In Israel, Labor's new leader brings upheaval

SDEROT, Israel -- Amir Peretz grew up in this struggling town between the Gaza Strip and the Negev Desert, part of a wave of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries who have long taken an economic and political back seat to the country's European-rooted elite.

Now, 50 years after arriving in Israel as the 4-year-old son of a Moroccan gas station owner, the fiery union leader has unleashed the biggest shakeup in Israeli politics in decades, which began when he ousted one of Israel's elder statesmen, Polish-born Shimon Peres, from the helm of the venerable Labor Party.

The upheaval continued yesterday as Peres, a Nobel laureate, quit Labor to campaign for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's new centrist Kadima Party. Peretz's upset victory over Peres last month is believed to have helped persuade Sharon to defect Nov. 21 from the right-wing Likud Party he founded.

Peretz has set out to refashion the once-dominant Labor from a stronghold of urban elites to an engine for socioeconomic change, with the ambitious goal of winning over the many working-class Israelis who have traditionally voted right wing in a rebellion against the country's left-leaning elite.

He has issued passionate calls to Israelis to refocus the country's political debate on the growing gap between rich and poor, and to reject decades of massive spending on developing and defending Jewish settlements in the territories Israel captured in the 1967 war.

Immediately after beating Peres in the Nov. 9 party primary, Peretz declared he would pull Labor out of Sharon's ruling coalition, declaring that Labor had ''stopped being Likud's spare tire." Soon after, Sharon decided to take the leap from the Likud Party, where he faced infighting from right-wingers incensed over Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip.

A thundering orator whose bushy mustache bolsters his working-class image, Peretz, 54, declared defiantly that he has no interest in forming a coalition with Sharon, and dismisses fears that his history as a labor leader who called many paralyzing strikes in the 1990s will drive away moderate voters.

The man who, if elected, would be the first prime minister of non-European descent, does not shy away from pointing out economic divisions and linking them to the settlement-building that Likud and even some in Labor held sacred until recently, a project he called ''crazy and deluded."

''For years this deluded dream of the entire Land of Israel drained all the budgets that could have been used to reduce the gaps, for health, education, welfare, culture, infrastructure," he told Yediot Aharonot, Israel's largest daily newspaper.

Peretz rose to prominence through the personal support he built in Sderot, even among Middle Eastern Jews who had long supported the Likud Party out of resentment against Israel's founding socialist governments that sent thousands of non-European immigrants to remote, struggling towns. Peretz was Labor, but many in Sderot remembered his family from the crowded tent cities set up for new immigrants as they waited for housing.

Recovering from wounds he received in the Sinai Peninsula in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, he returned home to become a popular soccer coach. Ten years later, he was elected head of the local government, the first Laborite to lead the town after years of local rule by Likud and the National Religious Party. He won lasting support by increasing funding to schools, but also by sparking pride among Sderot's many immigrants from countries such as Morocco and Tunisia, known as Sephardic Jews or Mizrahim.

''He brought Sderot to Israel and Israel to Sderot," said Shai Ben-Yaishe, Sderot's deputy mayor, who recalled Peretz, a friend of his father's, giving a pep talk to his high school graduating class as they prepared to depart for their obligatory army service.

''He told us we are going as ambassadors . . . as the representatives of Sderot," said Ben-Yaishe, 36. ''He said that each achievement we would create for ourselves, we would create for the city."

Of Ben-Yaishe's class of 28, 13 became army officers, a result the deputy mayor traces back to Peretz.

But in a sign of the challenges Peretz faces on the national stage, the personal respect people had for him did not change the way most of the town's 20,000 residents -- now split between Sephardic Jews and more recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia -- defined their ideology or voted in national elections.

In the last parliamentary elections, in 2003, Likud captured 33 percent of the Sderot vote to Labor's 3 percent, with another 16 percent going to a party that Peretz briefly led but that never flourished nationally. Most other votes went to right-wing or Sephardic religious parties. Now, many Shas and Likud voters in Sderot say they may vote for Peretz, but are more attracted to the man than his party.

Netalel Assado, 26, a son of Moroccan immigrants who runs a café selling sambousek, a pizza-like Moroccan staple, said he was thinking of voting for Peretz because he understands Sderot's problems and because ''we could have a Mizrahi prime minister for once."

But once in the voting booth, he is not sure if he will be able to stomach Labor. ''I was raised to be a Likudnik," he said.

Peretz became more politically controversial once he moved to the national stage. In 1994, after serving several years in parliament, he won control of the country's powerful federation of trade unions, the Histadrut, beating out Labor's preferred candidate to the irritation of party leaders and going on to call numerous strikes. In 1999, he formed his One Nation party, but rejoined Labor last year as the party sought to capitalize on growing concerns about the economy.

Unlike Sharon and his predecessor as prime minister, Labor's Ehud Barak, Peretz is not a former general. Many Israelis say it is time for a leader with a civilian background, but also worry that Peretz may not have the experience to deal with security threats. While Peretz backs immediate negotiations with Palestinians, Sharon has enjoyed wide popularity and vows to negotiate only if Palestinians uproot terror organizations. Early polls suggest Sharon's party would win the largest share of seats in elections scheduled for March 28, followed closely by Peretz's Labor, but Israeli public opinion is notoriously volatile. Political observers say Peretz and Sharon could end up forming a center-left coalition that would continue Sharon's policy of withdrawal from some Palestinian territories.

Peretz emphasizes the differences between himself and the country's urbane, English-speaking political veterans.

He admits that he is taking English lessons but says learning Russian is his priority. He and his wife, who have four children, still live in a modest two-story stucco house on a Sderot street dotted with for-sale signs, a legacy of the hundreds of Kassam rockets fired on the town from the Gaza Strip.

He has so far shunned the Western press his predecessors court. But to the Israeli paper, he recounted a tale of desperate poverty, of his mother trying to scavenge surplus apples before they were burned by the government. Sometimes she would bring them home soaked with kerosene. ''To this day," the paper said, ''the smell of apples or kerosene sears him with the insult."

Still, he insisted, he is defined neither by poverty nor by his Moroccan roots. ''I don't intend to focus my whole life on my father's lost dignity," he said.