In interviews after losing the election, Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, the two leaders of the Zionist Camp, explained their failure by blaming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for unleashing a racist campaign against Israel’s Arab minority.

Herzog and Livni are undeniably correct. Netanyahu did act like a first-class racist who tried to sow fear by announcing that Arab voters were flocking to the polls in droves. But the reasons for the results are to be found elsewhere. Blaming Netanyahu for it shows how disconnected they are from the country's mood, and how unwilling they are to engage in any real soul searching.

No one can argue with the numbers. The Zionist Camp's failure to win the hearts of the Mizrahi [of Middle Eastern origin] electorate living in the periphery offers an alternative explanation for its defeat, and it has nothing to do with the Netanyahu’s last-minute racist campaign. Any attempt to uncover the real reason why Zionist Camp lost should consider the two decades or so in which the party [then called Labor] was so conspicuously absent from the development towns [namely peripheral poor localities established in the 1950s] in the southern Negev region and the north. It ignored the plight of the periphery. Consequently, it was in these areas that the Zionist Camp’s election results where especially pathetic. The periphery was where the party crumbled and collapsed.

In recent days, a patronizing claim frequently heard is that residents of the periphery are ungrateful because they voted for the Likud Party instead of some party like the Zionist Camp, with a distinct social democratic agenda. In fact, this very argument only proves the disconnect. The truth of the matter is that many residents of these towns in the periphery cannot identify with a party, which shares its social concerns, but which is, at the same time, deemed too Ashkenazi [of East European origin] and too remote — or, too Tel Aviv. Though Zionist Camp Party Knesset members like Shelly Yachimovich, Amir Peretz, Stav Shaffir and Itzik Shmuli embody social democratic principles and have a proven track record on social issues, the party image at large relays a sense of detachment from the concerns of the lower classes. Indeed, the Zionist Camp was the largest party in Israel’s wealthiest settlements, data shows.