Editorial: The Disappearance of the Old Israeli Left

From 56 seats to 4

In 1992, Yitzhak Rabin's Labor won 44 seats. Meretz won 12 more. Together they held 56 of 120 seats and the keys to the government. In 2022, Labor won 4. Meretz won none. It missed the threshold by about 4,000 votes and left the Knesset for the first time in its history.

That is the story of the old Israeli left in two numbers. It is also the least interesting way to tell it. The numbers say what happened. They do not say why, and they do not say what comes next.

This is an editorial. I am making an argument, and I will mark where the facts end and the argument starts.

The party that built the state sits at the bottom of that table. Mapai and its successors ran Israel from 1948 until 1977. The Alignment won 45 seats in 1965 and Labor won 49 in 1969. In 1977 Labor lost 16 seats and went into opposition for the first time. It came back and won again, in 1992. After that the slide never stopped.

Note on the table: figures are from Wikipedia's party pages. The page's text and table disagree on Labor in 2003 and 2006 (18 or 19). I used 18. Labor's 1999 figure is its share of the One Israel list.

How it fell

Scholars still argue about the causes. Ofer Kenig and Gideon Rahat of the Israel Democracy Institute and Hebrew University wrote a chapter on exactly this question, titled "From 44 to 4", covering 1992 to 2022. I could not access its argument, so what follows is mine, built on the public record.

I see four causes. They stacked on top of each other.

1. The peace process lost its sales pitch

The left's core promise was land for peace. Rabin signed Oslo in 1993 and was assassinated in 1995. Peres lost the 1996 direct vote for prime minister to Netanyahu, even though Labor won the most Knesset seats. Ehud Barak won in 1999 and then lost to Ariel Sharon in the 2001 special election, after the Camp David talks failed and the second intifada began.

The lesson most Israeli voters took was simple. We tried it, and the bombs came. The left spent the next twenty years arguing about whether that lesson was right. It lost the argument in the only forum that counts, the ballot box.

2. The voters moved, and the left did not follow

This is the oldest problem, and it started before Oslo. Labor ran the country from 1948 and fell in 1977, when Begin's Likud won. Many Mizrahi Jews, who came from Arab countries and often felt shut out by the Ashkenazi establishment, voted for Likud and stayed. In the 1990s about a million immigrants arrived from the former Soviet Union. Many of them were hawkish and secular. The Haredi and religious-nationalist share of the population grew. None of these groups had a reason to vote Labor.

The left became the party of a smaller, older, wealthier, Ashkenazi, secular, coastal slice of the country. That slice is real, but it is not a majority.

3. It kept changing leaders

Labor went into its elections from 2003 to 2022 under eight different leaders: Mitzna, Peretz, Barak, Yachimovich, Herzog, Gabbay, Peretz again, and Michaeli. Ehud Barak left in 2011 with four other MKs to found his own party. The point is not that any one of them was bad. A party with a new face every cycle cannot build trust.

4. Someone else took the voters

In 2006, Ariel Sharon left Likud and founded Kadima, which took the center. In 2013, Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid won 19 seats on a secular, middle-class platform. Later it was Benny Gantz, then Naftali Bennett, then Gadi Eisenkot. Each time, the same voters, who would once have voted Labor, found a new center-left vehicle without Labor's baggage. Labor lost them on both ends. Its hawkish voters went right. Its liberal voters went to the center.

Meretz tells the same story at a smaller scale. It held 12 seats in 1992 and dipped under the threshold in 2022, with 3.16% of the vote. Many analysts say its voters drifted to bigger center-left parties to help block Netanyahu, though I have not seen exit-poll data that proves it.

What is left in 2026

The old left did not die. It changed shape, and it split into pieces.

The Democrats. In 2024 Labor and Meretz merged under Yair Golan, a former deputy chief of staff. Golan was elected Labor leader on 28 May 2024. The merger was signed on 30 June and ratified on 12 July. Meretz was guaranteed one slot in every four on the list. The new party averages about 9.6 seats in the polls. That is more than double Labor's 4 in 2022. It is also less than a fifth of what the two parties held in 1992. See the Democrats profile in this series.

The center, where the voters went. Most of what used to be Labor's electorate now votes for parties that do not call themselves left. In the polls, Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar averages about 22 seats and Naftali Bennett's Together, joined with Yesh Atid, about 11. Between them, they hold more than three times the Democrats' support. Many of their voters hold views that the old Labor would recognize: a secular state, an independent judiciary, an end to Haredi draft exemptions. They do not hold the old Labor's brand, and they do not want it.

The Arab parties. The Zionist left has always overlapped with the Arab parties on peace and civil rights, without ever governing with them. The Joint List, with about 7.6 seats, and Ra'am, with about 5, now carry most of the Arab vote. They sit outside the Zionist left and outside any coalition so far.

What the Democrats actually are. They are a small, ideologically clear left: two states, repeal of the judicial overhaul, no draft exemptions, social democratic economics. They rule out Likud and the Haredi parties. That makes them the most principled party on the board and one of the least flexible. They need the center to win and they cannot join a government that includes the right.

So the left's voters did not vanish. They fragmented. Most went to the center. A smaller group stayed in a smaller party. I have not seen data on how many moved to the Arab parties or stayed home.

What it means

Here is my argument.

The old left lost because its answer stopped matching the question. In 1992 the question was how to make peace. The left had a plan and the voters trusted it. After 2000 the question became how to stay safe, and the left had no answer the voters believed. After 7 October the gap is wider. A party that says "two states" now has to explain how, with whom and when. The Democrats have an answer on paper. The public has not been persuaded.

The values did not die. The brand did. Look at what the center parties promise. An independent court. Equal service. A secular state. Those used to be Labor and Meretz positions. They are now mainstream. The old left won the argument on civil society and lost the argument on security. Voters kept the first and dropped the second, and the party that carried both lost.

A left that cannot sit with anyone cannot govern. The Democrats rule out Likud and the Haredi parties. That is a principled line. It is also why they are stuck at under 10 seats. A party that polls in single digits and refuses most partners has one path to power: join a broad opposition and accept a junior role. Whether that counts as a comeback is a matter of definition.

What a real comeback would take. I see three things. A credible security and peace message after 7 October, one that does not sound like 1995. A leader who stays for more than one cycle. And a bridge to the voters the left lost in the periphery, the Mizrahi and Russian-speaking and religious voters who left decades ago and have no reason to come back. None of those is easy. Golan is a former general and has the first. He is also one of the most polarizing figures in the race, which cuts against the third.

The counter-argument. Defenders of the left say it is wrong to count only its own party. The values live on in the center and the center is winning. Yashar leads the polls. Under this reading, the story is not disappearance. It is victory by dispersal. I find that half true. The ideas survived. The institution did not, and an idea without a party cannot pass a law.

Caveats: The causes above are my judgment, not a settled finding. Scholars disagree. The seat figures come from public election data and the Democrats' polling average comes from the nine polls from 24 Sept to 7 Oct covered in the Election Math article.

Sources: Wikipedia, Israeli Labor Party; Wikipedia, Meretz; Kenig and Rahat, "From 44 to 4: the electoral decline of the Israeli Labor Party, 1992-2022" (Hebrew University record); Eran Lerman, "Not Much Left", JNS.