Slir

ROOTS

ter Shimon Peres to Mr. Rabin
before the last national election.)
He's also been a self-styled can-
didate for prime minister in the
"post-Rabin era," as a suitable
counterweight to the mediagenic,
quick-witted, and glib Bibi Ne-
tanyahu of the Likud. (Indeed, a
Labor poll has shown Mr. Ramon
commanding almost a third of the
party's support to succeed Mr.
Rabin, twice as much as any oth-
er potential contender).
What's more, far from being
identified with the Histadrut, for
the past two years Mr. Ramon
has been Labor's most outspoken
critic of its lethargic, top-heavy
bureaucracy — which sometimes
has difficulty deciding whether
its prime role is as trade union or
employer (the Histadrut owns a
number of Israel's largest com-
panies, in addition to miming its
largest health-care system). On
this score, at least, he's in closer
touch with the times than most
of his Labor colleagues.
His platform, therefore, is not
to weaken the Histadrut as a
trade union (as the Likud and its
allies would) but to curb waste
and guarantee a more effective
distribution of its resources by
streamlining it. That proposition
has great appeal not just to La-
bor's present constituency (whose
medical and pension plans are,
for structural reasons, still large-
ly controlled by the Histadrut),
but to blue-collar workers as well.

A labor poll shows
Ramon has a
commanding lead in
the race to
succeed Rabin.

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So far, according to the dictates
of conventional wisdom, Mr. Ra-
mon has done everything wrong.
First he resigned his post as min-
ister, which has never been a way
to get ahead in Israeli politics.
Then he defied the Labor Party
(which proved to be the ruin even
of David Ben-Gurion in his day).
Yet so far the results have been
spectacular. On Sunday, for ex-
ample, Mr. Ramon heaped hu-
miliation on no less a luminary
than Mr. Rabin himself by win-
ning the Mapam Party (the last
vestige of Israel's socialist move-
ment, an old Labor ally, and now
one of the components of Meretz)
over to his list.
In short, over the past two
weeks, Mr. Ramon has done
more damage to the Labor Party
than the opposition has in the
past two years. He's also
wreaked havoc with the political
map in general. Labor and
Meretz, the two partners in the

UNDERMINED page 56

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