AVI GABBAY has already overturned convention once—when on July 10th he won the primaries to become the leader of Israel’s Labour party just six months after joining it. Now he is causing more ructions in the main opposition, with a series of statements that are heretical to those on the far left of Israeli politics. Although other Labour leaders have, at times, espoused similar views, Mr Gabbay has done so earlier and more emphatically. He says that, should he win the next election he would not invite the country’s Arab parties to join his coalition. And he has said that he does not think that Jewish settlements built on land in the West Bank, which Israel captured in 1967, should necessarily be dismantled as part of a peace agreement. Further disconcerting some Labour supporters is his view that “a Jew cannot really not believe in God.”

Mr Gabbay’s intentions are clear. He is determined to break the image of Labour as a left-wing party that is detached from the concerns and beliefs of more conservative (and religious) voters. To win an election he needs to attract supporters away from other centrist parties as well as some of those on the right that have propped up the coalition government headed by Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and his Likud party.

Mr Gabbay is not the first leader of a Labour party to tack to the right. One of those he has sought advice from is Tony Blair, a former British prime minister and one of the architects of “New Labour”, which modernised the party and dropped its commitment to nationalising industry. But Mr Gabbay seems motivated by more than electoral mathematics.

He comes from a conservative family of Moroccan origin, a group that usually supports Likud, as Mr Gabbay once did. And unlike many of Labour’s previous leaders, who came from the army or out of the left-leaning kibbutz movement, his background is in business.

The Labour party last won an election in 1999 and has since changed leaders eight times. Party members who voted for a very different kind of leader this time are willing to give him a chance. “People on the left still think what happened is just an aberration and the reins of power will soon be handed back to us,” says Emilie Moatti, a Labour member who is planning to run for a seat in the Knesset at the next election. She laments that Mr Netanyahu has successfully “tainted us all as unpatriotic haters of Israel.”

Labour, which ruled Israel for its first three decades after the state’s establishment in 1948, is not the only opposition party undergoing an identity crisis. Meretz, a fiercely secularist party that describes itself as “Israel’s Left,” has suffered a series of electoral defeats that almost wiped the party out. On October 18th the party’s leader, Zehava Galon, said she was resigning from the Knesset in the hope of sparking “open primaries” for its next leaders. “There is a deep frustration on the left over having drifted away from positions of influence for so long,” says Nitzan Horowitz, a former member of the Knesset for Meretz. “Moving to the right or changing selection procedures won’t change that.”

The anomaly of Israeli politics is that a majority of voters supports the left’s two-state solution but continues to vote for right-wing leaders. Perhaps that will change if Labour is led by a right-winger.