A court battle within the Israeli Labor Party stands between Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg and victory in Tuesday’s party leadership election. But yet another struggle, this time over charges of vote fraud by Defense Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer, may not deter the long-time activist and political leader.
Burg has, after all, come a long way since demonstrating outside the prime minister's office nearly two decades ago to demand the resignation of then defense minister Ariel Sharon. In the years since that protest, where he was wounded by a grenade thrown by a right-wing Israeli terrorist that killed another young demonstrator, he has established a political base and fended off more hawkish rivals.
Burg, the speaker of the 15th Knesset, was born in occupied Jerusalem in 1955. Following his military service as a paratrooper, Burg became one of the leaders of the protest movement against the war in Lebanon, which was masterminded by Sharon.
In 1985, he was appointed by then prime minister Shimon Peres to serve as his adviser on Diaspora Affairs, a position he continued in until 1988. That year Burg was elected to the Knesset on the Alignment Party list, where he was a prominent member of the foreign affairs and defense committee, the finance committee and the state control committee.
Burg was elected to the Knesset once again in 1992, having placed third on the Labor Party list. Until 1995, he served as chairman of the Knesset education and culture committee.
In February 1995, Burg was elected chairman of the executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel and the World Zionist Organization and, on taking up this position, resigned from the Knesset. Under Burg's leadership there were significant changes in the structure and role of the national institutions, which began to operate in several new areas, such as the restitution of Jewish property stolen during the Holocaust and the battle for religious pluralism and tolerance among the Jewish people.
He stepped down from this position in 1999 to run for the Knesset on the One Israel list, and in July 1999 was elected speaker.
His biggest political success to date would be defeating Ben Eliezer for the Labor Party’s top post, which could help move Israel’s political debate away from its current hard-right trend.
“I'm the one who [has belonged] for so many years to the peace camp in Israel because I believe that occupation corrupts, it corrupts the occupier and it corrupts the occupied,” Burg said during a June 21 appearance on PBS Online News Hour.
Despite such statements, in some respects, Burg’s views on the latest Palestinian uprising against 34 years of Israeli military occupation seem not too far removed from his old foe Sharon. Speaking to PBS Online, he assessed the uprising as follows:
“[T]he question mark over the head of Yasser Arafat is a very simple one. Chairman Arafat, where do you belong, do you belong to the Israeli-Egyptian-Jordanian-American-oriented peace coalition. Or are you part of the Bin Laden coalition?” – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
