Labor Leader Amir Peretz on Saturday announced that he was dissolving his party's political alliance with Meretz.
Labor ran in the March 2 elections as part of an alliance struck with Meretz and MK Orly Levy-Abekasis' Gesher party. The faction won seven sits, but Levy-Abekasis exited it almost immediately over Blue and White's then-plans to form a minority government with the support of the predominantly Arab Joint List party.
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Blue and White has since entered talks with the Likud to form a unity government. Sources close to the negotiations say a deal may be hammered out by the end of the week.
Peretz said Labor filed a request to dissolve the faction in the 23rd Knesset on Saturday evening.
The move follows reports last week that Peretz and Labor MK Itzik Shmuli were set to become ministers in the Blue and White-Likud government – a move Meretz leader Nitzan Horowitz adamantly opposed.
Peretz "is betraying the trust of hundreds of thousands of voters for a job in a right-wing government," Horowitz tweeted.
Not mincing words, Horowitz castigated Peretz for "committing a terrible wrong. He just buried the Labor party – the very party that formed the State of Israel."
Labor insiders called Horowitz "ungrateful."
"We saved Meretz [from not passing the 4-seat electoral threshold] so why is he lashing out [at Peretz] like that?" one Labor official said. " There was a lot of pressure from Meretz and the whole [left-wing] camp to merge when it became clear they weren't going to pass [the electoral threshold]. We were willing to be team players, and we made a move by which the whole was smaller than the sum of its parts to save them for the bloc's sake.
"Labor members were pushed out [of the party slate] because of them," he asserted.
The official further said that Labor and Meretz differed on several key issues.
"Meretz made a big mistake," he added, "They had the opportunity to enter the government and influence it by holding significant roles, but they prefer to remain in their niche."
