Party over.
Israel's Labor Party, what was left of the party that created the state & led it for 29 years, now has 3 seats in the Knesset & voted today to join the govt of criminal defendant Netanyahu.
It now belongs to the graveyard of history.

Fact is, Labor suffered the Founding Party Syndrome from the 60s: Founding parties often lose direction after successfully creating a state & are left w little purpose but to try to hold on to power. They need to reinvent themselves...

After the 1967 war, Labor decayed further. It returned to its tactic of pre-state days, creating settlements to mark borders. It ignored warrnings from w/in that it was turning the occupied territories into colonies....

One it lost power in 1977, the need for the party to reinvent itself became even greater. Briefly, during Yitzhak Rabin's 2nd term starting in 1992, it seemed like it might have found a new direction & purpose...

But the assassination of Rabin cut that short. Most Labor leaders had no idea of how to be opposition politicians. Amir Peretz's desire to join the Netanyahu govt reflects the party's constant inclination to join rather than fight rightwing govts....

Nonetheless, Peretz is a particularly bitter disappointment. He was a longtime peace advocate, and actually retained a strong social democratic streak, opposed to the dominant robber-baron capitalism. Or so it seemed. ...

Now he is so eager to sit at the cabinet table that he is joining a government led by a criminal defendant hell-bent on annexation and utterly dedicated to brutal free-marketism. ...

If somehow we manage to survive this madness and save this country, 50 years from now Israeli schoolchildren will have less idea of what the Labor Party was than American kids do of what the Whigs were. If they learn, they'll forget by 12 minutes after the test.

Reality is that for several decades Labor has been the party of the Israeli bourgeoisie whose grandparents might have been socialists. It represented the tribe; the beliefs were dead...

Gantz took that electorate, and then delivered his support to Netanyahu. Labor's last gasp is a 12-point headline on page 7, an afterthought. ...

I can only hope that with it gone, we can begin to build a new social-democratic political force not tainted with Labor's history, or its patronizing attitude toward much of the country.