Israel’s Labor Party is seeking a fresh image

Vote demonstrates break from blue-blood roots

JERUSALEM — As Israel’s Labor Party prepares to choose its new leader, it already has taken a big step toward shedding its image as a bastion of liberal, upper-class Israelis of European descent.

A party primary on Tuesday chose two candidates of Middle Eastern heritage as finalists for next week’s runoff, handily defeating a trio of established blue-bloods associated with the old guard. In a strategy that could spell trouble for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the party is hoping its next leadership will appeal to the ethnic working-class voters who make up the core of Netanyahu’s support.

Labor still has a long way to go before returning to its glory days as the movement that led Israel to independence in 1948 and dominated Israeli politics for three decades. But both candidates for Labor leadership, Amir Peretz and Avi Gabbay, have made it clear that they are aiming to rebrand their party.

“You have proven that you are an open party that truly calls on new publics to join it,” Gabbay, the seventh of eight children born to immigrants from Morocco, told his supporters after the first-round vote. “Choosing me is a call to new constituencies saying: ‘We want you to join us.’”

The party’s early leaders of European, or Ashkenazi, descent took a paternalistic attitude toward Jewish immigrants from Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Many of these immigrants, known as Mizrahi Jews, were sent to shantytown transit camps and largely sidelined.

They found their political savior in the Likud Party’s Menachem Begin, who cultivated an outsiders’ alliance that appealed to their sense of deprivation. With massive backing from Mizrahi Jews, he swept to power in 1977. In many ways, Labor has been fighting back ever since, rarely wrestling control from Likud.

Opinion polls show the Labor Party in the doldrums, ranked just fourth or fifth in size, and observers fear many of its traditional voters could once again bolt, this time to the centrist Yesh Atid party and its telegenic leader, Yair Lapid.

But Peretz, a former union leader who has pushed social issues like raising the minimum wage, says he can expand the party’s base considerably. He hails from Sderot, a former development town that borders Gaza and has been battered by both rockets and unemployment and has long complained of government neglect. In the 2015 election, Likud earned 43 percent of the vote in Sderot, to just 7 percent for Labor’s bloc.

“I’m proud of being born in Morocco and glad that Middle Eastern Jews see my breakthrough as something they are proud of,” the 65-yearold Peretz told a news conference Wednesday.

In contrast to Peretz, the 50-yearold Gabbay is a political newcomer.

A former telecom executive, Gabbay nonetheless stresses his humble beginnings and was accompanied to Tuesday’s vote by his mother.