In 1981, I accompanied the secretary-general of Israel’s Labor Party,
Haim Bar-Lev, on a visit to Jerusalem’s Moroccan fruit market. Bar-Lev,
a storied former Army chief of staff, was distributing flowers in an
effort to show voters that the leaders of his once dominant party could
relate to average people. Four years earlier, the conservative Likud
Party had won its first general election, and a new national vote was in
the offing. “You trust Arabs?” a fruit vender shouted at Bar-Lev. “You
want to give them back the land?” Bar-Lev responded with a
fifteen-minute disquisition, with careful distinctions, regarding the
meaning of “trust,” “give back,” “land,” and “Arabs.” Exasperated, the
vender finally interrupted him. “I still don’t trust them,” he shouted.
Likud had mismanaged the economy; inflation was already hurting him.
Many thought Labor would sweep back into power. But, after watching the
exchange, I realized that the vender’s ten-second shouted question had
given Likud a fourteen-minute-fifty-second advantage. It also exposed a
widening gap between working-class Israelis, many of them of Moroccan
background, and Labor leaders.

Last Monday, Labor members narrowly elected Avi Gabbay, who was not even
a member of the Party eight months ago, as their new leader. Seasoned
pundits did not expect the win by Gabbay, who rose from a working-class
Moroccan family to run Israel’s largest telecommunications company. His
election could help Labor close its gap with working-class Israelis. The
morning after Gabbay’s win, polls showed support for Labor surging, and
Party loyalists grasped that Gabbay might have been sent over by central
casting. “It’s already clear,” Haaretz editorialized, thirty-six hours
after the win, that Gabbay “has breathed new life into the party.” Fifty
years old, balanced, affable, and gregarious, Gabbay projects the
gravitas one sensed in Barack Obama during the 2008 primaries. Labor
jumped to a projected twenty-four Knesset seats (out of a hundred and
twenty) in opinion polls, surpassing the vaguely centrist Yesh Atid
Party of Yair Lapid, where many liberals were parking their votes as
long as Labor was run by Gabbay’s predecessor.

Gabbay was educated at Israel’s élite Hebrew University, yet he speaks
like a man who, though comfortable with street talk, learned early on to
weigh his words and go meta on public problems. His acceptance speech
seemed to take a page out of Obama’s 2008 playbook: a good-news
challenge to skeptics, delivered with liturgical cadences: “To all who
doubted the indispensability of Israeli democracy; to all who doubted
Labor as alive, kicking, and renewing; to all who believed Israelis had
lost their hope for change . . . to all these people, the answer is this
night”—in Hebrew, ha’lila ha’zeh, a familiar refrain from the Passover
Seder. It is time for the government to think, he rhymed, of “Dimona,
not Amona”—that is, on behalf of the struggling towns in the Negev
Desert, not settler outposts in the West Bank.

But the parallel with Obama ends there. Gabbay’s story is not that of an
unlikely minority candidate who organized at the grassroots. He is the
unlikely majority candidate who climbed to the apex of Israel’s biggest
telecommunications company. One of eight children, Gabbay grew up in an
“asbeston,” a makeshift structure in the Jerusalem neighborhood of
Talpiot, in a transit camp designed to absorb Jewish refugees and
immigrants. As a Jew of Mizrahi, or Middle Eastern, background, Gabbay
was born into Israel’s Jewish underclass, a group that outnumbered the
country’s Ashkenazi, or European, Jewish population, but was
nevertheless mostly shut out of the economic, cultural, and political
élite. An obviously gifted child, Gabbay was recruited to the
prestigious (read, German-Jewish) Gymnasia Rehavia, and went on to
become an intelligence officer in the Army. He then attended Hebrew
University, beginning his career, in the mid-nineties, in the budget
department of the Finance Ministry, then in Labor’s hands.

In 1999, Gabbay joined Bezeq, the government telephone utility, where
his father had worked. Bezeq was privatized in 2005, and then found
itself in the turbulent world of legacy communications companies trying
to shift to Internet service. Gabbay rose from assistant to the C.E.O.
to C.E.O. in just ten years. From 2007 to 2013, he presided over the
sprawling company and implemented many changes, including headcount
reductions, and benefitted handsomely from spikes in its stock price.
Yet Gabbay also gained a reputation as an effective and humane manager,
and retired with enough money, he says, to focus on policy. Before the
2015 election, he helped to start Kulanu, a populist party that appealed
to struggling lower-middle-class families, largely Mizrahim, and
focussed on the high cost of living. Kulanu won ten Knesset seats and
became a crucial member of Netanyahu’s coalition—and Gabbay, though not
a member of the Knesset, was rewarded with the Environment Ministry.
Partnering with Likud was not unusual for Gabbay. During the early
two-thousands, he had voted for Ariel Sharon. He was not alone. Mizrahi
families have been the driver of Likud victories since the Party’s first
national victory, in 1977.

