Yachimovich: The coalition is utterly out of touch with the people

Netanyahu returns to his seat, shaking hands with various coalition members. With Lapid, with Bennett.

Opposition leader and Labor chair Shelly Yachimovich takes the podium. She says that for all the talk of new politics, the building of the coalition was all “old, and familiar, and not terribly pleasant, but legitimate.” So let’s make this clear, she says: “We’re your opposition” and we’ll be arguing with you over “the vision for this country.”

It will be a “bitter ideological argument,” she says. “We already have two countries for two peoples” and the coalition talks painfully proved it. The coalition parties are “thirsty and rich… and don’t understand what the people want.” Netanyahu, Lapid, Bennett, Livni, she says, are all from well-connected families, capitalists, with no financial problems.

She has something good to say to Netanyahu, nonetheless, for seeking to bring Labor into the coalition. But “you are a right-winger” economically and diplomatically. We both know you wanted Labor in the coalition, but you couldn’t manage in the weeks of negotiations to acknowledge “that there was perhaps something correct in our [Labor] worldview.”

Many in the coalition have good intentions, she says. “But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

She turns to incoming Finance Minister Yair Lapid, who she says earned NIS 2.6 million last year ($700,000), and NIS 3.7 million the year before. “That’s not middle class,” she spits.

Now she talks of ordinary Israelis who cannot remotely get through the month, facing impossible rents and bills, and for whom current government policy provides unfair allocations and inadequate safety nets. “And now you’re going to cut more, in the next budget” from the wrong places — from education, and from health.