1. The members of Labor selected a good ticket on Tuesday. They picked a young ensemble, perhaps too young, with many women (a strong card to play, especially when compared with Likud’s testosterone-rich list), socially conscious and lively, that can certainly be presented to the public as candidates who will “take care of people like you.” In other words, the Labor candidates care about Israelis who have a hard time making ends meet, who have despaired of a financially secure future, who are collapsing beneath skyrocketing housing costs and the high cost of living. At present, that’s quite a few people.

So what’s missing? Someone with a background in defense, someone who has military and political experience — and it would not hurt if that person were Mizrahi, too. It’s missing Shaul Mofaz, to put it succinctly: an excellent chief of staff, a good defense minister and an awful politician. The 11th spot on the joint Labor-Hatnuah ticket, reserved for an appointee of party chairman Isaac Herzog, is waiting for him now more than ever.

2. A prominent figure from the Russian immigrant community would also help, as would, perhaps, a religious Zionist candidate. In the end, the chance that Herzog will form the next government depends upon the size of the center-left bloc as a whole, not only on the number of seats won by Labor-Hatnuah. The current ticket is not likely to make moderate Likud voters want to cross party lines and vote Labor. If appealing candidates like Labor faction whip Eitan Cabel and Erel Margalit, a leading Israeli venture capitalist who served in the 19th Knesset, were placed higher on the ticket, along with those like Yossi Yonah, a philosophy professor who helped found the Sephardi Democratic Rainbow advocacy group for Jews of Sephardi and Mizrahi descent, that might work in Herzog’s favor in the more important battle.

Read the article in full at Haaretz.