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'Yuli Tamir was nothing and remained nothing'
By Gidi Weitz

The new Labor secretary general, Weizmann Shiri, delivers an unprecedented attack on the party's "rebels" in an interview tomorrow in Haaretz Magazine.

"None of them, if you stand them one-on-one in front of [Ehud] Barak, has accomplished or will accomplish 10 percent of what he did for Israel's security in particular and for the country in general. You're looking at people who have been party activists all their lives, and I say that in the negative sense of the word, political hacks, who are guided by their personal agenda and nothing else. I know a large percentage of these people, and I feel disdain for them, " Shiri said.
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Does Shiri think it is reasonable for the rebels to vote against the coalition?

"Listen carefully, that's why they're changing the constitution, so that whoever decides that he wants to behave like that will decide his political future for himself, period. Some of them, their future has already been decided."

As for the former chairman of the Labor Party, Amir Peretz, who served as defense minister during the Second Lebanon War, Shiri says:

"Look, in the eyes of the world, the Israel Defense Forces had turned into an army of dishrags that was incapable of getting water for its soldiers. You have to tell the truth and only the truth - all the rest is slogans. In every properly run country that man would have been kicked out, along with the prime minister."

Of one of the rebels, former education minister Yuli Tamir, Shiri says: "She was nothing and she has remained nothing. Her history does not prove that she is the most honest of people. She came from Peace Now, and she sat in a government with Ehud Olmert and said he was one of the best prime ministers, in spite of all the corruption.... She has no problem at all. It's a type of hypocrisy and ingratitude. I'm saying in the clearest possible way that she does not represent the electorate of the Labor Party."

With regard to the ousting of his predecessor, MK Eitan Cabel, Shiri says: "I heard Eitan Cabel calls Barak 'the emperor.' It's a shame and a disgrace. He compared Barak to Hugo Chavez; he could have come closer to the Middle East and compared him to Assad. It's nerve to claim his ousting was a dictatorial decision. Had Barak not ousted him, they would have called him a dishrag."

Shiri also gives a verbal trouncing to former justice minister Haim Ramon, Barak's most outspoken critic: "Haim Ramon is a person who is full of poison. This is a bad man, a manipulator. He should look in the mirror and ask himself how he will be remembered in the pages of history."

In response to Shiri's remarks, Peretz said: "I left Barak an army with a training program, a long-term acquisitions program, a different deployment of the home front and the National Emergency Authority, which was established during my tenure. I accept the fact that I paid the price of the belligerence surrounding the war; those who benefited from it were the defense establishment and the Jewish people. It is beneath my dignity to discuss Shiri and Ehud Barak, who led the party to the most embarrassing failure in its history."

Yuli Tamir said: "It's no wonder that Barak hired a pathetic mercenary to run his ideological wars for him. He's afraid to do it himself."

Eitan Cabel responded: "It's embarrassing for me to even respond. What is going on in Labor these days speaks volumes. I agree with Shiri on one point - I should have quit my job as secretary general the minute the party convention decided to join the Netanyahu government."
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