So not only do Israeli MKs not have individual constituents who vote for them and must be catered to, they don’t even have a local branch of activists in the party to answer to.

And as for Hilik Bar’s four-step plan (at least as of last week; today’s his party is in shambles) to “advance the party” and send a message to the skeptical press and public that it is actually on the way up, not down. First, he using the budget available to him -now that much of the party debt is paid – to renew activity in Labor’s branches with an emphasis on taking advantage of the student leadership that the party still dominates on campuses nationwide. He says Labor’s relatively strong Young Guard proves that the young generation is looking for an ideological party with roots. Next month a new Labor Party interactive website will be launched that he promises will be the most sophisticated of any party site in the country. It will include social networking for party activists and a large section on the party’s heritage. And he promises a new membership drive with the slogan “Build the party that built the country.”

Notice his target is students in the academy, campus politicians with ambitions of becoming professional politicians. Not a word about the struggles of the worker in this country.

It’s a country with no middle class. Only the well-off and the rest of us who can’t make ends meet from month to month.

Have you seen how the foreign ministry has been on strike, cancelling official visits? I don’t blame them. The staffers are paid poverty wages, like the cops, like the teachers.

It is a country ripe for a serious labor movement but these Israelis walk around in darkness…