It seems to me that Beilin has not been reading Labour's campaign ads. These ads, featuring a picture of Ehud Barak, bear slogans such as "Jobs before money for yeshivot", "For the people and not for the extremists", and "education before settlement".
These Labour campaign ads speak of the real issues, the issues of the small guy in the development town. Every Israel, other than those in Beilin's elite, is concerned about their income eroding, proper health care, family issues, crime, education, and national reconciliation. It is on these issues that the election will be run, and Oslo and its assorted misbegotten descendant agreements will appear as, at best, a secondary issue in these elections.
Beilin, though, has put the lie to Labour's campaign sloganeering. As the mastermind of Labour's election campaign in 1996, he can be counted on to understand what Labour will really campaign about. By making Oslo a central campaign theme, Labour will continue to miss the boat. Very few Israeli voters care that much about Oslo any more, especially since there is little real difference between Labour and Likud on that score. But the other issues, those in the slogans, appear to be on their way to the trashbin of Labour's campaign.
Labour cannot hope to be taken seriously when they run such campaigns aimed at a population that craves national reconciliation. These campaigns smear groups that do not hold the same values. Jewish values are trashed through attacks on yeshivas, and Zionist values are trashed through attacks on settlement. By including the more general "not for the extremists" slogan in the same campaign, Labour is labelling all yeshiva students, religious Jews, and settlers and their supporters as extremists. Even if they vote Labour. In fact, Labour is telling these groups that they do not want their votes. This makes Labour elitist, which belies its slogan "for the people".
If Labour hopes to gain any ground at all in this election, it is high time that they wake up and start treating Jews in Israel as the upstanding citizens we are, and not as a population deserving of second class.
Copyright 1998. Yehuda Poch is a writer living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission only.
