Yossi Sarid, a great man of the Left
Obituaries from MEE and Haaretz
Yossi Sarid in an electioneering gap, 2015. Photo by Michael Kramer
OBITUARY: Yossi Sarid – the Israeli left’s double-edged legacy
Sarid was one of the great innovators of the Israeli left ahead of its return to power in the 1990s and an early supporter of the 2-state solution
By Dimi Reider, Middle East Eye
December 09. 2015
For better or worse, there has never been a more perfect embodiment of the old Israeli left than columnist and politician Yossi Sarid, who passed away from a heart attack age 75 late last week.
He was an uncompromising champion of human and civil rights, of free speech, of separation of church and state, of equality before the law, transparency and accountability, and a vocal, frighteningly erudite and deliciously acerbic critic of the Occupation.
But Sarid was also one of the strongest examples of the Israeli left’s ill-disguised contempt for the religious sentiments cherished by the majority of the Israeli Jews, its willful ignorance of ethnic discrimination against Mizrahi Jews, and its single-minded fixation on championing the collapsed Oslo process without admitting to its many shortfalls. All this contributed to alienating the majority of Israeli voters, including many who could have been natural constituents for any left-wing opposition party.
Sarid was born Yossef Sneider, to Yaakov, a prominent functionary of the soon-to-be-ruling party Mapai (the Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel) and Dova, a teacher. When Sarid was six, his father learned that most of his family in Europe had been exterminated in the Holocaust; to honour them, Sneider took up the name Sarid, “remnant”.
After military service first with the artillery corps and then an Israeli army newspaper, Sarid went on to work for the Voice of Israel radio, making full use of his remarkable, bottomless bass of a voice.
Aged just 24, Sarid was appointed spokesman of the Mapai party, then at the peak of its glory as the founding party of the state and the source of all political and civil power in the country, and also the personal press secretary to the prime minister.
Sarid was elected to the Knesset in 1973 as the face of the young guard of the Labour party, a generation disillusioned by prime minister Golda Meir’s squandering of diplomatic opportunities in the run-up to the October war and Israel’s near-defeat in the war itself. This marked the beginning of an uninterrupted parliamentary career of 32 years.
The old left’s innovator
Sarid was one of the great innovators of the Israeli left ahead of its brief return to power in the 1990s. He was one of the earliest adopters of a two-state solution, already supporting territorial compromise in the late 1970s. Then, in 1982, he broke with Israeli tradition that until then dictated support for the armed forces in wartime by abstaining in the Knesset’s vote on the First Lebanon War.
He set a third precedent two years later when he left the Labour Party to join Ratz – a dovish party led by another, earlier Labor renegade, Shulamit Aloni. Labour MKs have split off to form new parties before, but the innovation here was in the cause of his departure. It was prompted by Labour going into the first of many national unity coalitions with the Likud – a practice that benumbed Labour as a credible political force in the 1980s and all but buried it as a credible opposition from 2000 onwards.
Ratz merged with another dovish party, Mapam, in 1992, forming Meretz. Its first elections were its best – the party gained 12 seats and became a senior partner in the second Yitzhak Rabin government. Sarid was named environment minister during which time he transformed the ministry from a backwater into a force to be reckoned with, aggressively legislating against polluters.
After a brief stint in opposition, Meretz returned to government under Labour Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 1999, with Sarid forfeiting the housing portfolio to become education minister – a choice emblematic of Meretz’s focus on the cultural battleground rather than the socio-economic one.
Although his tenure lasted a little over a year, Sarid is still remembered by teachers as one of the most pro-active education ministers Israel has ever had, fighting hard to fund and modernise the decaying state education system.
The majority of the public, conversely, remembers one particular decree – the decision to introduce two poems by Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish, into the curriculum. The poems were emphatically non-political but the Israeli public baulked at the notion of schoolchildren being taught the national Palestinian poet. The controversy soon escalated into a no-confidence vote, but the poem survived in the curriculum, with one being removed only this year.
Sarid stayed on in the Knesset for five more years, before finally retiring in 2005 and taking up a column in Haaretz – appreciated for its erudition and wit even by those who disagreed with its content.
Liberal blind spots
However, while the 90s were a high point for Sarid, they also saw the flip side of his particular brand of liberalism emerge and cement.
Alongside the peace process and it discontents, the 1990s were dominated by the ascendancy of religious Jewish parties – especially the Sephardi Shas, representing largely Mizrahi, or Arab-Jewish, Ultra-Orthodox.
Sarid saw Shas’ rise as a cardinal threat to what little separation of church and state existed in Israel, and threw all of his rhetorical power to fight it, not shrinking from denigrating the revered spiritual leader of the movement, Rabbi Ovadia Yossef.
But for many, the fight over the religious character of the state marked a much more important divide between Meretz and Shas – that between the party of the old, secular Ashkenazi elite and the party of a minority that was badly discriminated against. Sarid’s arguments fell flat for many, jarred by his seemingly unshakable lack of interest in the specific hardships the Ashkenazi old guard imposed on the Mizrahi minority.
On the Palestinian issue, Sarid stood honourably apart from the Labour Party, which spent the 2000s compulsively selling its commitment to a peace process for a few cabinet seats. But on the issue of Mizrahi Jews, Sarid embodied the old Left’s haughty contempt for Jewish ethnic and cultural minorities, who also happened to comprise the majority of the Israeli working class – a cross section of the very communities any social-democratic party should, theoretically, fight for.
Against the backdrop of this apathy – and sometimes outright denial – of the Mizrahi plight, Meretz’s commitment to Palestinian rights looks to many Israelis as the inexplicable boutique altruism of an old elite. This dissonance is as much a part of Sarid’s liberal legacy as its nobler aspects.
