on public housing, enabling renters to become owners, and was instrumental in passing a law setting a minimum wage. He says Meretz should focus on social and human rights and environmental issues. In March 2004, Cohen ran against Beilin for the leadership, losing narrowly by 47 percent to 53 percent. Beilin's victory was achieved largely through kibbutz support secured for him by his close friend Oron. Now, following the elders' co-option and endorsement of Oron, Cohen, who was the front-runner, is almost certain to lose again to the same forces.

"The opposition to my election derives from the fact that I don't belong to the conservative cream of the left that always tries to look pretty. They are afraid I might bring in groups they have never dreamed of, like Sephardim and inhabitants of the periphery," he fumed in the media. Accused of playing the ethnic card, Cohen retorts that he was not saying the party's Ashkenazi elites oppose him because he is Sephardi; rather, he was making a general class point, not a personal ethnic one. "I said there are elites, and I meant especially Shulamit Aloni, who don't like the idea of Meretz being open to wide socio-economic groups that were never connected to the party before. And I can connect them. I mean the periphery, the Sephardim, the Arabs, new immigrants, all of them. And they could introduce a fresh spirit, which some in the elites are afraid of," he maintains. Indeed, Cohen argues that is precisely his strong suit, the best reason why he should be leader. ""I am the only one who can dramatically broaden Meretz's voter base in this way," he says.

Gal-On counters that her special advantage as a candidate is that she is a woman. "We should have a woman as leader," she says. "There is a trend now in world politics, Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Angela Merkel in Germany, Hillary Clinton in the U.S., Segolene Royal in France. If we want to attract voters, we need to project that kind of trendiness."

Born in the U.S.S.R. in 1956, Gal-On came to Israel at the age of 4. Outspoken on a wide range of issues, she has been particularly active on women's issues, and chaired a parliamentary commission of inquiry on the trafficking of women.

She says Meretz's best hope of survival is to be fresh and exciting enough to bring back the young, once its most significant support base. "If we want to be relevant and to differentiate ourselves from Labor and to increase the left-bloc vote, we need to be relevant for young people and learn to speak their language," she says. And of all the candidates, she argues that she is the only one who can genuinely do that. "If I become leader, Meretz will again become a fresh, youthful party, constantly renewing itself," she promises.

Gal-On denies rumors that if she loses, she might leave Meretz and form a civil rights party of her own. She confirms that feasibility tests have been made, but insists that she will stay no matter what. "I am staying on in Meretz because I want to make it less conservative and more relevant in our battle for survival," she declares.

Meretz, however, faces another major pitfall in its existential struggle: loss of identity through a forced merger with Labor. All three candidates are adamantly opposed to any kind of union with Labor, but proposed legislation that would make the leader of the largest party automatically prime minister could force the new Meretz chief's hand.

Barak has already been putting out tentative feelers on forming a large left-wing electoral bloc in case the electoral law is changed. For now, all the Meretz candidates say they will fight the proposed amendment tooth and nail. "The whole idea of the prime minister coming automatically from the largest party is to put an end to parties like Meretz and, with all due respect, I don't think we have to volunteer to tie the noose round our own necks," says Oron.

The party elders who met at Aloni's home seem sure to get their way on the leader. Their, and Beilin's subsequent, endorsement of Oron have given him a significant advantage. Indeed, to many in Meretz the result of the leadership primary seems a foregone conclusion. Of the 14,000 registered party members, around 4,000 are kibbutzniks, who will almost certainly tip the scales in Oron's favor. But will the choice of a new leader, as capable as he, or she, might be, be enough to save Meretz from extinction and carve out a more secure political niche for the liberal peace party?

The battle, the Meretz elders would say, is for Israel's soul.

Copyright (c) 2008. The Jerusalem Report)