Gesher (2019 Political Party)

Gesher placed health care, housing, education, welfare, and the cost of living at the center of its political identity, with particular attention to disparities between Israel’s economic center and its geographic and social periphery.[3] Its March 2019 program called it a “social-national movement” and set out principles of equality, shared responsibility, dialogue among communities, and the reduction of social and geographic gaps.[3] The party presented its intended constituency as broader than one political camp, seeking people on both the right and left, in cities and peripheral communities, who felt overlooked by government.[4]

The party’s agenda combined support for private enterprise and economic competition with a substantial public role in essential services and social protection.[3] Its proposals extended beyond spending commitments to changes in government administration, including greater transparency, stronger budget oversight, anti-corruption measures, and coordination between public agencies.[3] Gesher also advanced positions on negotiations with the Palestinians and on religion and state, but its program emphasized everyday services, household needs, and the treatment of vulnerable groups.[3]

Electorally, Gesher participated in three successive national contests through different arrangements: an independent slate in April 2019, a Labor-Gesher list in September 2019, and a Labor-Gesher-Meretz list in March 2020.[1][2] These alliances brought Levy-Abekasis back into the Knesset after Gesher’s unsuccessful independent campaign, with Gesher remaining identifiable as a component of the joint lists.[1][2] Her subsequent decision to leave the three-party alliance affected negotiations over who could form a government after the March 2020 election.[2]

On December 25, 2018, Levy-Abekasis announced that she was establishing an independent list for the 2019 election under the name Gesher.[4] The name means “Bridge” and had previously been used by a political organization associated with her father, longtime legislator and former foreign minister David Levy.[1] She linked the choice to the name’s meaning and to her father’s earlier party.[4] The new organization was a distinct incarnation of Gesher rather than simply the continuation of the earlier electoral organization.[1]

David Levy’s Gesher had emerged as a Likud breakaway and participated in the Likud-led list in the 1996 election.[1] It subsequently joined Labor and Meimad in the One Israel coalition for the 1999 election.[1] The revived party therefore drew on a family political name associated with earlier alliances while presenting its own social agenda under Levy-Abekasis’s leadership.[1][5] She promised to represent people from the political right and left, cities and peripheral communities who believed that the government had overlooked them.[4]

Levy-Abekasis, born in 1973, first entered the Knesset in 2009 on the Yisrael Beiteinu list.[6] A former media personality, she served as a deputy speaker and chaired the Knesset’s Special Committee for Children’s Rights.[5][6] Her parliamentary work emphasized children, people living in poverty, and people with disabilities, providing a social-policy background for the priorities later advanced by Gesher.[5]

In May 2016, she broke with Yisrael Beiteinu rather than join the Likud-led coalition, arguing that socioeconomic issues had not been sufficiently addressed.[6] She objected to what she regarded as the abandonment of the party’s social platform during negotiations to join Netanyahu’s government.[1] She remained in the Knesset as an independent supporting the opposition and was ultimately ousted from Yisrael Beiteinu.[1] Her subsequent creation of Gesher gave organizational form to the emphasis on social policy that had accompanied that break.[1][6]

Before the April 2019 election, Gesher explored a joint run with Benny Gantz’s Israel Resilience party, but negotiations failed and Gesher ran independently.[1] Levy-Abekasis expressed confidence that voters needed a party attentive to the challenges affecting their daily lives.[1]

The independent slate brought together candidates with backgrounds in business, public administration, law, diplomacy, and social activism.[7] They included former Intel executive Dadi Perlmutter, former Housing Ministry director-general Hagai Reznik, legal scholar and social activist Yifat Biton, and former diplomat Dan Shaham.[7] Levy-Abekasis presented the candidates as a diverse group of public servants committed to changing the system and its priorities.[7] The slate also included other former senior public officials and social activists.[7]

Gesher failed to cross the electoral threshold in April 2019 and won no Knesset seats.[1] Labor also experienced a disappointing election, winning six seats, its weakest result to that point.[5] In July, the two parties agreed to contest the September election together, linking Labor’s electoral organization with Gesher’s socioeconomic agenda.[5]

Labor’s convention approved the agreement on July 31, 2019.[8] The arrangement barred further mergers, and Labor leader Amir Peretz rejected a late proposal to unite with the Democratic Camp.[8] The alliance paired Labor’s established organization with the distinct social-policy profile that Gesher had developed before the April election.[5]

In September 2019, Labor-Gesher received 212,782 votes, or 4.80 percent, and won six seats.[9] Peretz headed the elected list, followed by Levy-Abekasis, Itzik Shmuli, Merav Michaeli, Omer Bar-Lev, and Revital Swid.[9] The result returned Levy-Abekasis to the Knesset, but the alliance’s six seats equaled the number Labor had won on its own in April.[5][9]

In January 2020, Labor-Gesher and Meretz agreed to run together in the March election. Peretz headed the slate, Levy-Abekasis was placed second, and Meretz leader Nitzan Horowitz was third.[10] The combined list won seven seats, divided into three for Labor, three for Meretz, and one for Gesher.[2] An electoral results table recorded 267,480 votes and 5.8 percent for the joint list; those figures applied to the alliance as a whole, not to a separately measurable Gesher vote.[11] The center-left grouping comprising the joint slate and Blue and White held forty seats after the election.[10]

Gesher’s March 2019 program supported free competition and private enterprise while rejecting the application of market logic to welfare, health, education, and national resources.[3] It called for inclusive growth, stronger worker protections, and reduced disparities between the social and geographic periphery and Israel’s economic center.[3] Levy-Abekasis also identified the strengthening of small and medium businesses as a priority, alongside pensions, housing, health, and the costs of raising children.[1] She argued that the persistent right-left divide served an older political order and that social concerns should instead occupy the center of public debate.[1]

