Ex-environment minister joins Labor, likely to seek leadership

Former environmental protection minister Avi Gabbay, who resigned from the government earlier this year and quit the coalition’s Kulanu party, announced Thursday he had joined the Labor Party.

Party sources said Gabbay would likely contend for the party leadership, posing a challenge to Labor chief Isaac Herzog.

Gabbay tendered his resignation at the end of May, after Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman became defense minister in a coalition shuffle that also saw former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon quit politics in protest.

In a statement on his new website, in which he intimated his intention to run for the Labor leadership, Gabbay said that since his resignation “more and more [people] see that [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, the government and its leadership, they’ve just lost direction.”

Gabbay resigned in protest of Liberman’s appointment and launched a scathing attack on the coalition, accusing it of leading Israel along a path to destruction, wrecking US ties and silencing dissent on the offshore national gas deal and other matters.

At the time, he said the removal of Ya’alon, a former IDF chief of staff, as defense minister and his replacement by Liberman was a step too far. “The ouster of a professional, temperate defense minister, who just this year managed to calm a bubbling [Palestinian] uprising, was a move I could not be party to,” Gabbay said late last month.

On his new website, Gabbay criticized the Netanyahu government’s “obsession with closing the [new] public broadcasting authority” and “unchecked aggression against the media,” as well as the Regulation Bill that would retroactively legalize settlements and outpost in the West Bank.

Former party leaders Ehud Barak and Shelly Yachimovich jumped to lavish praise on the newcomer to the opposition party. Barak, a one-time Labor prime minister, sniped at Netanyahu in a tweet, writing: “Another reason for Netanyahu to tremble, and rightly so. Avi Gabbay is a natural and exceptional leader. Big and good news for Labor and the public. I wish you great success.”

Yachimovich wrote on Twitter that Gabbay “made us very happy” by joining the party, calling him “a capable and worthy person.”

Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who served in the cabinet alongside Gabbay, also wished the former Kulanu politician luck in his new political endeavors.

Earlier this month, former Labor leader and defense minister Amir Peretz announced that he would be running for party chairman again in a contest set to take place in some six months’ time.