Lev LaOlim

Lev LaOlim (Hebrew: לב לעולים, Heart to the Immigrants) was a political party in Israel, where it is also known as Lev (Hebrew: לב, Heart). It was not related to the Lev party that existed for a few minutes during the 15th Knesset.

Background and Ideology

The party was established in 1999 by Ovadia Fatkhov, before the elections in the same year. It is aimed at immigrants from Central Asia and is mostly composed of Bukharan Jews (from Uzbekistan) and Caucasian Jews.

The party states that its aims are to:

• Maintain close relations with the United States, Russia and other states in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
• Achieve peace with the Palestinians by implementation of negotiated agreements.
• Support a gradual solution to the economic and social problems of the constituent ethnic groups.
• Improve the standard of living of immigrants from central Asia and of other ethnic minority groups in terms of employment, accommodation, education, culture and religion.
• Establish community centers and employment centers for the benefit of the minority groups.
• Support the enforcement of labour laws and the reduction of the work week from six to five days.

Elections

In the 1999 elections the party won 6,311 votes (0.18%), far below the electoral threshold of 1.5%.

The party did not stand in the 2003 elections, instead urging its supporters to vote for Avigdor Lieberman's Israel Beytenu, a Russian immigrant party that was running on a joint list with the National Union.

In the 2006 election the party chose to run again with Fatkhov still heading its list. However, they were less successful than in 1999, gaining only 1,765 votes (0.06%), even further below the electoral threshold, which had been raised to 2%.

In the 2009 elections the party participated as an independent party, but again failed to pass the threshold, with just 632 out of nearly 3.4 million votes (less than two tenths of one percent—0.0019%) only a tenth of their showing ten years earlier.