The primaries farce
at the Labor party does not leave any other choice but to look for the reason for this party’s tragic condition in a whole different world of imagery. Political terminology, so it appears, is no longer sufficient, while logic has failed a while ago. Perhaps the answer could be found in the poems of Yehuda Amichai.
“God has mercy on kindergarten children,” Amichai wrote, and to paraphrase his words we can say that God apparently shows less mercy to the children of the Labor party. He does not at all show mercy to its voters, elected representatives, and members, and certainly not to its computers – it appears He is being cruel to them at the most difficult junctions. He is being cruel and leaves them hurt and bleeding, lacking mandates and hopeless.
There is no question about it: It is apparently impossible to sink any lower. This is the last thing the Labor party needed: Flawed primary elections that turn into a joke and end even before they started, breaking a Guinness record in terms of ridicule and dismalness. As was the case with Egypt, Labor is being hit by one blow after another, with each one worse and more painful than the previous one; a sequence of bad luck that refuses to end.
And in this case with the primaries, or shall we say non-primaries, the blow was harsh, painful, and unexpected. Because just on the day where Labor members wanted to embark on a new way, the truck carrying the asphalt flipped over – they have no way, and certainly not a new one.
Any cliché would be good to describe the day Labor had to go through. Trouble comes in bunches, and any bad thing that could have happened to the party, happened to it. After months of terrible polls, harsh criticisms, and dreadful prophecies, it isn’t difficult to understand the reason for the gloom that took hold of Labor’s members upon the collapse of the primaries.
All the energies were directed to this day. Candidates traveled all across the country, and the intention was to wake up in the morning singing a new tune. However, this tune was cut short in the middle of the day, making place for curses, fury, and anger in the face of a collapsing computer systems.
We can feel pity for members of the Labor party because this time – and this time only – it apparently wasn’t their fault. Even if we wish to do so, we cannot blame Ehud Barak for the computer screw-up. We also cannot blame Binyamin Ben Eliezer, or Isaac Herzog, or Shalom Simhon. The fingers are all pointing at Secretary General Eitan Cabel, yet it is still unclear whether he is guilty for the fiasco.
Cabel, who faces extremely difficult conditions at this pulverized party, wanted to finish the primaries with no debts, no forgeries, and with his head held up high. It didn’t work out for him, and those who did not see the primaries completed are not very interested in the explanations. The same is true for Ehud Barak, who is barely able to keep afloat, while trying to convince people that there is still hope.
Barak’s problem is that the economic damage faced by Labor can be coped with, and it is also possible to calm down the primaries candidates – however, it is doubtful whether the blow to the image of the Labor party because of the “primaries that weren’t” can be erased. Again, Israelis were forced to watch embarrassing images from Labor party headquarters, and again we saw the miserable state of the party that once upon a time “built this country” and today can barely elect a Knesset list or build a decent computer network.
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