Amir
Peretz
(1952 - )
Amir Peretz (born March 9, 1952) is an Israeli politician and Defense Minister of Israel. He also is the current leader of the Labour Party of Israel. Peretz is the former chairman of the Histadrut trade union federation and defeated Shimon Peres in the primary elections for the Labour leadership in November 9, 2005. He led the Labour Party to a second place showing in the 2006 Israeli elections. He was sworn in as Defense Minister along with the rest of the new Cabinet of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on May 4, 2006.
Early life
Amir Peretz was born as Armand Peretz in the town of Boujad, Morocco. His father was head of the Jewish community in Boujad and owned a petrol station. The family made aliyah (emigrated to Israel) in 1956. They were settled in the development town of Sderot, where Peretz graduated from high school.
He served in the Israel Defense Forces as a matériel officer in the 202nd paratroopers brigade and reached the rank of captain. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Peretz was badly wounded at Mitla Pass. He spent a year in the hospital recuperating. After leaving the hospital, he bought a farm in the village of Nir Akiva. Still in a wheelchair, he began growing vegetables and flowers for export. During this period he met his wife Ahlama and they married. They have four children.
Political career
In 1983, answering a call made by friends, Peretz ran for the office of mayor of the town of Sderot, as candidate of the Israel Labour Party. At only thirty years of age he won a victory which ended a long period of dominance of the town's politics by the right-wing Likud party and the national-religious Mafdal party. It was the first in a series of local councils which passed back to Labour control in the late 1980s. As mayor, he strongly emphasized education and worked to improve previously fractious relations with the kibbutzim in the area.
Histadrut
In 1988 he was elected a member of the Knesset - the Israeli parliament. In 1994, after failing in a previous bid for Histadrut leadership, Peretz joined forces with Haim Ramon to contest control of the then powerful trade union federation. They ran on an independent list against the favoured candidate of then Labour leader Yitzhak Rabin. They won, and Peretz became Ramon's deputy at the Histadrut. This isolated Peretz within the Labour Party. He became chairman of Histadrut in December 1995, when Ramon reentered the cabinet following Rabin's assassination. During his early years at the helm of the Histadrut, Peretz was regarded as a militant firebrand, with an easy hand on the trigger of general strikes. In these years the Israeli economy suffered a high proportion of workday loss due to strikes. Sometimes the pretext for declaring a general strike would be an inopportune statement by the finance minister, as had been the case with Ya'akov Ne'eman in 1996. However, in recent years Peretz has become much more moderate, some would say in a bid to present a more electable face as a future contestant for national office. During the tenure of former finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he was fairly cooperative with the government in a swath of structural and financial reforms which have moved Israel towards a more market-oriented economy. He has remarked that "the most effective strike is the one that didn't occur".
Am Ehad
In 1999 Peretz resigned from the Labour Party to form his own party, Am Ehad ("One Nation"). Am Ehad won two seats in the Knesset in the General Election of 1999, and three in 2003. As Labour's fortunes changed with the Likud Party in government, and Israel's social programmes being dismantled by the market-oriented reforms of finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Peretz became increasingly popular with Israel's working-class. By the start of 2004 he was being talked of as a "white knight who will rescue Labour from oblivion". After protracted negotiations with Shimon Peres and other Labour leaders, Am Ehad merged with Labour in the summer of 2004.
After the merger, Peretz ran for the leadership of the Labour Party on a platform of ending the coalition with Likud, led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and reasserting Labour's traditional socialist policies. Peretz narrowly defeated the incumbent leader and former Prime Minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, in the election on 9 November 2005. Peretz won 42% of the votes as against 40% for Shimon Peres and 17% for former defence minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer. After winning this election, he resigned from his post at Histadrut to focus on the campaign to become the prime minister. In fulfillment of Peretz's pledge to withdraw Labour from the Likud-led coalition government, the party withdrew its support for the government on 11 November and all Labour Party cabinet ministers resigned. This action deprived the government of its majority in the Knesset and resulted in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon calling a new election for March 28, 2006.
Would Labour have won the 2006 election, Amir Peretz would have become the first non-Ashkenazi prime minister in Israel's history. Instead, Labour placed a strong second behind the Kadima Party, led by Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert. Labour agreed to join a coalition government led by Olmert and the Kadima Party. In the negotiations for the formation of the government, Peretz, after attempting to gain the finance ministry, became Defense Minister, replacing Shaul Mofaz (Kadima) in the post. Peretz also received the title of Deputy Prime Minister. On his first day as Defense Minister, Peretz ordered an airstrike with no civilian casualties that killed five members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Views and beliefs
Peretz is strongly committed to social issues and to the strengthening of the welfare state. He has declared that "within two years of taking office I will have eradicated child poverty in Israel". Notwithstanding, he has also reiterated his commitment to a market economy. For his movement in latter years towards "third way" positions, as well as for his earthly and warm personality, Peretz has been compared to Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
In matters concerning relations with the Palestinians and the Arab world, Peretz holds dovish positions. He was an early member of the Peace Now movement. He was also, in the 1980s, a member of a group of eight Labour party Knesset members, dubbed "the Eight" and led by Yossi Beilin, who tried to set a liberal agenda for the party in matters concerning the peace process with the Palestinians. Peretz connects between the peace process and internal Israeli social issues. He believes that the unresolved conflict with the Palestinians has also been a hindrance to the solution of some of Israel's most pressing social ills, such as rising inequality. He sees the resources allotted to the settlements in the West Bank as having diverted funds that could have helped to solve these problems. He has described the conflict as having mutated Israeli politics, so that the traditional left-right distinctions do not hold: Instead of supporting a social-democratic left which would advance their cause, the lower classes, mostly of Middle Eastern Jewish origins, were diverted to the right by the fanning of nationalist tendencies. Concurrently the left in Israel was usurped by the well-to-do, so that the Labour party had ironically become elitist. That is why Peretz sees an intrinsic connection between a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the resolving of Israel's internal social tensions.
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