Stav Shaffir says she won’t run in March election, but will ‘come back stronger’

MK Stav Shaffir, until recently of the Labor party and now a Democratic Camp lawmaker, announces she won’t be running in the March election after she was left off the united left-wing slate of Labor, Gesher and Meretz.

Shaffir, who had long urged Labor to seek such a union, says she does not regret that it came at a personal cost to her.

“This union is more important than me,” she says at a press conference on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, the swanky pedestrian boulevard where she first rose to prominence as a leader of the 2011 cost-of-living protests.

Now the head of the Green Movement party, Shaffir says, “I won’t run in this election, but I will stay in the race for our country. Today we’re taking the Green Movement out [of the Knesset] — out to the streets, to the cities, to the neighborhoods — in order to build our tomorrow and come back stronger.”

She adds, in a reference to scandal-plagued Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Today’s fight is to remove the mafia don from the prime minister’s chair and to clean the Augean Stables of our government from the terrible corruption that has gripped it and from the incitement that has pitted all the beautiful parts of Israeli society against one another.”