Labour in Israel elects a centrist
THE ISRAELI Labour Party has elected as its new leader a telecoms millionaire who only joined the party six months ago.
Avi Gabbay, who won 52 per cent of members’ votes in a second poll, was little known to the wider Israeli public until he secured second place in the first round of the party primary last week.
He beat Amir Peretz, a former party leader and defence minister, who won the first round and was supported by much of the Labour establishment and the trade unions.
Mr Gabbay’s surprising achievement is seen as a victory over the party establishment and a win for Labour’s centrist wing over the much more leftwing option of Mr Peretz.
Mr Gabbay is not a member of the Knesset and is therefore in the rather unique position of being leader of the second-largest party in Israel but without the ability to serve as the official leader of the opposition.
A day after the result, Channel 2 and Channel 10 polls indicated a jump in popularity for Labour, passing Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid.
The survey puts Likud on 29 seats and the Zionist Union, which
includes the Labour Party, on 24 seats.
A newcomer not only to Labour, Mr Gabbay has only been in politics since 2014, when he helped Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon found his centre-right Kulanu Party.
He served for a year as environment minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, resigning in May 2016 over the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as defence minister.
He has offered Isaac Herzog, the former Labour leader who came third in the first round last week, the chance to remain in his Knesset position.
Labour members gambled on a virtually unknown figure to breathe life back into the party which founded the state of Israel but has not won an election since 1999.
Mr Gabbay, 50 years old and born in Jerusalem, is from a family of Likudvoting immigrants from Morocco. He served as an intelligence officer in the IDF and worked for five years in the Finance Ministry’s budget department.
He then spent 14 years in the largest telecoms company in Israel, Bezek, becoming its CEO at the age of 40.
While his rival, Mr Peretz, was supported in the second round by Mr Herzog, as well as the party’s former secretary-general and the boss of the Histadrut trade union federation, Mr Gabbay also had influential backers in former party leaders Ehud Barak and Shelly Yachimovich. The new leader will need his centrist credentials if he is to have any chance of restoring the party’s fortunes.
Mr Herzog led the party to a relatively strong showing in the 2015 election, winning 24 seats for the Zionist Union bloc, which includes Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah party. In the last two years, however, the party has plummeted in the polls, losing half its voters to the centrist Yesh Atid party led by Mr Lapid.
To win the next election, Labour under Mr Gabbay must convince these voters to return to the fold, as well as prising away a chunk of voters from Kulanu and Mr Netanyahu’s Likud.
In his victory speech in Tel Aviv on Monday night, Mr Gabbay announced: “Tomorrow we begin the campaign to change the government in Israel.”
He warned his supporters that “a difficult campaign awaits” and attacked Mr Netanyahu’s government of “dividing between right and left, between religious and secular, between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, between Jews and Arabs. Dividing us to keep on ruling.”
He took aim at the settlers, saying Israel “needs a government that will take care of Dimona, not only of [the settler outpost] Amona”.