Left behind—but not quite as far as it was

I've been spending a lot of time on obnoxious or wicked Israelis, and it's only fair to note that there is more going on than that, including one of the great socialist organizations of history, the Histadrut labor federation, roaring back today with a general strike against the government habit of hiring low-wage contract workers from the Israeli equivalent of temp agencies instead of union members. Interestingly enough, the government is more right-wing than the private employers' organization, the Coordinating Bureau of Economic Organizations,  which has already done a deal with the federation.

Fourth meeting of the Hapoel Hatzair movement, about 1909. David Ben Gurion is possibly in this photo, first at the left in the second row from the bottom. From Labor Zionism at MidEastWeb.org.

This follows up on the federation's decision, after days of agonizing back and forth, to join last summer's vibrant protests against housing conditions— [jump]

one protester – not a Histadrut member – was quoted by Channel 1 news as saying that while she appreciated any help the protest movement could get, “I am not sure Ofer Eini should be standing on stage and pretending to be a leader of this. I don't think the Histadrut leadership or many of the workers have too much trouble finishing the month on their incomes.”

 Okay, so maybe it wasn't all that heroic...

The Meretz Party has a new chairperson, Zahava Gal-On, who says that under her leadership,

"Meretz will bring Israel's Left home... it will no longer be a boutique, north Tel Avivian faction. Meretz will translate last summer's social protest into political power. It will be a true social-democratic party that supports dividing the land (of Israel)."

One Haaretz op-ed piece, by Danny Gottwein, suggests that the Israeli left has begun to notice that it is flirting with nonexistence, and has an idea why,

The decline of the left is the result of the privatization policy. The dismantling of the welfare state eroded the middle classes where most of the voters of the left are to be found, and they, in a pointless attempt to improve their status, moved to the center. Parallel to this, the left was left with fewer sectors of the public to turn to, after it knowingly stopped trying to garner the votes of the lower classes.

And another, by Oudeh Basharat, breaks toward thinking not exactly the unthinkable, but the fairly difficult-to-think:

We have a prime minister who was elected thanks mainly to donations from abroad. Some 98 percent of the donations that Benjamin Netanyahu received for the Likud primaries of 2005 came from foreign donors, most of them Americans. The phenomenon of raising money primarily from abroad repeated itself in last week's Likud elections. The foreign tycoons do not make do merely with supporting a candidate. They also help the citizens of Israel choose the correct candidate with the aid of a partisan press.... 

It was because of pressure from the American Jewish lobby that President Barack Obama decided to retreat from his demand that construction on the settlements be frozen as a condition for the continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. The Jewish lobby twisted Obama's arm at a time when the Arab world, which is undergoing stormy upheavals, expected him to show a reasonable measure of balance. Not only did the president of a superpower become irrelevant, but the peace process itself also got stuck... 

Israel must decide whether it is the bridgehead of all the crazy Westerners in the Middle East, or whether it will stand by the Arab people in their struggles against internal and external oppressors. 

At the moment, the Jewish lobby has drawn up a treaty with U.S. neoconservatives, against anything that smells of freedom in the Middle East. The time has come to make a decision. If the goal is integration into the region, then it is essential to break away from the Jewish lobby. 

That's actually kind of stunning to me—not that there are progressive views in Israel, I knew that, but that the Aipac and its various allies and their intertwining tentacles are an even worse source of corruption there than they are here.
Meanwhile, we'll be listening to Schoenberg until there's peace in the Middle East—or until you learn to like it—or why not hope for both?

Sommermüd, Tot, Mädchenlied. You can follow the German texts online at the YouTube site.