The week Avi Gabbay lost control
How the Labor Party leader went from seeking to shunning Likud voters
Avi Gabbay was elected leader of the Labor Party and Zionist Union with great fanfare last July and was immediately hailed as the ultimate alternative to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who could take votes away from Netanyahu’s Likud.
He is a self-made millionaire whose family voted Likud. He is the son of Moroccan immigrants and was raised in a poor transit camp in Jerusalem.
He proved his integrity and ability to sacrifice himself for ideals when he quit Netanyahu’s government to protest the prime minister replacing defense minister Moshe Ya’alon with Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman.
He shifted Labor rightward by saying he wouldn’t evacuate settlements, expressing doubt that there was a partner on the Palestinian side, condemning the Left for “forgetting what it means to be Jewish,” and pronouncing that “the whole land of Israel is ours” because it was promised to Abraham by God.
Labor under Gabbay rose to more than 20 seats in the polls, after floundering under its previous leader, Isaac Herzog. But less than a year later, Labor is getting only 10 to 13 mandates in the polls, losing half the 24 Herzog won in the 2015 election. A Midgam poll broadcast on Channel Ten last Friday night found that only 7% of Israelis believe Gabbay is the most suitable candidate to be prime minister.
That same day, Ben Caspit reported in the Maariv newspaper that Gabbay invited former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz to be the party’s candidate for prime minister. According to the report, Gabbay would remain the chairman of the party, but Gantz, who internal Labor polls show would win 10 more seats than Gabbay, would face off against Netanyahu.
Although Gabbay’s spokeswoman refuted the report early in the morning, the article kicked off an especially bad week for the Labor leader, in which he endured bad news every day.
In one week, Gabbay was proven to have lied about not running a smear campaign against Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid; embarrassingly suggested the Western Wall belongs to Christians; faced harsh attacks from former Labor leader Amir Peretz; and endured calls for polygraph tests about leaks from a closed-door party meeting.
Virtually the entire party leadership ganged up on Gabbay to stop his move to prevent elections for the Labor central committee, which could make it harder for him to solidify his control over the backbone of the party.
The week culminated with an interview with Army Radio Thursday morning in which host Yaron Deckel started by asking him if there was any pit he had not fallen into.
What all those incidents have in common is that they all indicated Gabbay’s inability to win over voters from the Right in general and the Likud in particular – the very ability for which Labor voters elected him.
The problem was not that Labor admitted it was behind the smear campaign of Lapid after Gabbay said over and over again that he wasn’t, on live TV. He said in the Army Radio interview that his staff did it, not him, and it is possible that his workers paid for anti-Lapid social media without telling their boss.
The problem is that Gabbay or his staff were targeting Lapid in the first place. He is supposed to want Lapid to succeed, because they ostensibly come from the same political camp, and they are supposed to work together to unseat Netanyahu and take votes away from Likud.
The problem is not that Gabbay mistakenly told the AJC Global Forum that the Western Wall belongs equally to “ultra-Orthodox or Orthodox, Conservative or Reform, affiliated or unaffiliated, Christians or non-Christians.”
The problem is that he revealed that he cannot understand a complex problem that divides Israelis and Diaspora Jews, and that he is turning off religious voters who would be just as angry about him giving the Wall to Reform Jews as to Christians.
The problem is not that he fought with Peretz over technical matters in the Labor Party that no one outside the party understands, or that Peretz said Gabbay has led Labor to a new low and “should devote his efforts to returning the massive amount of people who have run away from the party this year.”
The problem is that it is Peretz’s supporters in the periphery whom Gabbay needs to be embracing. Peretz explained how Gabbay’s technical moves were inflating the power of Labor’s Tel Aviv branch at the expense of branches in the North and South, by giving representation in party institutions based on where Labor’s votes came from in the last election. So much for shifting the party’s priorities.
The polygraph tests and calls for hunting the sources of leaks also do not bode well when facing off against Netanyahu, whose party’s activists and grassroots adore him and are united behind him.
When Gabbay’s associates are asked what went well for him this week, they note successful tours of the Gaza periphery and West Bank security barrier. They say he had a terrific meeting with gay activists in Tel Aviv and claim that the crowd at AJC liked him more than Lapid.
While very nice, none of those things will give him one more vote from the Center-Right. Asked if there is any sign that could soon change, Gabbay’s people point out praise he received this week from right-wing comic Nadav Abukasis.
That is no laughing matter. If Gabbay does not find new ways to steal votes from the Likud soon, Labor could replace him before the next election, and the joke could end up being on him. •