Labor leader to PM: On any accord with the Palestinians, we’ll support you

Yachimovich continues, in what is a strikingly passionate speech: People have the right to normal lives, to make an honest living, to have a roof over their heads, to go the cinema sometime, fly abroad once every few years, have a guitar lesson, a full fridge. “The right to peace of mind” — to a real future, not merely to survive.

She calls this a government of “marginalization,” not of inclusion, noting the exclusion of the ultra-Orthodox from its ranks, too.

Netanyahu doesn’t seem to be listening too closely. He’s discussing some paperwork with Ya’alon at his right.

In the coalition accords, “there isn’t even hope,” she says.

“Your victory picture is a photo without the ultra-Orthodox. What kind of achievement is that?” she asks.

She predicts no progress on the diplomatic front. No progress on civil marriage. “What’s new? Never has the ‘new’ looked so old.”

Now the Labor leader turns to the Obama visit. She quotes her former party leader, the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, calling for “an end to the bloodshed” and the start of an era of friendship and coexistence. “I find it hard to see you saying those words,” she says to Netanyahu.

But she heard the promise of progress in Netanyahu’s speech, she says, and so she promises him her support if he is poised to make real progress and needs Labor’s votes. “If you get even to an interim agreement… I promise you, what I said to you face-to-face,” she says, “we will join your government in order to see through such a move.”