Yair Golan, a former member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and Israel Defense Forces deputy chief, achieved a commanding victory in the Labor party primary on Tuesday, winning 95.15% of the votes cast. Golan, who has pledged to unify all leftist parties in Israel, defeated longtime Labor activist Azi Nagar, billionaire socialist Avi Shaked, and attorney Itai Leshem, none of which reached even 2% of the vote. Golan will replace Merav Michaeli, who resigned as chairwoman late last year.
Good luck to Yair and the party
A total of 31,353 Labor members, or 60.6% of eligible voters, participated in the primary. Michaeli congratulated Golan, tweeting, “Good luck to Yair and the party.” Yair Lapid, chairman of the centrist Yesh Atid party, also extended his congratulations, emphasizing Golan’s patriotism and the need for cooperative efforts for the country.
In his victory address, Golan called for unity among Labor, the further left Meretz party, protest organizations, and those disillusioned by other parties. He announced plans to form a negotiation team to create a new leftist alliance. Golan, 61, highlighted the need to combat corruption and build a ruling party, not just a niche group.
Meretz Secretary-General Tomer Reznik expressed readiness to unite with Labor, pending discussions after Golan’s win. Labor MK Naama Lazimi and Gilad Kariv praised Golan’s victory, emphasizing the need for a united democratic camp to guide Israel’s future.
The Labor party was once at the forefront of the Israeli political stage. The political forerunners of Labor, in their multiple incarnations and under several names as they moved in and out of alliances with satellite parties, set the dominant tone for Zionism in the prestate era and became synonymous with the young state after its founding. At its peak in 1969, the Alignment, a Labor-led alliance with the further-left Mapam party, briefly held 63 seats, an unprecedented majority in the 120-seat Knesset.
But with the 1973 Yom Kippur War, several corruption scandals, a decline in socialist values, and changing demographics in the country, Labor’s power began to fade. Since 1977, the right-wing Likud has dominated Israeli politics, with Labor and a few centrist parties only briefly heading government coalitions.
Michaeli was one in a string of party leaders who failed to make Labor relevant in Israel’s changing political discourse. In Tuesday’s primary, only about 50,000 people were eligible to vote for the leadership of the legacy political party.
Although the next general election in Israel is scheduled for October 2026, polls currently show the Labor party will not pass the 3.25% electoral threshold needed to enter parliament. Meretz polls just above the threshold.
The apparent demise of the left signals a new era for politics in the country.
Aligned with a global process is an Israeli left-wing that is fading.
“Aligned with a global process is an Israeli left-wing that is fading. Within it are movements that focus on very progressive issues like gender, but less on social welfare and issues that concern the lower socioeconomic levels of society,” said Dina Dayan, a social activist and member of the Labor party. “In Israel, this process is more visible, and the left has become less and less relevant.”
Avrum Burg, a former member of the Knesset who also served as speaker of the house, once belonged to the Labor party. “The party has expired, it is done, its function is over,” Burg told The Media Line. “Like any other consumer product, it’s no longer needed.”
The party has expired, it is done, its function is over
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During her two-year stint as head of the Labor party, Michaeli’s trademark was using feminine verbs rather than the more customary masculine inflections (Hebrew is a gendered language). Dayan told The Media Line, “The left has nothing to sell to people living in the periphery. The single mom struggling to survive couldn’t care less if someone used masculine or feminine vocabulary. The more progressive and delusional the left became, the more it shrank.”
Israelis have in recent decades gradually leaned more to the right, with no prime ministers from Labor since 2001. Now, amid a major war with Hamas and with other fronts threatening to combust, the process could be accelerating.
With Meretz and Labor now on the verge of disappearing (Meretz did disappear from the Knesset in the last election, when it failed to reach the threshold), even joining with the parties representing Arab citizens of Israel means the left might amount to less than a sixth of the Knesset seats. The left has become a small, quiet lobby rather than a political bloc with influence.
Dayan projects neither Meretz nor the Labor will pass the threshold in the coming election, which many believe will be held before October 2026 due to the political unrest and public dismay with the current government’s handling of the war.
Burg agrees.
