Abstract
The labor movement has been the principal political, economic, social, and cultural force in Israel since the establishment of the state in 1948. However, the movement fell into gradual decline in the last quarter of the twentieth century and entered its final period of collapse in the early twenty-first century. What marked its downfall was the Labor Party’s (formerly, Mapai) 1977 electoral defeat, a loss that the political arm of the labor movement was never able to recover from fully. In the years since then, the Labor Party has only regained the office of the prime minister twice and has slipped quietly, especially in the last decade, into the margins of Israeli politics. This chapter traces the origins of the domination of the Labor Party and asks how and why it fell and whether a credible left-wing political movement can regain primacy in Israeli politics.
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Solomon, H., Arnold, S. (2023). The Labor Party of Israel: From Core to Periphery. In: Kumaraswamy, P.R. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Israel. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2717-0_100-1
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