Health policy was a prominent feature of the March 2019 campaign launch.[12] Levy-Abekasis proposed adding 13 billion shekels to the health budget, creating more positions for doctors and nurses, acquiring medical equipment, and expanding rehabilitation services in hospitals’ internal-medicine departments.[12] She also said that a national emergency health plan and control of the health portfolio would be conditions for Gesher joining a government.[12] These campaign commitments accompanied a broader platform emphasis on increasing national health expenditure and reducing differences in service provision between the center and periphery.[13]

Education proposals included greater funding for less affluent areas, support for teachers and school leaders in peripheral communities, and publicly funded early-childhood education beginning in infancy.[3] The program also called for more accessible and equal higher education.[3] It proposed abolishing the psychometric entrance examination, arguing that the examination reinforced social inequality.[3] These measures were presented alongside the party’s wider commitment to reducing the effect of social and geographic circumstances on access to public services.[3]

Housing policy emphasized publicly funded housing, affordable rents, and an expanded public-housing sector.[3] Proposed instruments included long-term planning, government-built rental housing, and changes to public-housing eligibility rules.[3] The program specifically identified public-housing recipients, single-parent families, immigrants, older people, people with disabilities, and at-risk youth as groups requiring political attention.[3] It also addressed gender pay disparities and violence against women, proposed expanded services for older people and people with disabilities, and called for additional support facilities for women in distress.[3]

The party linked these service commitments to proposals for changing government performance.[3] Its program covered budget planning and oversight, public transparency, and anti-corruption measures, as well as a “one citizen—one contact” model for dealing with public agencies.[3] Under that proposal, a single government body would coordinate a citizen’s request across the relevant agencies rather than leaving the individual to manage the process alone.[3] The program argued that inefficiently used public funds could be identified within the government system and redirected to public needs.[3]

The later Labor-Gesher platform proposed investing 30 billion shekels in welfare, education, and health care.[5] It also called for a higher minimum wage, affordable housing for young families, and expanded services for older people, including increased pensions.[5] On business development, the joint platform supported additional investment in new enterprises and safety nets designed to encourage risk-taking.[5] These commitments carried Gesher’s emphasis on social provision into its electoral partnership with Labor while retaining support for business formation and economic activity.[3][5]

Gesher’s 2019 program supported a negotiated process with the Palestinians based on mutual trust and agreements, Israeli security, recognition of Israel as the Jewish people’s national home, and Jerusalem as its capital.[3] Its stated conditions included retaining settlement blocs, avoiding the division of Jerusalem, and meeting Israel’s security needs.[3] The program specifically rejected a plan that would annex Palestinians while granting them citizenship, arguing that such an arrangement would create two kinds of citizenship.[3]

The Labor-Gesher platform subsequently proposed restarting a peace process through a regional framework directed toward a two-state outcome.[5] Its terms included keeping settlement blocs within Israel, rejecting a Palestinian right of return, maintaining Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, providing restitution for Jews expelled from Arab countries, and treating the Jordan Valley as Israel’s eastern security border.[5] The platform also sought to reduce Israel’s international isolation, including through the restoration of good relations with the United States and Europe.[5]

On religion and state, Gesher adopted the spirit of the Gavison-Medan model as a framework for addressing disputes with moderation, tolerance, and an emphasis on equality.[3] Its program also proposed allowing local authorities to regulate limited public transportation and business activity on Shabbat in accordance with the character and preferences of their communities.[3] The proposal therefore assigned a role to local decision-making in determining the availability of certain services and commercial activity on Shabbat.[3]

Gesher brought a detailed social-policy agenda into both its independent campaign and its later alliances, with a 63-page platform covering services, spending, administration, and inequality.[13] Its emphasis was not confined to a single benefit or constituency: proposals ranged from early-childhood education and hospital staffing to public housing, business support, and access to government agencies.[3][12] Levy-Abekasis’s earlier work on children’s rights, poverty, and disability gave those priorities continuity with her parliamentary activity before the party’s establishment.[5][6]

The party’s alliances placed its socioeconomic agenda within successively broader electoral lists.[5][10] The September 2019 arrangement restored Levy-Abekasis’s parliamentary representation after the failed independent campaign, and the March 2020 agreement produced one Gesher seat within a seven-seat alliance.[2][9]

Gesher’s parliamentary significance became especially apparent after the March 2020 election, when Levy-Abekasis’s departure weakened the prospects for a government led by Blue and White.[2] Her decision effectively ended the three-party partnership through which she had been elected.[2] A July 2020 government investor newsletter subsequently listed Gesher among the coalition parties and recorded its departure from the alliance on March 23, followed by Meretz’s departure on April 6.[14]

The principal controversy in Gesher’s post-election conduct concerned Levy-Abekasis’s decision to leave Labor-Gesher-Meretz and support Benjamin Netanyahu after the March 2020 election.[2] The move weakened the prospect of a coalition led by Blue and White and effectively ended the three-party alliance.[2] A government investor newsletter recorded Gesher as leaving the alliance on March 23, 2020, shortly after the election results were published.[14]

The party’s electoral alliances also involved disagreement over how broadly to unite the left-of-center parties. In July 2019, the Labor-Gesher agreement excluded further mergers, and Peretz declined a late proposal to join the Democratic Camp.[8] By January 2020, Labor-Gesher had instead agreed to a common slate with Meretz.[10] The change reflected a shift in electoral strategy between the September 2019 and March 2020 contests rather than a single permanent organizational merger.[8][10]