Group of members, disenchanted with Barak, will decide whether to endorse Likud chairman.
By GIL STERN STERN HOFFMANNetanyahu pouts like a chimp 248.88(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
A group of veteran Labor members who were close to former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin will meet with Likud chairman Binyamin Netanyahu on Friday to gauge whether they could consider supporting him in the next general election.
Members of the group, who include a couple of former Rabin advisers, said they were disappointed with the leadership of current Labor chairman Ehud Barak and wanted to evaluate their options.
The meeting will take place at the Kfar Shmaryahu home of Netanyahu confidante Shlomi Fogel, Ampa's managing director and board chairman.
Likud officials said they believed Netanyahu could convince the group to support him. They said that Barak's political allies had pressured the group not to come to the meeting.
Barak's associates denied they had pressured anyone, adding that the participants in the meeting were "from the fringes of the party."
Labor activists who were named in a press report about the meeting earlier this week said they canceled their participation not because of any pressure, but to protest the leak.
The veteran Laborites who organized the meeting said that both the Likud and Barak's foes within Labor had exaggerated the importance of the meeting for political purposes. Event organizer Menahem Zlihovsky, a former Rabin adviser, said that only 10 people were invited, and not the 30 claimed by the Likud.
"The meeting was supposed to be secret, but someone made headlines out of it to cash in politically, and I don't want to be part of it," veteran Labor activist Arieh Brosh said. "I wanted to meet Bibi and tell him what's on my mind about decisions he has made over the years. I will never forgive him for being on the porch at the Kikar Zion rally where Rabin was shown in an SS uniform, and that's what I intended to tell him."
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