Blue and white balloons brought a festive air to the events hall in Bat Yam on the night of Oct. 30. The Zionist Camp, Israel’s main opposition party, was beginning to show new signs of life. 

One day before the Knesset opened its winter session, Knesset member Yoel Hason gathered 400 party activists for the event, called “Israel must wake up!” Despite the name, it looked like the event was intended to wake up his own party first and foremost, before it finally loses its status to Yesh Atid as Israel’s biggest opposition party.

In attendance were Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog, his second in command Knesset member Tzipi Livni and about half the party’s other Knesset members. Considering its crash in recent polls, some of which give the party fewer than 10 seats if elections were held now, an optimistic mood pervaded the room.

Hason, a veteran member of the Knesset, has in the past represented two other major parties — first the Likud and later Kadima. In his Oct. 30 speech, he identified another major problem facing his current political home apart from its drop in the polls and the leadership crisis it has been facing for many months now. He claimed that the Zionist Camp does not function like a party that sees itself as forming a potential government.