The French newspaper Le Figaro nicknamed Avi Gabbay, the Israeli politician and businessman, “the Israeli Macron” in reference to the many similarities between him and French President Emmanuel Macron. Indeed, Avi Gabbay also comes from the financial and business world, he runs his party like an entrepreneur, just as he is a newcomer to the Israeli political scene.
Avi, whose real name is Avraham Gabbay, was born on February 22, 1967 in the quiet Baqa neighborhood south of Jerusalem to Jewish Moroccan parents from Casablanca, Moshe and Sarah. He is the seventh of a sibling group of eight.
His outstanding school results earned him access to the famous “Rahavia”, an elite institute through which a large number of Israeli politicians have passed. After his military service, he studied economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he obtained his PhD.
Well before getting involved in politics, Gabay managed to raise a considerable fortune that made him a millionaire and one of the most important businessmen in Israel, after a few years working in the Ministry of Finance and then in a telecommunications company that he joined in 1999 and became its managing director in 2007. He left this position in 2013 and founded the centrist Koulanou party in 2014.
Although he was unable to enter the “Knesset” in the 2015 parliamentary elections, when his party won only 10 seats, Gabbay managed to enter Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and take over the environment portfolio before resigning in May 2016, in protest against the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as defense minister.
Gabbay joined the Israeli Labor Party and was able to become its secretary general in 2017, thus overtaking another Moroccan Jew, Amir Peretz. But he will retire from politics following his party’s failure to win enough seats to return to the “Knesset”.
In 2019, he published his autobiography entitled “Everything is possible”.
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