Will this be the week in which, after one particularly short term that lasted for a year and three months, Tamar Zandberg's career as Meretz party chairwoman comes to an end? Well, it depends who you ask. The coming week is set to be one of the most important in the party's history, which ever since the 2003 election, has found it hard to garner more than six Knesset seats.
This coming September, the veteran left-wing party could be wiped out entirely, and that it is precisely what a majority of its members are so afraid of. Some of them look forward to seeing Nitzan Horowitz knock Zandberg down to second place on the Knesset list and lead Meretz to form a broad alliance with a Labor-led left-wing bloc. Others argue that such a move will not likely make much of a difference. The fog should clear come Thursday night, when we learn who will head the party ahead of the coming election.
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On one hand, veteran Meretz party members Ilan Gilon and Michal Rozin have announced they will not support Zandberg at the party conference. On the other hand, the party's unofficial executor, Issawi Frej, the man who brought Zandberg to power the last time around thanks to support from the Druze-Arab sector, which succeeded in keeping the party above the electoral threshold in the last election, announced he would once again support Zandberg as party head. We must now, in typical Meretz fashion, add to this chaos the fact that it was decided that the party committee would be the one to select the chairman and formulate its list for the coming Knesset. This decision was made after a two-thirds majority was not reached on a vote over whether to hold primaries or to keep the current list in place.
This is nothing short of a failure for the party's three leaders: Zandberg, who supported broad primaries, and Gilon and Rozin, who preferred to stick with the current list rather than run for re-election. There was, however, one person who had something to gain from all this and that person is Horowitz, a former party member who announced he would run for party leadership and rushed to welcome the move.
"This is the first step on the path to renewal and the establishment of a broad camp, as I have committed to doing," Horowitz said. "I am convinced these elections will give Meretz a significant boost and a tailwind ahead of the general election."
'The party is dying'
At a town-hall event in Kiryat Ono last Saturday, Rozin fired the opening shot.
"I do not believe that we can do the same thing and expect different results," she explained. "That is why we should present a different female or male leader for the party ahead of the coming election."
Rozin's remarks sparked an ugly Twitter feud within the party, of the kind popular with the Left's political rivals.
"Michal, what are you scared of?" Frej asked her on Twitter. "Everyone should have the right to run for the list, and that is precisely what you are trying to prevent."
It was clear to Rozin that should Horowitz win, Frej would likely be knocked down one slot on the list, to fifth place, and probably have to watch the next Knesset's activities from the comfort of his living room.
"The opposite is true, Issawi," she replied. "I respect the more than 16,000 female and male voters who went out and voted for the Meretz list for Knesset just a few months ago. Let us focus on making Meretz big and not our slot within the list."
Frej of course, had contemplated running for party chair but ultimately decided against the idea.
There is, however, one thing that everyone in Meretz can agree on: The party is dying. The very fact that they have relinquished party primaries is a testament to the desire of many Meretz members to rid themselves of the current party heads.
Zandberg, who promised the party 10 Knesset seats, failed to do so at the moment of truth. "She made every possible mistake," a senior party official said. "At first, she said we need to rejuvenate the party, but later she froze the elections. One month ahead of the election, we all understood that Blue and White was draining votes from us and Labor. She did not respond. She had no strategy. On Election Day, we were lucky she left her house at the last minute [to campaign] and the Arabs woke up, otherwise she would have wiped the party off the map."
According to former party chairman Yossi Beilin, the party's past achievements were reached thanks to organized plans.
"When Meretz reached 12 Knesset seats, it wasn't some kind of miraculous event. Keep in mind that before that, it had 10 Knesset seats. It didn't come out of nowhere, and that is what people must remember."
The upcoming September election could see the party permanently disappear from the political arena. Let us recall that Meretz made its mark as a member of the coalition. Education ministers like Shulamit Aloni and Yossi Sarid left their marks and influenced the entire party.
But over the past decade, Meretz has started getting used to being an opposition party, which outside of shouting is barely able to accomplish anything. Israel's political history has shown us that such parties are destined to disappear.
That is why there are increasing calls for Meretz to join forces with the Labor party, which is also recalibrating its course. Before the last election, Zandberg had sought to unite her party with Labor. Rozin had been tasked with negotiating toward a possible alliance, which began and ended with just one phone call to Itzik Shmuli, who told her, "There's no point in meeting. [Labor leader] Avi [Gabbay] thinks that together, we cannot increase our power." Rozin insisted that perhaps it would still be worth meeting, but Shmuli hurriedly ended the call.
