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Will Avi Gabbay Lead Israel’s Labor Party to a Comeback?

July 12 2017

On Monday, Avi Gabbay—a former telecommunications executive—won the race to be the new head of Israel’s Labor party, meaning that he would be prime minister in the event of an electoral victory for his party. A relative newcomer to politics, Gabbay only recently joined Labor, after spending a few years in the center-right Kulanu party and briefly serving as Benjamin Netanyahu’s environmental-protection minister. Michael Koplow explains the significance of Gabbay’s election:

For starters, Gabbay is Mizraḥi, born to Moroccan immigrant parents. . . . Until Menachem Begin’s 1977 victory, Israel was essentially a one-party state, and that party represented the Ashkenazi, socialist, secular, Labor Zionist elite. Begin’s election did many things, including ushering in four decades of right-wing dominance, but one of the most critical was empowering Mizraḥi Jews and giving them a voice. Begin was not himself Mizraḥi, but he openly represented a Mizraḥi constituency. . . .

Gabbay is not the first Mizraḥi Labor leader, but [if] the polling is accurate, he is going to siphon off votes from Likud, in no small part due to his background.

Gabbay also represents a break from Labor’s ideological past. . . . He is known for advocating populist economic policies during his brief time in politics, but he is decidedly not from the old Labor economic tradition. This too creates the potential for Labor to expand its pool of supporters, and to demonstrate that it understands the way in which it must craft economic policies that relate to the new economy. . . .

Israel is a center-right country, and the key to Labor returning to a position of power isn’t boosting its traditional turnout but [expanding] its base of support. Gabbay has the potential to capture new non-traditional Labor voters, and that is what makes his victory tantalizing to those who want to see Labor challenge Likud. . . . [None of this means] that he will be the next prime minister, or ever the prime minister. It does, however, mean that Labor may see itself back in a center-left coalition before too long.

Read more at Matzav Blog

More about: Avi Gabbay, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel & Zionism, Israeli politics, Labor Party, Mizrahi Jewry

 

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic