Labor’s rise from three seats to seven, according to the preliminary results of Tuesday’s election, is a step along the way to Labor returning to be a ruling party, Labor leader Merav Michaeli said Wednesday at a faction meeting in Tel Aviv.
Michaeli said she hoped Labor would rise from seven seats to eight in the final results, following the counting of the double ballots of voters in hospitals and nursing homes, emissaries, soldiers, prisoners and those sick and quarantined due to the coronavirus.
“We want to get Nachman back in the Knesset,” Michaeli said, referring to former Labor MK Nachman Shai, who was eighth on the Labor list.
Shai, who was Michaeli’s commander in Army Radio 30 years ago, said she succeeded in reviving Labor, because she is talented, did great work and had good luck Shai said it cannot be taken for granted that the courts allowed Labor to hold primaries for its leader and list that went well for Michaeli and that the parties of Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai and former MK Ofer Shelah failed.
“Everything Merav tried succeeded,” Shai said. “Politicians need luck to succeed, and she has it.”
But the final results could have the opposite effect and rather than bring in Shai, could lower Labor from seven to six, which would leave out Labor’s controversial seventh candidate, Ibtisam Mara’ana.
Mara’ana is an award-winning Muslim Arab filmmaker whose films have highlighted the suffering of Arab-Israelis. She is from the Arab village of Fureidis, near Haifa, and is married to a Jewish man. Her candidacy was initially disqualified due to her past extreme statements.
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Michaeli expressed satisfaction at bringing into the Knesset both Mara’ana and Rabbi Gilad Kariv, the first reform rabbi to serve in the Knesset.
“The presence of a Reform rabbi in the Knesset is a major milestone in the long journey of the non-Orthodox streams into the Israeli mainstream, and I am honored to do it as a part of the Labor party,” Kariv said. “Considering the fact that [extremist right-wing] Rabbi Meir Kahane’s successors are now rooted in the Israeli political scene, the voice of progressive Zionism and liberal Judaism is today essential more than ever.”
Michaeli called upon voters in the Center-Left to “return home” to Labor and join the party, which is in the midst of a membership drive.
Shai expressed disappointment that current results do not put him in the Knesset after campaigning in Labor’s primary from the US struggling to make it back in the country while Ben-Gurion Airport was shut down.
“But it’s not over until it’s over,” he said.
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