Last week, two heads of Labor party local branches approached an associate of former IDF chief-of-staff Lt. Gen. (Res.) Gabi Ashkenazi. They asked him to arrange a meeting for them with Ashkenazi to talk him into running for the chairmanship of the Labor Party. The associate, who has been getting similar requests every week since the January elections, told them the time was not yet ripe, but gave them to understand that there was room for discussion, that Ashkenazi had not abandoned his dream of becoming prime minister.
Ashkenazi has not yet met with the heads of the Labor Party’s branches, but he maintains friendly, ongoing ties with two of the most senior party leaders; former Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, and the chairman of the general federation of trade unions ('Histadrut'), Ofer Eini. When the time is right, they are the ones who will lead his camp. In recent, behind-the-scenes discussions, these two have been saying that Ashkenazi would easily beat anyone who runs against him and that he’s the one who can carry the Labor party to the premiership. This hasn’t happened since former Defense Minister Ehud Barak was elected prime minister in 1999 at the head of the Labor Party.
February 2014 marks the end of a three-year “cooling off” period for the former chief-of-staff, after which he can go into politics. The assessment within the party is that by then, all the loose ends of the “Harpaz affair” will have been tied up. The affair was very damaging to Ashkenazi, who had been one of the most popular people in Israel until it erupted.
Nonetheless, putting aside that affair of complex interests, intrigues and plots, on which the final word has yet to be said, senior Labor Party officials believe that Ashkenazi has not been significantly damaged from a public standpoint. In addition, he is considered someone who can swing right-wing voters over to the Labor Party. Ashkenazi, a respected general who rehabilitated the military after the second Lebanon war and the commission of inquiry established in its wake, was perceived as a “brother” well before Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett and Finance Minister Yair Lapid adopted that pose during the election campaign.
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