Michaeli Vows To Restore Labor To Customary Irrelevance

“There are voters coming of age who have never known a Labor-led government.

File source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Merav_Michaeli_by_Ron_Kedmi.jpg

Tel Aviv, January 27 – The newly-installed chairwoman of one of Israel’s oldest, but fading, political parties made a public commitment Wednesday to bring Labor back to its former glory and its familiar position as leader of ineffective opposition to a right-wing-led government.

MK Merav Michaeli prevailed in Labor Party primary Sunday that saw a 26% turnout of party members, but who gave gave her 77% of the vote. The outspoken feminist and longtime party activist spoke to reporters following a round of consultations with advisers and party functionaries, and promised not to stop working until she has restored Labor, one of Israel’s founding political organizations, to the position in which it became most comfortable through the decades: railing against the politically conservative policies and stances of the ruling coalition, but wielding no effective power.

“It will be a long, difficult journey,” warned Michaeli. “But we will succeed. Labor, the party of Rabin and of Ben-Gurion, of Shimon Peres and Golda Meir, will once again rise to the status it has customarily enjoyed. We will once again lead the opposition in Knesset, righteously fulminating against everything the right-wing government does, but never managing to convince enough voters to put their trust in us after the debacle that we brought upon them with the Oslo Accords.”

“At this point,” she acknowledged, “I’m not sure anyone on our side of the political map even remembers what it’s like to hold power on a national level. There are voters coming of age who have never known a Labor-led government.” Labor last held membership in a governing coalition as part of a unity government with Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud in 2012; the last Israeli prime minister from the Labor Party left office in February 2001, ushering in right-wing and center-right governments, mostly under the Likud Party, over the ensuing two decades.

Michaeli pointed to several key issues for her party to overcome if it is to reclaim its old level of political irrelevance. “Surveys show us barely meeting the electoral threshold, so that will be our first battle,” she observed. “A Knesset without Labor is an unknown in Israeli politics, as marginal and useless as Labor has been the last few years. But I undertake to help Labor harness that marginal, useless status and leverage it over the medium term to become once again a force on the left that stands for whatever is opposite to that which those who hold actual power have put forth as policy. But we must go beyond mere survival; we must step into the role that our predecessors have carved out for us, the role of the clueless naïfs who insist on concessions to terrorists no matter the body count. Together, we can do it. Let’s put the party back on the front lines of ineffectiveness.”

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