A video of him trying painfully to give a speech in English to American Jewish activists became a hit. He was caricatured as a cabinet minister talking through a bullhorn – a union rabble-rouser with a thick Moroccan accent and a Zapata moustache pretending to be a statesman. And that was before the war in Lebanon.
Afterward, when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and military chief Dan Halutz were blamed for screwing up, Peretz was not just blamed for screwing up, he was laughed at for being stupid. The fatal image, one that will never leave him, was of him watching a military exercise through binoculars with the caps still on. Like a dumb, hot-headed Moroccan. Or, as Wikileaks quoted a U.S. diplomat cabling what he heard from Labor’s Yitzhak Herzog during the 2006 campaign, the “public perception of Peretz is [that he is] inexperienced, aggressive and Moroccan.” (Herzog denied having said this and the diplomat, Robert Danin, denied having heard it.) The problem is not so much that Peretz is Moroccan (or, to be more politically correct than is called for in Israel, born in Morocco). If he were, for instance, an eloquent, Moroccan-born history professor at Tel Aviv University like former Labor foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, his ethnic background wouldn’t hurt him, or anyway not much. It would be the same if Peretz had risen to the top of the military establishment, like Iranian-born Shaul Mofaz, who is number two to Tzipi Livni in Kadima. But Peretz is too much the “folkloric” Moroccan to be taken seriously for national leadership. His accent is too thick, he talks too loud, he gestures too broadly. He hardly ever wears a tie. He’s a man of the Histadrut workers’ committees, of strikes, of crowds of fired-up workers. He’s lived all his adult life in Sderot, which would be a giant plus for a more ‘representative” Israeli politician. For Peretz, it just bolsters his image as a Moroccan from the periphery, an outsider. (…)
