Israeli police have raided the headquarters of the Histadrut in Tel-Aviv, Israel’s oldest and most prominent labor union, in what the police described as “one of the largest public corruption scandals investigated in Israel”. During the raid on Monday morning, November 3, cops arrested senior members of the Histadrut, including its chairman, Arnon Bar-David. Culture Minister Miki Zohar of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right Likud party is also expected to be questioned by the police in the coming days due to his close ties to some of the suspects.
Far-right Minister of Finance, Smotrich a settler in the occupied Palestinian territories, with the chairman of the Histadrut Arnon Bar-David (Photo: Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
According to the police, the detained union members are suspected of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. At the center of the affair is an insurance agent, a member of the Likud leadership, Ezra Gabay, who thanks to his government connections, appointed the heads of workers’ committees to positions in the board of state companies in exchange for personal favors. The police also suspect that senior Histadrut officials planned to sell some of the organization’s assets, worth millions of shekels, in exchange for a share of the profits.
The affair, according to Israeli media reports, is expected to include the interrogation of more than 300 senior Histadrut officials, heads of workers’ unions – including at the Israeli airline El Al and the railways – senior officials in public institutions and even several mayors. According to Haaretz, many of those involved in the affair have direct ties to Israel’s ruling party.
The communist Zo Haderekh newspaper criticized Bar-David for having “direct ties with the capital, the bourgeoise and the government, especially with the extreme right-wing Likud”. Bar-David, according to the Communist Party of Israel newspaper, is “an enthusiastic supporter of the war of annihilation in Gaza, he gave Netanyahu’s government a free hand to sacrifice the workers on the altar of revenge and occupation”.
