MK Levy-Abekasis claims Gantz offered her second place on his slate

MK Orly Levy-Abekasis said Sunday that during negotiations for a possible merger between her Gesher party and Benny Gantz’s Israel Resilience ahead of the elections in April, she was offered the number two slot on a joint slate.

Sources in the Gesher party said last week that a deal with Israel Resilience was close, but then on Wednesday, Levy-Abekasis announced that her party would run alone after failing to reach an agreement. The following day Israel Resilience and Yesh Atid announced that they were uniting to form the Blue and White party, which has since been predicted in polls to win the most Knesset seats in the elections.

“Gantz offered me the number two and five places on his slate,” Levy-Abekasis told told Channel 12 news.

At the time the negotiations were being held, Israel Resilience had already merged with former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon’s Telem party, and he was assumed to be number two on the party slate.

She also talked about a recording from a closed conference, broadcast earlier this month by Channel 12, in which she slammed Gantz’s party platform, saying at the time that it was so badly written that her son could have done better when he was 12.

“When I spoke about the phrasing of course I meant the section in the specifications that talked about the goals of the party,” she said. “A party that is set up can’t include one and a half lines in the section on goals.”

Running alone, Gesher is not expected to pass the Knesset threshold of 3.25 percent of the vote.

Levy-Abekasis has had a roller-coaster relationship with ex-army chief Gantz and his Israel Resilience party. Despite the recorded insult, Gesher was later said to be in negotiations to form an alliance, which Levy-Abekasis denied, yet days later, sources within her party claimed was near to being signed.

After she pulled out of talks with Gantz last week, Levy-Abekasis said negotiations fell apart despite her having reached written agreements with Gantz that included Israel Resilience’s adoption of Gesher’s socioeconomic platform as one of the alliance’s main campaign planks, as well as which spots on a unified list her party members would receive.

“To our amazement, since [reaching] these agreements… a bizarre scampering around started in Israel Resilience, accompanied by the spreading of disinformation and biased briefings to the media, a sort of game of hide-and-seek as if there hadn’t been discussions between us,” she said in a statement after ending talks.

Levy-Abekasis issued stinging criticism of Gantz himself, saying he had failed the “credibility test” and calling his behavior “weird and hallucinatory.”

Parties finalized their election slates last Thursday in keeping with a mandatory deadline.

Polls have found that Blue and White, the Israel Resilience-Yesh Atid alliance, is expected to win up to 36 seats in the Knesset, compared to up to 30 for the ruling Likud party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. However, the centrist Blue and White would likely still find it hard to put together a majority of 61 seats out of the total 120, leaving Netanyahu as the most likely candidate to be tasked with forming the next government with other right-wing parties.

Under the terms of their unification, should Blue and White form the next government, Gantz will be prime minister for the first two and a half years, after which Yesh Atid chief Yair Lapid will take over. Ya’alon is third on the slate followed by another ex-IDF chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi.