The first impact of Knesset member Isaac “Buji” Herzog’s victory in the primaries for the chairmanship of the Israeli Labor Party could be felt on Friday morning, Nov. 22. Moments after the final results were in, and the extent of outgoing Chairwoman Shelly Yachimovich’s defeat became known, party old-timers rushed to the Journalist House, Beit Sokolov in Tel Aviv. They were heading back to center stage. They were returning from an exile imposed on them for over two years.
These were the old familiar faces, who attended victory parties for late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, President Shimon Peres and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They were there for every turnover that the party experienced in the long years that it failed to rise from its ruins and re-establish itself. Also present were senior Labor Party officials of the past who had disappeared completely from party life such as former Labor and Social Welfare Minister Raanan Cohen and former Knesset member Colette Avital.
It is this account from the sidelines of the turnover that could explain Yachimovich’s huge defeat. The outgoing chairwoman paid the price for distancing the movement’s old guard over the last few years, and for doing it so brashly. She paid the price for trying to obliterate the Labor Party’s DNA and establish a new party — the Yachimovich Party — in its stead. She surrounded herself with legions of extremely young activists, because she felt safe with them around her. But she lacked the good sense to keep Environmental Protection Minister Amir Peretz, former Defense Minister Binyamin “Fuad” Ben Eliezer, Knesset member Eitan Cabel and Isaac Herzog beside her, too.
Yachimovich always knew how to praise the party’s democratic structures under her leadership, when in fact, it was a one-woman democracy. During the Labor Party’s election campaign at the start of this year, she was patronizing in the way she cast aside anyone who dared to warn her of the consequences of abandoning the left-wing party’s diplomatic banner and of expressing diplomatic positions that might appeal to the right. She told anyone who expressed doubt and dared to ask her about it that Likud Party supporters would soon be flooding the Labor Party and supporting it en masse.
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