In the period leading up to that historic election, particularly the
fifties and early sixties, the vast majority of Israel’s Mizrahim
arrived as immigrants and refugees. In countries stretching from Morocco
to Iraq, the collapse of colonialism and the birth of the Jewish state
had left them exposed to unexpected persecution; they abandoned
businesses and friends in heartbreaking haste. Educated or affluent
Mizrahim mostly went not to Israel but to France; of the eight hundred
thousand who did immigrate to Israel, most found themselves subordinated
to the Ashkenazi establishment, long the base and beneficiary of the
Labor Party.

At first, founding Labor leaders like David Ben-Gurion attracted Mizrahi
loyalty, though the Party often condescended to them as culturally
deprived. (As recently as the 2015 election, the leftist painter Yair
Garbuz publicly dismissed Likud’s Mizrahi voters as “amulet kissers”—an
Israeli version of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.”) After the
catastrophic Yom Kippur War, in 1973, Likud’s Menachem Begin—himself the
product of the Ashkenazi petit bourgeoisie—won over Mizrahi voters with
speeches vilifying the Labor aristocracy, and projecting a love of
traditional Jewish family rites, not the secularism of Zionist pioneers.
By then, many Mizrahim had made it in retail, car repair, or real
estate. Their children had become lawyers, police officers, and
contractors; rates of intermarriage with Ashkenazi families were high.
Yet Mizrahim remained hungry for status, and supporting Likud became a
form of protest—and identity.

Mizrahim still struggle economically. Tens of thousands have only menial
employment in Jerusalem, where the price of housing is prohibitive, or
remain unemployed in neglected cities and development towns such as
Dimona. Many still feel they have a score to settle with “the Arabs.”
Mizrahim who have risen in Labor, like Amir Peretz, a former Party
leader whom Gabbay defeated in this year’s primaries, did so as veterans
of Israel’s central labor federation, the Histadrut, or the Army—not by
having made an independent career in the private sector.

In key ways, Gabbay is the Party’s first chance in two generations to
remake the country’s political map. Even if the Party merely siphons off
seven of Kulanu's ten seats, a center-left bloc led by Labor could
achieve as many Knesset seats as the Likud bloc; Gabbay also has the
potential, however, to take votes from Likud directly, and from Shas, a
right-wing religious Mizrahi party and Likud ally. Adding to his appeal,
particularly at a time when some of Netanyahu’s closest associates are
embroiled in a scandal over a sketchy deal for German-made naval
vessels, Gabbay enjoys a reputation for the kind of personal integrity
that swing voters might admire.

In his acceptance speech last week—embellishing things, perhaps, but
suggesting his future line of attack—Gabbay implied that he had left the
government in part because “those who conduct the Prime Minister’s
coalition negotiations should not be agents for a German submarine
company.”

Meanwhile, he has made clear that he would welcome dialogue with the
President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and would
consider Palestinian sovereignty in Arab neighborhoods of an
administratively united Jerusalem. Gabbay’s emergence might well bring
about the consolidation of a center-left Knesset opposition, which even
the leader of the Arab Joint List, Ayman Odeh, has been pushing for. (“We must build a new ‘democratic camp,’ ” Odeh told me.)

Gabbay may yet prove to have skeletons in his closet. The
director-general of the Communications Ministry and Bezeq’s current
chairman and largest shareholder—both Netanyahu confidants—were recently
accused by the state comptroller of collusion, allowing Bezeq to
maintain a near monopoly on broadband infrastructure and integrate with
content providers. Who knows what Gabbay knew before he retired?
Nevertheless, he has become the story and symbol of a new path to power
for Labor. For decades, the Party has suffered from the same time type
of disconnect from working-class voters that now seems to plague the
Democratic Party in the U.S.

Gabbay is trying to bring that dynamic to an end. His crack about Dimona
superseding Amona summarizes the heart of his appeal. Before Gabbay,
Mizrahim who disapproved of Likud’s support for settlers and the
ultra-religious struggled to find common ground with Labor’s Ashkenazi
élites, intellectual socialists, and union hacks. Gabbay, the former kid
from a transit camp who rose to run an iconic corporation, might bridge
the gap. As in all democracies, voters who feel the greatest economic
stress are the least likely to read patiently through the policy
arguments that more highly educated voters respect; they need to identify
with a candidate—and, on rare occasions, even to trust and like him. In this, Gabbay’s election may be a lesson for American
Democrats as well.