The most recent opinion poll published by Haaretz last week [Dec. 10] was especially depressing for the Israeli left.

The poll predicts that 49 out of 120 mandates will go to center or left-wing parties. In Israel, the party receiving the largest number of mandates is less important than the formation of party blocs that can assemble a coalition and a government. And this is an impossible task with 49 mandates. Close associates of Tzipi Livni and Shelly Yacimovich sounded more gloomy than ever this week, and mainly blamed each other — not Netanyahu, of course — for fragmenting the camp.

Together, Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah Party, Shelly Yacimovich’s Labor Party and Meretz garnered 29 mandates. Twenty years ago, the Labor Party under the late Yitzhak Rabin went through a transformation, and Labor and Meretz garnered 56 mandates together. A simple calculation demonstrates that the Israeli left lost more than a million voters in the last twenty years.

The center-left partners trade mutual recriminations over the fact that the camp did not unite in anticipation of the coming elections, in contrast to the union of Likud and Avigdor Liberman’s party, Yisrael Beiteinu. However, this is merely election spin, a blame game. According to almost all polls, a center-left union would not have added even one mandate to the left bloc. The catatonic status of the Israeli left is not reducible to whether a specific politician joins a different party, or to the founding of a new party. The problems are more fundamental, and have continued this way for years.