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Why one former IDF chief of staff may be heading for politics

Former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi has just been cleared of a five-year legal affair and might be considering joining Israeli politics.
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In the months that immediately followed the 2013 election, the Labor Party under Shelly Yachimovich was left licking its wounds after another resounding failure at the polls. At the time, former Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi was mentioned as someone who could pull the party out of its morass and lead it back to power.

Proponents of the idea included former minister and then-Knesset member Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and the Chairman of the Histadrut Labor Union Ofer Eini. Both Eini and Ben-Eliezer were close to Ashkenazi, who ranked high in popularity polls. They both believed that he could extract himself from the public imbroglio he had gotten into as a result of his fierce disagreements with Minister of Defense Ehud Barak. Eini and Ben-Eliezer were supposed to be Ashkenazi’s turbo engines, when he ran in the primaries for head of the Labor Party. They planned to present the former chief of staff as an updated version of Yitzhak Rabin in 1992 and of Ehud Barak in 1999 — former generals appointed chair of the party who managed to bring the party back to power.

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