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Are the people stupid? It was Amram Mitzna who on Sunday revealed the same amazement that has been a constant theme in the rhetoric of the Labor Party and the left since 1977. "I am unable to break the genetic code of the Israeli voter," he said. "I see a woman on TV who has nothing to eat and no work and she says she will vote for Sharon." Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, who anointed Mitzna, once said it differently: "The people should be changed." In other words, the people are to blame. After all, why the hell does a large part of the Israeli public vote for "those who screw them"? Indeed, why the lower classes generally tend to vote for the right is an age-old question. Every introduction to political sociology provides two basic answers. The first is that the lower classes usually vote for those they want to be like. The people want to be near the wealth, and the Likud of the last 20 years has been the party that has the jobs, the national party for protektzia. The other explanation is close to Israeli reality: The lower classes, who have been stripped of their sense of security and control over their own lives, derive a sense of compensation for their own low stature from a xenophobia against the foreign and different. In the reality of impoverishment, it's convenient to feel a sense of superiority over someone, and it's easy to crawl into the warmth of nationalism, which apparently makes up for the daily sense of impotence. That's the explanation, simple in its clarity, for why the lower classes supported the colonialism of yore in the Western countries, the rise of the right in Europe of the 1920s and the terrible 1930s. According to that Israeli genetic code, the control over the Palestinians is an alternative to the sense of lack of personal control and it is a membership card to the national collective. The European socialist movements implemented the lesson from that insight, through the establishment of welfare states and social safety nets, to prevent the need for the warmth of nationalistic illusions and the sense of power in xenophobia. The Israeli Labor movement's answer to that well-known sociological phenomenon is incomprehension and self-righteous accusations of the people, along the lines of "the public is stupid, the public will pay." The public's stupid? The public has not forgotten the old lady in the Nahariya hospital corridor, who only three years ago was Ehud Barak's ride into victory in the 1999 elections. Barak was elected and the old lady was forgotten. Labor had two years in a unity government and could have conducted an alternative policy, aimed at that woman without food and a job, perhaps the daughter of the elderly woman in the hospital corridor. But its representatives didn't ask for the social portfolios, nor did they unveil an alternative. Moreover, Mitzna, and Avraham Shochat, who backed Labor's departure from the government, did not come up with a genuine alternative in their election campaign. Mitzna chose to abstain on the budget vote that cut even more from the guaranteed income payments and rental assistance to the woman without work or food, and Shochat chose to reiterate in the election ads the old worn-out slogan, "money for the slums, not the settlements," which is strikingly similar to Yosef Lapid's "money for the middle class, not the Haredim." But those are false promise slogans. What determines economic policy is not the investment in the territories but mostly the interest rate policy, the budget framework, the benefits for employers, tax breaks, real estate breaks, etc. Since 1985, and the Shamir-Peres unity government, both Labor and Likud have been scratching each other's backs. The collapse of the welfare state inside the Green Line is the work of both parties. The difference between Labor and Likud is that the Likud doesn't pretend to be a social party. Its representatives speak about "peace and security," like the European right, and promise the illusion of divvying up the profits from their restrained budget policies with the people. Finance Minister Silvan Shalom - who continues the policies of his late patron, Yitzhak Moda'i, from 1985, when unemployment began rising - said this year what Labor Party people have been saying for years: "The economy will recover only after the peace process is resumed." In other words, we have to sit and wait for something to happen "outside" for something to change "inside." And since there's nobody in the Labor Party who can present a credible, realistic policy of economic change and social justice, which is the only way to deflate the illusion inflated by the right, it's no wonder that Mitzna, in his own way, recycled Ben-Aharon's famous quip from 1977. It's only regrettable that nobody asked him why, in the choice between the interests of that woman without food and work and the interests of the likes of Gad Zeevi and Dov Lautman, Mitzna already made his choice. It's impossible to be loyal to both. Mitzna made his choice - and the people made theirs. By Hannah Kim