ISRAEL: The once-mighty Labour Party is disunited and in disarray, writes David Horovitz in Jerusalem.
As Israel today marks the 55th anniversary of its independence, the Labour Party, which governed the country uninterrupted for its first three decades and has carried the banner for territorial compromise in the cause of peace with the Arab world, is on the brink of self-destruction.
With Labour a disunited, barely audible voice of parliamentary opposition to Mr Ariel Sharon's Likud-led government, the party leader, Mr Amram Mitzna, announced his resignation earlier this week.
He despondently described Labour as being bent on political suicide, crippled by internal rivalries and on the point of financial bankruptcy.
The departure of Mr Mitzna, a sad-eyed former army general and long-time mayor of Haifa, has neither surprised nor particularly upset the dwindling ranks of Labour supporters.
After all, it was he who presided over a collapse of electoral support for Labour in the general elections last January that hugely bolstered Mr Sharon's hold on power.
Once the "natural party of government" under such icons as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin, Labour now holds a record low of just 19 seats in the 120-member Knesset.
But it is a measure of Labour's internal feuds and lack of dynamic new leadership that it has been unable to so much as field a candidate for the Jerusalem mayoralty - once a safe Labour city under legendary mayor Teddy Kollek - in elections due on June 3rd.
Further evidence of Labour's collapse is that many in the party are looking to the last of the icons, former prime minister Mr Shimon Peres, to take over from Mr Mitzna as party chairman, at least temporarily. Mr Peres turns 80 this August.
Mr Mitzna was not a charismatic leader, but Labour's electoral woes stemmed less from his personality than from his declared readiness to re-engage at the negotiating table with the Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
An overwhelming majority of Israelis - not to mention President Bush - believe Mr Arafat has orchestrated much of the violence directed at Israeli targets in the past 2½ years of the intifada.
Also, Mr Sharon's determined policy of both boycotting all contact with Mr Arafat and attempting to persuade the international community to do the same is a major source of his domestic popularity.
Mr Sharon's success will be underlined early next week, when the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, visits the region. Mr Powell will hold talks with the Palestinian Authority's new Prime Minister, Mr Mahmoud Abbas, but he will not meet Mr Arafat.
Reinforcing the condemnatory Israeli-American attitude to Mr Arafat are attacks such as the most recent killing of an Israeli civilian, Gideon Lichterman (27), who was shot dead north of Ramallah late on Monday night.
Gunmen from Mr Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO claimed responsibility for the attack, in which Mr Lichterman's six-year- old daughter and another passenger were critically hurt.
While Labour - the trailblazer of the collapsed Oslo process and the party which oversaw Mr Arafat's rehabilitation and return from exile in Tunis as part of that process - now sets about its own attempts at rehabilitation, Mr Sharon reiterated yesterday that he would soon meet Mr Abbas.
At a pre-Independence Day ceremony for fallen soldiers yesterday, he vowed not to miss "the chance to make peace, even if it comes at a painful price".
However, the prime minister has also indicated that he would not be prepared to relinquish much more than half of the West Bank in the cause of a peace accord. He has also said he would veto any Palestinian stake in Jerusalem - positions which leave little prospect for a breakthrough.
He has made clear that the US- and European-backed "road map" to Palestinian statehood is a non-starter as far as he is concerned, unless Mr Abbas can act independently of Mr Arafat and smash what Mr Sharon calls the "infrastructure of terror."
Mr Abbas, who has pledged to end the "armed intifada", has urged Mr Sharon to work with him to immediately implement the "road map."
Mr Saeb Erekat, one of Mr Abbas's ministers, yesterday claimed that Mr Sharon, who has raised a series of formal objections to the provisions of the "road map," was stalling deliberately, so as to delay any possible progress until Mr Bush has to switch his attention from foreign policy to domestic election concerns.