Between the personal and the political
The tragic irony of this is made all the starker by the fact Sarid never turned away a person in need, whatever their background.
Hip-hop singer The Shadow, probably the most violent rightist rabble-rouser today – responsible for organising attacks on leftist rallies during last summer’s Gaza war – posted an uncharacteristically warm obituary for Sarid, recalling the latter’s help when the singer’s father was abused by the prison system.
Political rivals from across the aisle praised his even-handless and incorruptibility, with only the most marginal of right-wing extremists stooping to celebrate his death. Israeli media and social networks were so full with similar memories of Sarid that people who he didn’t help, reassure or comfort in some way began to seem a minority.
But there was something about the aloof, somewhat haughty strain in Sarid’s otherwise earnest and sincere liberalism that prevented him from translating these laudable traits into broader political achievements.
This, incidentally, belies an essential flaw with some of the eulogies that bemoaned not only the death of Sarid, but the passing of the Israeli left itself.
The truth is that while Sarid’s left is withering away, a new generation of Israeli progressives and radicals is well on the way to succeed it. It is a more inclusive and diverse generation, which battles the status quo on many more fronts than the 90s left ever did – from gas revenues to independent unionising, from rent control to resisting the forced displacement of the Negev Bedouin communities, and, crucially, against the internal Jewish racism so prevalent among Israel’s liberal elites.
The fight against the occupation, too, is much broader, more direct and more sophisticated than Meret’z own campaigns; and the emergence of the Joint List as the most dynamic force of the Israeli opposition gives hope of mainstream political struggles where Palestinians are artners, rather than distant objects of liberal compassion.
The fact that Sarid’s politics overlapped with the left’s last actual stint in government does not mean they are right for all seasons, or even that they were entirely right at the time. His generation is on its way out, as all generations ultimately go; it can only be hoped that the generation now on the ascent will learn both from Sarid’s achievements and from his mistakes.
Yossi Sarid, 1940-2015. Columnist, parliamentarian, minister, leader of the Meretz Party. Survived by his wife, Dorit, and three children.
Yossi Sarid with fellow Ratz MK Shulamit Aloni on Election Day, 1988. Photo by Vered Parr / IPPA
Yossi Sarid: The Man Who Showed Israel in Its True Light
Sarid was a courageous, uncompromising politician whose bitterness toward his country’s leaders only grew over the years.
Yossi Verter, Haaretz
December 06, 2015
Yossi Sarid, who died on Friday [December 4th] , hated honey-drenched eulogies. The idea that only good can be spoken of the dead was as foreign to him as all other forms of flattery. He once said that whenever he wrote or said something in praise of someone, he lived to regret it – “so I decided to write only bad of people. That way, I’m never disappointed or sorry.”
He gave this principle weekly expression in his op-eds for Haaretz over the last decade. In his biblical Hebrew, he mourned the illnesses of the country he loved – its spreading corruption, rising violence, overpowering racism and deteriorating politics, virtually stripped of the towering figures that surrounded him in the early Knessets. He mocked the leaders and those who presumed to become leaders. He exposed their nakedness. Had he received a dollar for every mask he tore off, he’d have been a millionaire.
He was very bitter – and didn’t try to hide it. He was bitter over the country’s wrong turns. He was also bitter that he never managed to make full use of his political talents. Perhaps he mourned missed opportunities, like his brief period as education minister, abruptly curtailed for political reasons.
National and personal sorrows often intertwined. His last years in politics weren’t good ones. The Meretz party he headed suffered repeated blows at the polls and became irrelevant. His table in the Knesset cafeteria, once bustling with journalists and young MKs who lapped up his stories and revelled in his wit, gradually emptied. He would sit alone, rarely making eye contact with those around him. Until he finally understood, and quit. Later, he admitted with characteristic honesty that he delayed his retirement too long, and those years of repression made him even more irritable.
Sarid was one of Israel’s greatest parliamentarians. Many laws bear his signature. But as he himself said, this wasn’t his crowning achievement: there are many laws, but few create real change. His true contribution to Israeli public life was norms, principles and standards, and the cruel mirror he held up to the public and his colleagues, which he viewed as a mission.
This was rooted in three character traits: exceptional courage, personal honesty and uncompromising integrity. He was the only one who recognized what a disaster the 1982 Lebanon War was from its very first day. His immediate, harsh criticism of the war’s stewards – then-Defence Minister Ariel Sharon and then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin – made him an enemy of the people. The intensity of the hatred flung at him could have melted steel. But he was undeterred and refused to remain silent. And it didn’t take many weeks before most of the public switched to his side.
The same was true on the diplomatic front. His consistent support for ending the occupation and returning the territories was initially often viewed as treason. But Sarid was there from his first day in politics. It’s a miracle he reached 75 without being assassinated.
He was proud of polls from the 1980s that showed him as Israel’s most hated politician without compare. When Shimon Peres overtook him, he was disappointed. But perhaps this was only pretense because, ultimately, everyone wants to be loved.
If one had to choose a seminal moment in Sarid’s political career, it was his departure from the Labour Party after the 1984 election, when it formed a unity government with Likud. Sarid wasn’t willing to accept this. He was then 44, a political meteor who was widely considered a shoo-in to someday lead his party and become prime minister. But he unhesitatingly left his political home and wandered in the desert, to a tiny left-wing party called Citizens’ Rights Movement (Ratz), which later became Meretz.
He knew he was sealing his political fate and that, having pulled over onto the shoulder, he would never be able to get back on the highway and reach the summit. But his honesty, morality and integrity wouldn’t allow him to do otherwise.