From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
Yair Golan wins Labor party leadership primary with whopping 95% of vote
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
Ex-Meretz MK and former IDF deputy chief Yair Golan, who has pledged to “unify all leftist parties in Israel” into a single bloc, wins the Labor party primary with 95.15 percent of the vote.
He beats longtime Labor activist Azi Nagar (0.77%), billionaire socialist and online gambling magnate Avi Shaked (1.89%), and attorney and anti-corruption activist Itai Leshem (1.76%).
Throughout the day, 31,353 Labor members, 60.6% of those eligible, voted in the primary to replace outgoing chairwoman Merav Michaeli.
A former IDF Northern Front and Home Front commander, Golan, 61, now a general in the reserves, was passed over for the position of IDF chief of staff in 2018, after a 2016 speech in which he likened contemporary trends in Israel to the “disturbing processes” that took place in Europe in the run-up to the Holocaust.
He later served as deputy economy minister during the short-lived, ideologically diverse coalition led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, and then made a failed bid for the leadership of Meretz ahead of the last elections.
The retired general made headlines and received accolades last year when he headed to the front lines of Hamas’s October 7 onslaught on his own initiative and rescued many partygoers fleeing the massacre at the Supernova music festival.
Addressing an online campaign event in March, Golan said that he had sworn “to reestablish the Zionist left in Israel” and was running in the Labor primary “to unify all leftist parties in Israel, all members of the protest movement who are willing to fight for the destiny of Israel, for Israel as a democratic liberal state.”
