Labor Party Chair Avi Gabbay. (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
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The tenure of Avi Gabbay as Labor Party leader will end on July 2, almost exactly two years after he was elected to the post, after he announced on Tuesday that he would not run in the July 2 Labor leadership race.
Gabbay had resisted calls to resign since he led Labor’s fall from 24 to six seats in the April 9 election. But he wrote in a lengthy Facebook post on Tuesday that he would not try to stay on longer by running in the primary.
“I will not run for leader of the party next month,” Gabbay wrote. “The direction was already clear the night of the last election, but big decisions must not be made in a time of a storm, so I waited until the issue would be relevant to decide and make an announcement.”
Gabbay is still expected to run for Knesset, whether Wednesday’s Labor convention decides to keep the current list of Knesset candidates for the September 17 repeat election or hold a new primary for the list among the party’s 60,000 members.
The former businessman and minister with the Kulanu Party won the July 4, 2017, Labor leadership race with great fanfare, defeating MK Amir Peretz in a run-off race they had reached after winning more votes than six other candidates.
Gabbay ran a campaign in which he promised not to enter Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, but after the election, he negotiated a deal with Netanyahu and said over the weekend that he still regrets not joining Netanyahu’s coalition and preventing the new election.
Candidates for Labor leader are expected to include former prime minister Ehud Barak; former IDF deputy chief of staff Yair Golan; current MKs Itzik Shmuli, Stav Shaffir and Amir Peretz; and former Labor MKs Eitan Cabel, Danny Yatom and Danny Atar.
Shaffir said Tuesday that Netanyahu’s greatest accomplishment was “killing Israeli politics.” Speaking at a conference of the Meitavim Institute and Davis Institute on democracy and foreign policy at Hebrew University, she vowed to present an ideological alternative to the Right.
“We can no longer use the excuse that the public moved rightward and continue taking part in enabling the crumbling of Israeli democracy,” Shaffir said.
Cabel responded to Gabbay’s announcement that he won’t run by saying that it was “too late, which made the announcement as pathetic as he is.”
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