Declining norms. Barak
Photo: Dudu Azulay
It's all Labor's fault
Labor's consistent refusal to be in opposition facilitated Right's landslide victory
There should be no mistake about the election results, while no significance should be attributed to Livni's personal accomplishment; it is meaningless. Israel chose to go right; it chose conservatism and fascism, and it did so in an unequivocal and blatant manner. There is no point in seeking liberal comforts in these election results as they cannot be found anyway.
Given Kadima's Knesset list and the fact it is merely a derivative of Likud, with most of Kadima's members not really undergoing an ideological metamorphosis, the Right's victory in Israel is not only unequivocal in mathematical terms. It is a crushing win. Let's not cover up this fact or its implications.
Labor must not dare consider the corrupting idea that guided it in the past 30 years – in the name of "national responsibility" of course – to join, as a fifth wheel, yet another rightist government and continue to push our political history into the realms of chaos and apocalypse. We are there anyways thanks to you.
You already caused great and possibly irreversible damage with your decision to crush the democratic system, while cheapening and showing contempt to the role of the opposition in a democratic regime. All of it is your doing, you so-called social-democrats (in your own eyes, at least).
Labor is the party that pulverized the fundamental political order of coalition and opposition and enabled the Right to recycle and rehabilitate itself after each failure.
Had Labor realized back in 1984 that being in the opposition is not about going to a barren land, but rather, it's a mission and there is no democracy in its absence, perhaps we would have been in a different era by now.
However, labor always preferred the comforts of power, and by doing so consistently built up the strength of the Right, while eliminating itself. Meanwhile, no suitable ideological-political response to the rightist rule was created.
Barak's refusal to quit is merely another testament to the declining norms, the lack of shame, and the grim public reality we are facing, whereby people no longer quit for any reason around here.
