Yachimovich’s Labor of love

Granted, this is partly due to the weakness of her potential rivals: MKs Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Isaac Herzog, for instance, have repeatedly served as cabinet ministers with few achievements to show for it, while former MK Amram Mitzna led the party to a landslide defeat when he chaired it in 2003, then quit in a huff several months later. Yachimovich, by contrast, has proved an energetic and effective legislator.

But the significance of her chosen focus cannot be ignored. During two years in office, Yachimovich has barely uttered a word about the peace process, preferring to devote herself exclusively to domestic issues. Yet Labor Party voters, who largely identify themselves as members of the “peace camp,” would rather be led by her than by her rivals, all of whom claim to view the “peace process” as a top priority. What gives?

The answer is simple: Most Israeli voters, including those in Labor, agree with Yachimovich that domestic issues ought to be the top priority right now. Repeated public opinion polls bear this out.

A January 2007 Peace Index poll, for instance, found that voters’ top concern was governmental corruption, which received a weighted grade of 31.5 out of 100. That compared to 22.1 for the second-place issue, rehabilitating the Israel Defense Forces after the previous summer’s Second Lebanon War; 20.1 for reducing economic gaps; 15.4 for reducing crime; and a mere 10.8 for making peace with the Palestinians. An October 2010 Peace Index survey similarly found that only one-fifth of Jewish Israelis deemed peace with the Palestinians the country’s most pressing issue; the other four-fifths chose various domestic concerns.

And it’s worth noting that these polls may actually skew the results in favor of the peace process by omitting some of the most important domestic issues from the list of choices. The October 2010 poll, for instance, gave respondents six choices, two of which were strengthening either the state’s Jewish character or its democratic character. Unsurprisingly, these ranked last. But the choices did not include improving the state’s failing education system, though this is a key concern for many Israeli parents and has received considerable media attention in recent months. Nor did they include rising crime rates, another issue that has garnered considerable media attention.

The reason why most Israelis view domestic concerns as higher priority than the peace process is simple: They see no chance of actually reaching a peace agreement in the foreseeable future. The October 2010 poll, for instance, found that two-thirds of respondents deemed Israeli-Palestinian talks unlikely to produce an agreement “in the coming years”; that finding has been roughly constant for years, regardless of which party headed the government. That is because two-thirds of Jewish Israelis also believe that most Palestinians “have not accepted Israel’s existence and would destroy it if they could,” as the October 2007 Peace Index poll put it. And as the pollsters noted, “this finding is not exceptional; similar rates have been found in the Jewish public since the mid-1990s.”

Having concluded that Palestinian intransigence currently makes a peace agreement unobtainable, most Israelis would rather the government focus on problems it could solve – namely, domestic ones. But leading politicians of almost every party, from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Likud to opposition leader Tzipi Livni of Kadima, have instead consistently neglected domestic issues in favor of an obsessive focus on the peace process. That is certainly true of Yachimovich’s main rivals for the Labor Party’s chairmanship.

All three of the party’s declared candidates for leadership – Herzog, Ben-Eliezer and Avishay Braverman – were members of the current government until they resigned last week, and all three held portfolios directly relevant to major domestic issues like poverty and employment: social affairs; industry, trade and labor; and minority affairs, respectively. Yet instead of tackling these issues, they spent most of their time in office threatening to quit if the government did not make progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

Yachimovich, in contrast, did focus on domestic issues – and whether or not one agrees with her proposed solutions, she clearly got results. To take just one prominent example, her bill to reduce inequality by capping executive pay through legislation garnered enough Knesset and public support that the government was forced to respond with its own, more market-based proposals to curb excessive executive pay.

Labor voters are evidently excited at the prospect of a party leader interested in addressing burning domestic concerns rather than wasting all her time and energy pursuing an unachievable peace agreement. The question now is whether other Israeli politicians will finally get the message.