Gabbay's political career has since wound up in the trash bin of history, and it is Shmuli who is now fighting a war of succession against fellow Labor members Stav Shafir and Amir Peretz. The division is clear: Should Shafir or Shmuli win the Labor party primaries, there is a very good chance they will unite with Meretz. Should Peretz or even former Prime Minister Ehud Barak decide to step back in the ring, such a move will be out of the question. In the meantime, senior Labor party officials like Shelly Yachimovich, who do not intent to run for party head, have not ruled out an alliance with Meretz now that they have succeeded in getting rid of Gabbay.
In the Meretz party, by contrast, they are sending a clearer message on the subject.
"There is no substitute for Meretz," Zandberg told her fellow party members this week. "Once again, the Labor party is contemplating whether it is the Left. If we run together, there will be no deliberation. In the last election, we saw how our public thinks first of all about the national moment of emergency and replacing [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. Our contribution to this effort is a Meretz that knows how to look for unifications, broadens the ranks, [creating] a broad left-wing front, and at the same time brings our assets to any such partnership – a party that knows both how to look for alliances but also preserve its uniqueness."
So it seems an alliance is definitely a possibility, the question is whether Zandberg will be the one tasked with leading such a move.
If the previous election was decided by the Arab and Druze vote, this time it is clear the party will be returning to its source, leaving the Tel Aviv cafes for the kibbutzim where many of Meretz's prominent lawmakers – who contributed to the party's characterization as one working the soil – hail from. Everyone is in agreement that the kibbutzim will decide what the party will look like in the near future, which is why it is worth dwelling on Horowitz's return. On the face of things, as a privileged Ashkenazi Jew, he has nothing new to offer. But within the party itself, he is clearly favored to win the party's primaries. Horowitz's great advantage, it seems, is that he represents a combination of the old-school Meretz Left with the new look the party has sought to adopt for a long time now.
Moderate winds of change
The Meretz party committee is comprised of some 1,000 voters, 15% of whom will stand behind Frej when they are called to duty. While Frej has already announced his support for Zandberg, Horowitz brings with him voters from the kibbutzim and moshavim, but also a respectable number of voters from the center who supported him when he was humiliated in the Tel Aviv municipal elections. Rozin and Gilon support a run by Horowitz, as does the Druze representative on the Meretz party list, Ali Salalah.
In the Meretz party, Horowitz is considered a representative of the moderate Left, someone who emphasizes social issues and thinks ahead about joining up with the bigger bloc, even if that means bending their ideology as far as the occupation or Israeli Arabs are concerned. Horowitz could be an ideal partner for Labor or Barak, should the latter decide to return to the political arena.
Just to make things clear, while Zandberg has spoken of a "technical union," Horowitz doesn't deny he is talking about an ideological union into one relatively moderate left-wing bloc.
"We need to come together and not rule it [the ideological union] out automatically" is a mantra Horowitz is oft to repeat. "I certainly aspire to unite with the forces closest to me," he has said. Already in the last election, Horowitz did not conceal his desire to unite Meretz with Labor.
"There's no doubt we need to unite. There has been this dynamic throughout history," according to Beilin. "On one hand, there were Labor party heads who were doves but were scared of being identified with Meretz, and on the other hand, there were leaders in Meretz like Zehava Galon, who were scared of working toward an alliance with Labor and opposed it. In the end, it's unavoidable, and it doesn't matter who is at the head of Labor or the head of Meretz."
Born in Rishon Letzion and a lawyer by trade, Horowitz entered politics after years of working as a journalist. He was a military reporter for Army Radio, who later served as a foreign news reporter and editor at Haaretz and at the now defunct Channel 10. Ahead of the 2009 election, Horowitz made the decision to join the Meretz party, where he ended up on the third spot on the party's list.
During his time as a lawmaker, Horowitz established the gay caucus as well as the Caucus for Civic Equality and Pluralism, both of which he headed. He served as chairman of the Committee for Foreign Workers and was a member of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. In Dec. 2014, Horowitz announced he would not run for Knesset, having learnt his lesson in his defeat in the local election.
Now, of course, he has decided to return to the political arena, emphasizing that he is a "secular and socialist Zionist, and the State of Israel should be a Jewish and democratic country," in what could be an attempt to turn the ship around before it collides with the iceberg known as the electoral threshold.
As Beilin sees it, "The bottom line is that Meretz is important to the entire bloc. If Meretz is wiped out, Labor will be dealt a fatal blow, and Blue and White will also sustain damage. And in fact the entire bloc will lose its definition. There's no choice but to work toward unification in order to save the party and save the bloc."
