Israeli Labor chief’s anti-Arab strategy
Comments of Israeli Labor chair Avi Gabbay against Israeli Arab Labor Knesset member Zouheir Bahloul reflects Gabbay’s strategy of abandoning left-wing values to seek right-wing votes.
Zionist Camp party leader Avi Gabbay and Knesset member Zouheir Bahloul exchanged accusations this week. But the clash between Gabbay and Bahloul, the feeble reconciliation they declared and the silence of the party’s legislators over Gabbay’s public hazing of Bahloul amount to a dangerous milestone in Jewish-Arab relations. They are also a stain on the annals of the veteran left-wing party, whose senior members lambasted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his 2015 election day warning that the Arabs were “flocking in droves” to the ballot boxes, accusing him of incitement against the country’s Arab community.
The incitement against the Arab minority (21%) by Netanyahu, by Israel’s right-wing parties and even by centrist Yesh Atid party chair Yair Lapid (who coined a dismissive name for Arab legislators, calling them the “Zoabis” after controversial lawmaker Haneen Zoabi) is to be expected given their habit of translating Jewish-Arab alienation into populist name-calling. This week, Gabbay — who heads the left-leaning Labor Party and the Zionist Camp faction of which Labor is the senior member — contributed his part.
