Labor Chief Plans To Hide And Hope No One Notices

Gabbay intends to ride out the 21st Knesset by attracting as little attention as possible and quietly leaving politics.

Tel Aviv, April 30 – The leader of one of Israel’s once-great political parties, now at a nadir in its representation, aims to avoid attention for spearheading the greatest decline in the country’s electoral history by not setting foot into the parliamentary compound, party insiders disclosed Monday.

Labor Party Chairman Avi Gabbay revealed to his top aides over the weekend that whatever the composition of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s next Likud-led coalition, he plans to stay at his home in the North Tel Aviv neighborhood of Tel Baruch when the next parliamentary session begins in several weeks, rather than face his Opposition colleagues or an inquisitive media eager to hold him to account for the party’s unprecedented fall from 13 seats to 6, compared to 56 in 1969.

“It’s been a difficult few months for Avi,” admitted one aide. “He’s not going to deny all responsibility for what happened, but there was only so much he could do to plug the hemorrhaging of voters to [the center-left] Blue and White [Party]. But whether or not others, even in Labor itself, understand that, the knives are out, the wolves are circling, and there’s basically no point in Avi subjecting himself to all that awkwardness. So he’s going to keep himself far away from the Knesset, and since there are so few Labor lawmakers making their presence felt there anyway, his absence will hardly register.”

At its peak two decades after Israel’s founding, Labor’s 56 seats almost secured an outright majority in the Knesset, the closest any party has ever come to 61. Since then, however, Labor has lost steady ground to Likud and its right-wing allies. The violent, bloody, and deadly failure of the Oslo Peace Process of the 1990’s brought about the electorate’s disillusionment with the assumptions behind that flagship project of the Israeli Left, leaving Labor, once the Left’s main delegation, without a convincing platform or vision to counter that of Likud’s skepticism of Palestinian willingness to achieve peace. Gabbay, himself a former Likud minister, hoped to rejuvenate Labor, but succeeded only in alienating allies such as Zionist Union alliance partner Tzipi Livni, thus driving her HaTnua Party constituents to defect to Blue and White, which, while it failed to articulate a coherent vision beyond “just not Bibi” Netanyahu, at least convinced many voters on the Left that it possessed the security gravitas that Labor no longer projected. Gabbay, according to aides, intends to ride out the 21st Knesset by attracting as little attention as possible and quietly leaving politics.

“We’re not sure what will happen to Labor,” conceded a second aide, “but it hasn’t made a difference in years anyway.”

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