Labor’s Love Lost.
Moved, one prisoner said it would be nice to finally change underwear.
The warden thought it over, and then agreed.
“No problem!” he said.
“Sasha, you swap underwear with Vassily, and Dimitri, you swap with Igor.” The poor souls who still vote for the Israeli Labor Party, fewer and fewer of them every year, may empathize.
In this case, the departing dauphin is the affable but ineffectual Isaac “Bougie” Herzog, and his likely successor is the fumbling Amir Peretz, best remembered in the collective Israeli imagination as a short-term defense minister who once infamously posed for a photo op while looking through a pair of binoculars without bothering to first remove their caps.
The image resonated because it was, and remains, an apt metaphor for Labor’s woes: The party likes to pretend it’s resolute, but its ability to see clearly is compromised by its own inherent ideological blinders.
That Peretz managed to advance to the second round of the party’s primaries—his opponent is Avi Gabay, a newcomer to Labor from the newfangled Kulanu party who, just like Peretz before him, had served as a minister for environmental protection in Bibi Netanyahu’s cabinet—is all the evidence you need that the party is continuing its spiraling descent into oblivion.
It’s difficult to think of another political implosion so spectacular—Labor was in power for the first three decades of Israel’s existence, and remained a significant electoral force for three more decades thereafter before beginning its march into the margins—but there’s no joy in watching Labor fumble.
And Shelly Yachimovich, another bumbling former party boss, spent most of her energy this year in a failed bid to take over the Histadrut, the large labor union Labor has traditionally controlled, and then, once defeated, taking her opponent to court.