Yacimovich victory shows what voters really care about

Just when you’d expect diplomatic issues to top the agenda, the party most closely identified with the peace process elected a leader who prioritizes domestic issues. Will other politicians get the message?

By EVELYN GORDON
Shelly Yacimovich at Labor HQ 311 (photo credit: Gil Hoffman)
Shelly Yacimovich at Labor HQ 311
(photo credit: Gil Hoffman)
Israeli voters sent their politicians a remarkable message last week. At a moment when one would expect diplomatic and security issues to top the public agenda – with the UN poised to recognize a Palestinian state, peace with Egypt looking shakier than it has in 30 years and turmoil engulfing Syria – members of a major political party decided their new leader should be someone who unabashedly prioritizes domestic issues over foreign policy. Even more remarkably, this choice was made by a bastion of Israel’s left, the party that brought us the Oslo Accords, whose flagship cause for the last two decades has been the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
By choosing MK Shelly Yacimovich as their new leader, Labor Party members sent an unequivocal message that they are tired of this order of priorities. Clearly, they weren’t saying diplomatic-security issues should be ignored. But for years, successive Israeli governments have focused on diplomatic-security issues to the virtual exclusion of domestic ones. This neglect has enabled domestic problems to balloon and multiply, which in turn led to the eruption of the summer’s massive socioeconomic protests. And now, even members of Israel self-proclaimed “peace camp” have had enough: They want a leader who understands, as Yacimovich once wrote, that “before we … engage in a struggle for peace, we need to have a state.”
As I’ve noted before, polls have been showing for years that most Israelis view domestic issues as higher priority than the “peace process,” for the simple reason that most have concluded Israeli-Palestinian peace is currently unattainable. But voters have rarely had the option of expressing this preference via the ballot box: Candidates for leadership in every major party usually focus on diplomatic-security issues.
The recent Labor primary, however, offered a clear-cut choice, and the voters’ verdict was unequivocal. In the first round, they eliminated two candidates identified almost exclusively with diplomatic-security issues (Amram Mitzna and Isaac Herzog) in favor of the two with a record of championing socioeconomic issues: Yacimovich and Amir Peretz. And in the second round, they chose the candidate whose six-year career in parliament has been devoted exclusively to domestic issues over the one who, when he finally found himself in the cabinet, relegated domestic issues to the back burner by choosing to serve as defense minister.
Yacimovich’s victory – along with the surge it has given her party in the polls – thus sends an unmistakable message to leading politicians of all political stripes: Henceforth, you ignore domestic issues at your peril. If you continue focusing exclusively on diplomatic-security issues, you, too, may find yourself defeated in the next primary by a newcomer who focuses on domestic problems.
Yet at the same time, it poses several dangers.
The first is that Yacimovich might succumb to the heavy pressure she will now certainly face, from both the media and leading public figures on the left, to shift her focus to diplomatic-security issues. Haaretz, the voice of the hard left, fired the opening salvo just two days after her election, declaring in an editorial that “For Labor under her leadership to be able to head the left in the next Knesset election, she will also have to give voice loudly, clearly and forcefully to the diplomatic message she has thus far avoided: that ensuring Israel's future requires a political separation from the Palestinians and the end of the settlement enterprise in the West Bank.”
So far, Yacimovich has showed an impressive ability to withstand pressure. She stuck to her socioeconomic guns before the primary in the teeth of all the pundits who asserted she couldn’t win without a diplomatic message; she also refused to back down when doyens of the left attacked her for insisting that the settlements are not the root of all evil (as she explained in a lengthy interview with Haaretz last month, she thinks most settlements will have to go under any peace deal, but she doesn’t think they are “a sin and a crime,” doesn’t support boycotting them, and doesn’t buy the argument that if only the settlements disappeared, billions of shekels could be diverted to social issues and all of Israel’s domestic problems would be solved).
Still, the pressure is bound to escalate now that she has won. And if she does succumb, this will deal a tremendous blow to Israelis’ already shaky faith in their political system. In a survey published in January, over half of respondents said they feel their vote has either “no” or “insignificant” influence on policy. This feeling would surely intensify if, after having made their preference for prioritizing domestic issues so clear, voters were to find themselves stuck with yet another politician preoccupied with the “peace process” at the expense of all else.
The second danger is that other parties might conclude not merely that they should pay more attention to domestic issues, but that they should actually adopt Yacimovich’s policies – most of which would be disastrous. In that same Haaretz interview, for instance, she unequivocally backed the continuation of monopolies and powerful public-sector unions, blithely disregarding their sizable contribution to the exorbitant prices that sparked the summer’s protests.
The third danger is that the rest of the political class will simply fail to get the message. For if other parties keep focusing on foreign affairs to the exclusion of domestic issues, not only will Israelis’ faith in the responsiveness of the political system continue to decline, but Yacimovich’s destructive economic ideas will win by default. Only if other parties offer their own solutions to domestic problems will voters have a real alternative to her proposals.
Yacimovich’s victory is remarkable for the clear answer it provides to the question of what Israeli voters really care about. The new question it raises is whether Israel’s political establishment is listening.
The writer is a journalist and commentator.