The Reading 3 event hall in Tel Aviv is considered one of the best places to take in a show. It's usually heavy metal rock bands that barely manage to fill the venue to its 800 –person maximum capacity, that or either Mizrahi singers who pack it to capacity. But on Tuesday night, the Labor party was happy to see it half full.
When party leader Avi Gabbay showed up, there were more media typed in the hall than activists. A group of young people, party members know had ever heard of like Emilie Moatti, or will soon forget, like Revital Swid were among those who remained/who were still standing around Gabbay when he took the stage to deliver his good and fitting speech, but was comparable to the speech delivered by Edward Smith, the legendary captain of the Titanic just before it drowned in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. But while Smith asked his officers to "be British," Gabbay asked to maintain the country's Zionist Left: "I did all I could," he said.
Gabbay who encountered the iceberg known as the Israeli reality quite some time ago, did not for a minute hint at his retirement even though the Labor party, it seems, is now selling goods a majority of the public is just not interested in buying at this stage in time. But we will return to Gabbay, one of the most tragic figures in the history of the Labor party, later on.
We must begin our story on the night before the elections. The Hapoel Tel Aviv Football Club, once the flag that was raised on that same magnificent Titanic called Labor, took the field in a match against the Beitar Jerusalem team, the most political team in Israel's history. Hapoel is no longer the team it once was, and Beitar? It's identification with the Likud party has also undergone a turnaround in recent years: some of its fans have turned to the religious Zionist parties, others to Shas, and still others to Otzma Yehudit (which merged into the Union of Right-Wing Parties). For a majority of the team's supporters, the Likud party represents the political center.
On the day before the game, in which Hapoel Tel Aviv would go on to lose in the last minute, the team's management convened for a meeting. On the agenda: the team's May Day events, International Workers' Day. At one time, the streets of Tel Aviv would be filled with flags and banners representing the hammer and sickle, and out of the Histadrut labor federation building would emerge processions accompanied by drummers and dancers. After Haim Ramon, the man who was a partner to the destruction of the Histadrut labor federation, the Labor party and Hapoel Tel Aviv in the span of one lifetime, completed his work, all of these organizations were left in a broken trough, and in such a state, who could be expected to have the energy to mark the first of May?
"Since we entered this story called Hapoel Tel Aviv, it was important for me to renew this tradition, and this is the second year we will be marking events for May 1. A football club is not just for coming, playing and leaving, but something deeper," so tells me Boaz Toshav, who represents one of the owners of the team. I have known him for 20 years. He is the opposite of the "ugly Israeli." He served in an elite military unit, excelled in his academic studies at Tel Aviv University and has contributed a great deal to the community. On April 9, he voted for the Meretz party because he felt that it was the only party that suited his worldview. Sometimes it seems that Hapoel Tel Aviv, just like Meretz and Labor, is being reduced to Tel Aviv, Jaffa and Ramat Hasharon on one side and Bat Yam on the other, the physical borders of the city it represents. For the Reds, this is something to be proud of – a small, but cohesive family.
On Election Day, it seemed that the real "gevalt" campaign was being waged at Meretz's campaign headquarters. The pressure was so great you could feel it in the air. Meretz leader Tamar Zandberg was running around from place to place, including in the Arab villages, in an attempt to salvage/save the life of the historic party but also her own political life. Party activists got the message that this time, things were more dramatic than usual. Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz "took our votes" – that was the message that was relayed already in the afternoon hours and was also voiced even next to the polling stations in the center and north of Tel Aviv. The in-depth surveys talked about a struggle for the electoral threshold. By 9:00 p.m. Tel Aviv's Tzavta Theater, which just like Reading 3, was not nearly half full, a gloomy atmosphere prevailed that someone cried out was reminiscent of a funeral, and everyone there broke out in laughter.
Here, too, there were more media types than Meretz activists. But when the exit polls were announced, it was hard not to notice the immense joy of Zandberg and her fellow party member Michal Rozin when the media figures realized would make it into the Knesset but there was no real story to report, they packed up. "Thank you to all of Meretz's male and female voters, Israel's Left. Thank you to the thousands of female and male activists who were on their feet all day in Meretz's name, fighting for equality, justice, peace and democracy," Zandberg, who in light of the party's history surely understands that she will no longer be at the helm of the party in another two years.
On my way from the Tzavta Theater to Reading 3, I notice that the city is empty. A group of young people has taken advantage of the relative quiet to consume a cocktail of vodka and energy drinks. On the banks of the Yarkon River, a group of haredim look out at the water. The sense of disappointment in the Labor party is equal only to the backstabbing atmosphere that is in the air. Labor's Eitan Cabel, according to reports, is giving the performance of his life in the election broadcasts and as the phoenix sharpening its talons to pierce what remains of Gabbay's short-lived political career,
One of the more well-known activists draws my attention to "who is not here." On one hand, there's Stav Shaffir and Itzik Shmuley, whose putsch, according to activists, has been in the works for some time. Those who saw Shaffir walking along Tel Aviv's Rothschild Boulevard in the last few hours of the election, trying with all her might to fight for the party that was, from the outset, clearly only going to earn Knesset seats in the single-digits, could understand that this was the consciousness of an oppositionist and a party that will remain so in the coming years.
On the other hand, even the old players Amir Peretz, Shelly Yachimovich and Cabel are preparing the party for the day after. Fellow Labor party member Tal Russo, who was sent to address the media that had swarmed the hall, later earned a big hug from Peretz, who sat him down at the bar. If Russo plays his cards right, he could be the consensus candidate of both the younger and the older generation, one moment after Gabbay's career comes to an end. And that is something about which everyone is in agreement/agrees.
"We warned that Netanyahu could stay here. We warned that our camp's votes could bring in lawmakers who are members of the ideological hard Right. People who just/simply don't represent the positions of our camp. Despite tonight's results, something good has happened to the Labor party in recent months. Something that is deeper than the … mandates. In recent months, we built something new, in a party that needed renewal." By the time Gabbay finished his remarks, there were a few young men and women who had tears in their eyes/shed a few tears. There is something beautiful/nice about a group of young people that still believes in ideology and concerns itself with trying to bring values into Israel's deteriorating politics.
And yet/nevertheless, it might have been better had they approached the old, lonely man who was walking around, looking for people to talk to. His name was Alex Goldfarb, and he is 71 years old. At one point, the dying party on stage persuaded him to defect from the right-wing Tzomet party to Labor by offering him to become deputy Housing and Construction minister, but it's doubtful anyone would make any kind of deal with Gabbay at this time.
In phone calls I made in preparation of this article on the morning after, those on both sides of the battered Left that succeeded in getting some sleep had woken up and were busy talking about a quick union in order to consolidate some kind of power ahead of the next elections. Meretz of course had called for such a merger in this current election campaign, but Gabbay had issued Shmuley a directive and didn't even bother to meet with Rozin.
This time, it was different. Yachimovich, the person who was supposed to be working with Cabel and Peretz, will try to collect the pieces and push the young people and Gabbay off to different places, has already begun to act on the subject out of the sense that maybe with 10 joint Knesset seats this will be the third largest party, they will be able to make the lemons into lemonade, which as things currently stand, seems like an fictional/imaginary scenario in the egoist terms of the Israeli Left.