“It doesn’t really matter if they make it or not,” he said. “Neither have the potential to be in the government, and they do not move a single vote from the right-wing bloc to the opposing bloc. In the best case, they are an employment arrangement for their members.
Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has for years accused his opponents on the left of weakness in the face of Israel’s many enemies. Calling someone a “leftist” almost became a curse during those years. Developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even before the current war, made Netanyahu’s work easier. There have been no peace negotiations since 2014.
The eruption of the war and the unyielding stance of Hamas have further distanced the possibility of resuming talks. The traditional left in Israel was a champion of conducting negotiations and of the two-state solution, a notion that the right has balked at. Even before the current war, according to Pew Research polls, only a minority of Israelis believed that a two-state solution was possible.
At the same time, the center of the Israeli political map has grown, taking a chunk of its power from the left.
Parties such as Yesh Atid and Blue and White that do not have leftist ideologies have emerged in recent years. They are now Netanyahu’s most formidable opponents, especially former Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who leads Blue and White and is far ahead of Netanyahu in recent polls.
“Their economic ideology is far from the left,” said Dayan. “The right is very strong, and there is no alternative. There is no change on the horizon because the left has failed to bring the tidings of a social welfare state and equality. What we are hearing is just progressive craziness.”
When Netanyahu entered office in 2009, Israelis were recuperating from years of the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising that cost a great number of lives on both sides. For many Israelis, that pre-existing trauma grew after Hamas terrorists stormed the Israeli border on October 7, killing approximately 1,200 people.
That intifada arose after Israelis and the Palestinians in the early 1990s signed the Oslo Accords, an agreement meant to end the armed conflict between the two and eventually see the establishment of a Palestinian state. However, a final settlement eluded the negotiators, and the Second Intifada followed in 2000-2005. The bloodshed pushed many Israelis towards a more hawkish position.
Politicians on the left did not catch up then, and even more so now.
“The [current] war has made Israeli society very coherent. It all went to the right,” said Eran Vigoda-Gadot, a professor of public administration and political science at the University of Haifa. “What remains of the left is fragments of an idea of utopia. The war made it very clear to Israelis that they are living in a neighborhood that deems them to live by their sword forever.”
A survey published Tuesday by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs showed that 64% of Israelis are against the establishment of a Palestinian state. A breakdown of the survey showed that, even among people who associated themselves with the left wing, 24% were against a Palestinian state.
“The left hasn’t sobered up and remains fixated on ideas that were relevant in the 1990s,” Dayan said. “They are disconnected. Everyone but the left woke up. … The left has become almost anti-Zionist, continuing to entrench itself, making it irrelevant.”
“Most Israelis understand, especially after the 7th of October, that Israel isn’t Switzerland,” she added.
Yair Golan, the big winner in Tuesday’s primary, has a history of controversial statements. In 2016, he compared Israel’s conduct in the West Bank to that of Nazi Germany.
A few years later, he called Jewish settlers who rioted against Palestinians in the West Bank “subhumans.” An outpouring of criticism and condemnation followed, positioning him on the fringes of the already almost ostracized Israeli left.
On October 7, Golan, a former senior Israeli military commander, rushed to the scene of Hamas’ attack and rescued partygoers in his car. He was praised across the political map for his bravery, but the chances of this being translated into high ratings in a national election are remote.
“He [Golan] needs to be a very special kind of magician in order to make it,” Vigoda-Gadot told The Media Line. “The best chances of the Labor party are to be at the fringes of the political stage, and even those chances are slim.”
The leaders of the left bloc either ignored the Palestinian issue, choosing more progressive agendas to highlight, or conveyed idealistic messages that fell on the deaf ears of jaded Israelis. Either way, the electoral cost was high and could end the country’s traditional left-wing bloc.
Netanyahu had also tried to sideline the Palestinian issue, and did so successfully for many years, but the events of October 7 proved this approach was not sustainable.
“The left essentially adopted the right-wing paradigm that the Palestinian issue doesn’t exist,” said Burg, who in 2022 established a political party called All Its Citizens, which aims to be a home for both Arabs and Israelis. “If and when there will be renewed negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, it will be because of the new circumstances that have emerged since the war and in the world. The Labor party will be but a yawn in such an occurrence.”