Knesset member Amir Peretz, who serves as chairman of Labor-Gesher, has been very busy these past few weekends. Ever since he was elected chairman of the Labor Party July 1, Peretz has made it his habit to spend Saturdays with Israel’s Arab sector. He and his team now make a point to visit Arab, Bedouin and Druze towns and villages so that they can meet with activists and local council heads. In fact, it seems as if Peretz is investing more of his time into winning the support of Arab voters than the head of any other Jewish party. “I am the only person on the center-left who can bring Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews together and find a common socioeconomic denominator among them, while overcome all the rifts and divisions,” he explained in a radio interview Aug. 6.
At a party conference Aug. 5, Peretz sounded especially optimistic about his campaign among Arabic speakers. “We will get at least two seats from the Arab and Bedouin sectors,” he promised. It won’t be easy. Those two seats mean 70,000 votes, and the Labor Party won just 5,542 votes from Arab and Druze localities in the April 21 Knesset election. In other words, it won just 1.3% of the Arab vote. In comparison, in 2015, some 4.9% of Arab voters voted for the Zionist Camp — that election’s iteration of the Labor Party. In that election, the Zionist Camp was the Jewish party, which received the most support from Arab voters, but by April 2019 Labor dropped to seventh place. Meretz, Blue and White, the Likud, Kulanu, Shas and Yisrael Beitenu all received more votes from the Arab sector than the Labor Party that year.
