Podcast: Matti Friedman on the Last Gasp of the Israeli Left

Israel’s Labor Party—the political organization that erected the governing structures of the country—has now been reduced to a mere three seats in the Knesset. What happened?

Avi Gabbay, then-chairman of Israel’s Labor Party, speaks at his party’s headquarters in Tel Aviv on election night on April 9, 2019. JALAA MAREY/AFP via Getty Images.

Avi Gabbay, then-chairman of Israel’s Labor Party, speaks at his party’s headquarters in Tel Aviv on election night on April 9, 2019. JALAA MAREY/AFP via Getty Images.

Observation
April 30 2020
About the authors

A weekly podcast, produced in partnership with the Tikvah Fund, offering up the best thinking on Jewish thought and culture.

Matti Friedman is the author of a memoir about the Israeli war in Lebanon, Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War (2016). His latest book is Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel (2019).

This Week’s Guest: Matti Friedman

 

Have you ever seen the old murals that decorate the walls of Israel’s historic kibbutzim? They often feature young, brawny Jewish women and men working and plowing the land. They depict the pioneering spirit of early Zionism, glorifying sweat and soil. The murals portray what Hebrew labor could achieve through cooperation and collective action. They are a reminder that the Jewish state was founded in large part by Labor Zionists, and that the Israeli left once dominated the country’s politics.

But now those murals are relics of an earlier age. Things have changed a great deal over the past 72 years, and Israel is now a nation with a conservative consensus. The Labor Party of David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir—the political organization that erected the governing structures of the country—has been reduced to a mere three seats in the 23rd Knesset. What’s more, a poll conducted earlier this month shows that if elections were to be held again at this moment, the party would not win a single seat.

What happened? Earlier this week, the journalist and author Matti Friedman wrote a piece in the New York Times examining “The Last Remnants of the Israeli Left.” In this podcast, he joins host Jonathan Silver to discuss how the ideals of socialism remain on the aging, muraled walls of kibbutzim as museum relics, even as those ideals have all but vanished from Israeli politics.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as “Ulterior” by Swan Production.

Background

 

For more on the Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic, which appears roughly every Thursday, check out its inaugural post here.

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More about: Arts & Culture, Israel & Zionism, Labor Party, Labor Zionism