The No. 2 slot on the Labor Party list in the 2013 election, right after party head Shelly Yachimovich, was filled by Isaac Herzog, already then a well-known name.
In the 2015 election, Yachimovich and Herzog switched places for Labor on a combined list with Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah party called Zionist Union. In the first election in 2019, Tal Russo – a well-known general – was Labor’s No. 2; in the second election of 2019, Labor’s No. 2 – in a joint list with Gesher – was Itzik Shmuli, who became a household name following the 2011 cottage cheese protests.
In 2020, it was Shmuli again in the second slot reserved for Labor on the joint Labor-Gesher-Meretz list, and in the last election, in 2021, it was veteran politician and security maven Omer Bar Lev, who was second to Merav Michaeli.
This time around, Labor’s No. 2 – if the party’s primary results are honored and there are no unexpected outside figures parachuted to the top two slots in the list – will be filled by Naama Lazimi.
Naama who, many people are probably wondering.
It’s a safe guess that Lazimi, 36, was one of the most widely searched names on Google in Israel on Wednesday, as voters – who never heard her name before – scrambled to find out something after hearing she had won the Labor Party primary a day earlier.
What they learned was that Lazimi is a Migdal Ha’emek native who was active in student politics at the University of Haifa, won a slot in the Haifa Municipality in 2018, and entered the Knesset last year when Public Security Minister Bar Lev quit the Knesset under the “Norwegian Law” to make room in parliament for the next person on his party’s list.
Out of the spotlight
Except for Knesset and political reporters, however, not many people heard much about her accomplishments in the Knesset. Yet here she is, the victor in Labor’s primary and one of the reasons that well-known names representing Labor’s Old Guard – veteran politicians like Bar Lev, 68, and Nachman Shai, 75 – have been pushed down into unrealistic slots on the party’s next Knesset list.
In other words: Lazimi in, Bar Lev out. Out with the old, in with the new.
But this is not just a “generational thing,” although it is that as well, since four out of the top six vote-getters in the Labor primary were 42 and under. It is also, however, an “agenda thing.”
In a KAN Bet radio interview on Wednesday morning, Lazimi said the Labor primary results reflect a desire by the party’s voters to see the agenda shift to issues such as housing prices, the high cost of living, wages, and the “life-work balance.”
“The color of the list reflects a big interest in dealing with the issues of life itself,” she said in a twist on a line made famous by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The greatest challenge we face, as citizens of the State of Israel, is the threat of Iran arming itself with nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told a group of Likud supporters in Ma’aleh Adumim in 2015, following a State Comptroller’s Report critical of his government’s handling of the housing crisis. “People speak about the price of housing and cost of living, but I don’t forget the matter of life itself.”
His point was clear: first secure life, then deal with the quality of that life.
Lazimi’s message was that for the nearly 23,000 people who cast their votes in the Labor primaries, the “life itself” issues are in fact the issues of housing prices and cost of living, not necessarily Iran and security and foreign policy dilemmas.
Labor's top slots
It is noticeable that none of the top slots in the Labor primary, once a party heavy with ex-generals and politicians whose main message was Palestinian-Israeli peace, were not won by those – like Bar Lev – whose political persona is identified with those issues. Rather, the Labor primary victors were those identified primarily with economic and social issues.
While this represents a shift in Labor’s identity, a shift the party has been undergoing for several years now, it is – if a poll conducted at the end of July for the Israel Democracy Institute is to be believed – reflective of a wider trend across the country as well. Fully 44% of the respondents in this poll said a political party’s platform on the economy and the cost of living was the major factor that would influence which party they would vote for in the November election.
Only 11% said that a party’s platform on foreign policy and security issues would be the main determining factor, and 14% said issues of religion and state would be the deciding factor.
This poll was taken before the weekend round of fighting in Gaza. Overnight foreign policy and security issues could once again leap-frog to the top of the list of people’s priorities before November 1, if there is another round of fighting in Gaza, or a wave of terrorism similar to the one that hit the country in April and May. One need only think back to the three days of fighting in Gaza that began on Friday to realize how quickly the country’s agenda and focus can move from social and economic issues to security ones.
If things remain relatively quiet, however, then what was evident in the Labor primary vote will likely play out on the national level as well.
With the security situation in the country relatively calm; with nothing dramatic expected to happen on the Palestinian track in the foreseeable future; with Iran in most people’s minds little more than annoying background noise that has been there already for more than 30 years and which they have become accustomed to; quality of life issues have now moved to the forefront, just like – as so many Israelis say longingly of other nations – in a “normal country.”