He may currently be chairperson of the party and buoyed by its backing is emphatically insisting that he will be the next prime minister, but just under a year and a half ago, Yitzhak Herzog’s Labor party wanted to “erase” him according to Labor MK Shelly Yechimovich.
In November 2013 Herzog deposed Yechimovich for Labor leadership in a party primary, but before he did she wrote a caustic condemnation of him on Facebook, slamming his term as welfare minister when he served the same weaker social classes that the party claims to champion.
“Members of the Labor party will do everything to erase from its manpower strength Knesset Member Buji Herzog who destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of families in the state of Israel, and was even disqualified by the Movement for Quality Government from serving just as a minister. Party chairman? In his dreams,” wrote Yechimovich on September 1, 2013.
Her Facebook post at the time also featured a link to sharp criticism by journalist Natan Zahavi against Herzog, in which he accused him of failing as welfare minister even despite the special treatment he was afford by leftist journalists.
The comments regarding Herzog’s disqualification as minister refers to when the Movement for Quality Government (MQG) asked for him to be removed back in 2005 when Ariel Sharon was prime minister.
MQG contacted Sharon and determined that Herzog could not be appointed housing and construction minister due to his involvement in the 1999 “Amutot Barak” (Barak NGOs) scandal of 1999, in which it was charged that then Prime Minister Ehud Barak breached the party funding laws.
Herzog maintained his right to silence in the case, forcing the attorney general to close the case against him due to a lack of evidence. Ironically, Herzog has been accused of another funding scandal in the current elections with the foreign funded V-15 group, and Herzog is again keeping silent.
In asking for Herzog to be disqualified, MQG wrote to Sharon and the Labor chair at the time.
“There is no doubt that a man seriously involved in acts described by the attorney general as ‘systematically trampling on the law,’ and who prefers the right to silence over his obligations to give an account to the public so as to clarify the truth, should not be appointed to a senior and central position as minister, all the more so when speaking about a minister appointed over an organization of people,” read the letter.
