MK Shelly Yachimovich was without a doubt a different breed of lawmaker. Diligent and thorough, she devoted long weeks to every bill she sought to promote. I followed her from her first day on the job in the Knesset. I saw how she sat hours on end in the Knesset Finance Committee, learning the intricacies of each clause and sub-clause of the national budget. She had a good mentor in those days in President Reuven Rivlin, who was a regular MK at the time for the Likud party. They developed a deep friendship despite their political differences. In 2014, Yachimovich helped spearhead support for Rivlin's presidential candidacy (counter to her party's position).
For two years (2011-2013) Yachimovich was also chairman of the Labor party, and during her time in the position she garnered 15 mandates in the 19th Knesset. But she preferred parliamentary work over the political intrigue and scheming. She indicated as much in the farewell message posted to Facebook, in which she wrote among other things that "politics is vital only as long as it serves as a tool for realizing a worldview, and not as an empty goal in and of itself, meant to serve only hollow power, personal ambitions and even corruption. There has to be some semblance of balance between it and the work on behalf of the public. This balance has been disrupted in an intolerable manner."
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In an interview I did with her last October, she confessed she was very worried about the state of the Labor party. "I'm not an ostrich burying my head in the sand. The polls that say we will get 12 mandates in the election are certainly very concerning to me, but I remember far darker days the party's history, for example when Ehud Barak was party chairman for a pretty long time we were polling between zero and four mandates."
One cannot help but be impressed by her many achievements in the Knesset. She initiated and introduced 69 new laws. She dutifully and responsibly chaired the Knesset Ethics Committee, which deals with complaints against MKs; in the 20th Knesset, she chaired the State Control Committee and the classified Subcommittee on Special Issues pertaining to national security. She twice served as leader of the Opposition and four times rejected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's proposals to serve in his coalition – an exceedingly rare occurrence in Israeli politics.
Yachimovich can serve as a role model for the new MKs entering the 22nd Knesset. She can teach them how to work and be impactful; how to push and fight for new bills and raise important issues from the benches of the opposition.
