Former Finance Minister Yair Lapid has an impressive ability to identify the public mood in Israel at any given moment. Sometimes these are actual trends that Lapid connects to just in the right way, and he redefines them as he is campaigning. That is exactly what he did in the 2013 elections. He walked away with 19 seats and became leader of the middle class after the 2011 summer social protests. He did the same thing in the last election (March 2015), successfully pulling himself out of a political nadir by focusing his campaign on public corruption. His current strategic efforts, intended to get him elected prime minister, show the same kind of understanding of the Israeli public. He is breaking right, attacking the left and getting close to the ultra-Orthodox.

That is why a Facebook post that he wrote Oct. 27 is nothing less than a barometer of the public’s attitude toward the Israel Electric Company (IEC) and the greatest fiasco in that company’s history, which occurred this week. Lapid was the first to notice that the Israeli public was resentful of the IEC's management, its workers’ union or both, and that there was enormous political potential in this animosity. The 230,000 angry Israelis who lost power from anywhere from one to three days following flash floods are looking for guidance and an action plan to resolve the situation.

The public’s enormous and justifiable ire resulted from reports that the IEC's workers’ union was in no rush to fix power outages and other problems that arose Oct. 25 during the morning storm. They were engaged in what the media called an “Italian strike," which is when the workers do the minimum required by their contracts. The threatening monologue that the chairman of the IEC's workers’ union David (Miko) Tzarfati delivered to the Knesset’s Finance Committee Oct. 12, two weeks before the storm, only exacerbated the public’s outrage. In that contentious speech, which was aired on TV again and again over the past few days, Tzarfati shouted, “If anyone thinks that there will be someone to bail them out in the next storm, you are mistaken.” He couldn’t have been more clear.

As soon as he realized this, Lapid sat down to write his Facebook post, asking the public to take note of the “thunderous silence of the Likud and Labor parties in response to the Italian strike by the IEC's workers’ union. Tens of thousands of children and senior citizens still have no power … but Shelly Yachimovich is silent, Haim Katz is silent, Isaac Herzog is silent and Benjamin Netanyahu is silent. Why? Because half the employees of the IEC vote in the Labor Party primaries, and the other half votes in the Likud primaries.