For the first 30 years of Israeli statehood, the moderate Labour Party, under various names, governed the country. Since then, Labour has declined gradually, battling for power against the hawkish Likud. But yesterday, Labour reached rock bottom, when its elections to find a new leader descended into farce.
Fewer than 60,000 party members had bothered to turn out to vote on Tuesday - less than half of a pitifully low national membership of 117,000. When the totals were tabulated yesterday, it turned out that they had cast their votes in an almost even split between the Speaker of the Parliament, the 46-year-old Mr Avraham Burg, and the Minister of Defence, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer (65).
Mr Burg, who had seen a convincing lead in the polls reeled in by his rival over recent weeks, claimed victory by a margin of about 1,000 votes. Mr Ben-Eliezer cried foul, alleging widespread voting irregularities, especially among Labour's Arab voters - where the turnout was relatively high and support for Mr Burg markedly strong. Terming Mr Burg's claim of victory "one of the gravest political scandals in our political history", Mr Ben-Eliezer wailed at a press conference, "This is not South America", and vowed not to concede until there had been a thorough party investigation.
Keeping a lower profile, Mr Burg issued a statement pledging: "All the attempts to distort the voters' decision will be opposed." The irony surrounding this demeaning culmination to a fractious campaign is that taking the job of Labour leader, in today's Israel, is a poisoned chalice. With 23 seats, Labour is the largest single party in the splintered 120-seat Knesset. But that is really a quirk of Israeli electoral law. When Mr Ehud Barak called elections earlier this year, he chose not to disband parliament, but instead held a one-on-one prime ministerial election battle against Mr Ariel Sharon, which Mr Sharon won by a wide margin. Had the electorate been given the opportunity to vote for a new parliament, Labour would have lost many of its seats, opinion polls made clear.
At the root of Labour's decline is the collapse of the Oslo peace process - led initially by the Labour prime minister Mr Yitzhak Rabin and maintained, after Mr Rabin's assassination in 1995, by his Labour successor Mr Shimon Peres. Mr Peres remains Labour's elder statesman and, as Foreign Minister in Mr Sharon's government, is one of the last Israeli champions of a negotiating partnership with the Palestinian Authority's President Yasser Arafat. Much of Labour's electoral base, and even some of its leaders, no longer believe such a partnership is viable. Were general elections to be held today, some relatively hawkish Labour voters would likely switch to Mr Sharon's Likud, the most moderate might switch to the left-wing Meretz party, and Labour would be left with a much depleted constituency.
Of the two bickering would-be leaders, Mr Burg is the clear moderate - a one-time Peace Now activist who is also an unusual Israeli left-winger in that he is an Orthodox Jew; most Orthodox Israelis are associated with the right-wing camp. Mr Ben-Eliezer, whose candidacy was endorsed by Mr Barak, is also committed to far-reaching territorial compromise with the Palestinians - but openly mistrusts Mr Arafat. It was Mr Ben-Eliezer whom Mr Rabin dispatched to meet Mr Arafat before the Oslo process began, to try to gauge the Palestinian leader's credibility. Mr Ben-Eliezer returned to tell Mr Rabin that he believed Mr Arafat was committed to peacemaking. Nowadays, he says he feels betrayed by the Palestinian leader.
Both Mr Burg and Mr Ben-Eliezer have now hired high-powered lawyers to fight their case - in an eerie repeat of the Bush-Gore standoff. The difference, of course, is that they are fighting over an increasingly marginalised party, not the leadership of their nation. And the battle has left members of Mr. Sharon's Likud, watching from the sidelines, wreathed in smiles.
The Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, told Israel yesterday "enough is enough" and urged the US to restrain the Jewish state from attacking Palestinians.
Prince Faisal said "the failure" of the Middle East peace process did not lie with the Arabs. "It lies with the policies of Israel, policies of intimidation, policies of aggression, policies of going back on agreements that were signed, policies of avoiding the responsibilities of peace," he said.