The Infighter

Whether Israel's opposition Labor Party succeeds in recapturing power from Menachem Begin's Likud government depends very much on the performance in the next seven weeks of a low-keyed and surprisingly mild-mannered veteran political infighter: Shimon Peres, 57, a longtime political organizer who has been at the heart of the Labor organization for 30 years. Only five months ago, Peres defended his leadership against a challenge by former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, with whom he had feuded bitterly—and publicly—for years. Since then he has spent almost all of his energies trying to repair the...