Labor's knives come out

Labor party leader Shelly Yachimovich came under fire on Monday at the party’s caucus meeting, less than a week after the party came in third in the polls. While everyone expected knives to be drawn and directed at Yachimovich in the wake of Labor’s poor showing in the election, no one knew this would happen so soon.

Efforts to unseat Yachimovich as party leader were already underway before the elections and it is very likely that a leadership contest would be called over the next year (the party charter stipulates that new primaries must be held within 14 months of an election). The chairwoman will face a daunting challenge if she tries to stall this process.

The caucus meeting was ostensibly called to deliberate whether Labor should enter Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's new coalition, but many participants used it to warm up their engines ahead of the coming succession battle. MKs Eitan Cabel and Isaac (Buji) Herzog are almost certain to challenge Yachimovich.

Herzog criticized Yachimovich at the meeting on Monday, saying, "Some of Yachimovich's stances on economic issues alienated voters; we lost seats to [leftist] Meretz and to the Center."

Cabel said that "there are internal processes that need to be accelerated within the party." MK Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said, "The Labor party cannot just continue moving along without a clear position on the peace process."

Some of the party's newcomers to the Knesset also joined the chorus of detractors. Erel Margalit said, "The Labor party must make its positions on the peace process clear and form a taskforce to explore the possibility of entering the coalition."

Yachimovich shot back, conceding that the party had underperformed in the polls.

"The results were disappointing; of course we would have wanted more seats. However we are now on the upswing and the party is continually growing," Yachimovich said.

"Perhaps we should have, on the very night Bibi [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] and [then-Foreign Minister] Avigdor Lieberman announced they would merge their candidate lists, made it clear that we would not enter such a radical government. I refused to treat the center-left bloc's parties as political adversaries so I only attacked Bibi. That strategy was effective, but unfortunately a great number of the fruit it bore were ultimately picked by a trendy party. Had the race been only us against Bibi, that would have been terrific, but the center-left arena was torn into pieces."

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