With A spectacular own goal, even by its own hapless standards, Israel's opposition Labour Party yesterday dealt the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, a fierce political blow, only to obscure that achievement by picking a fight with half the nation's voters.
The party leader, Mr Ehud Barak, who has failed to mount an effective challenge to Mr Netanyahu over the past two years of collapsing peace moves and economic regression, should have gone to bed last night in rare celebratory mood.
After all, the opposition, boosted by a mini-rebellion in Mr Netanyahu's coalition, secured approval in the Knesset yesterday for the preliminary reading of legislation to dissolve parliament and hold general elections.
The legislation must now take a protracted route through the Knesset's Law Committee and three further readings, and there is no reason to believe that it will take effect for many months, if at all. But nevertheless, rebels from three parties inside Mr Netanyahu's own coalition - including Mr Dan Meridor, a former minister and potential leadership challenger from the Prime Minister's own Likud party - voted with the opposition.
And Mr Netanyahu, realising that defeat was inevitable, was, rather humiliatingly, reduced to persuading most of his colleagues to boycott the vote, claiming that it was an irrelevance.
At the very least, his aura of invincibility has been dented; at most, the 60 to 6 vote, coming in the final Knesset session before a lengthy recess, could conceivably turn out to mark the beginning of the end of his hold on power.
But Mr Barak, whose party tabled the legislation, was unable to savour the sweet, and uncommon, taste of victory. Success in the Knesset was overshadowed by publication of an interview with one of his closest party colleagues, Knesset member Mr Ori Orr, who, with a singular lack of political nous, effectively branded the entire Sephardi community as hopelessly dense.
The Jews of Middle Eastern origin, he told the Ha'aretz daily, "are not interested in understanding and learning about life, to know what's good and what's bad".
For good measure, Mr Orr went on to single out Moroccan-born Jews as particularly lacking in curiosity, and then observed that he couldn't have a "normal conversation" with those of his own Knesset colleagues who are of Moroccan origin, because they "interpret any legitimate criticism as being ethnically-motivated". Since Labour will have to win the support of a sizeable proportion of the Sephardi community if it is ever to be returned to office, Mr Orr's remarks were, to put it mildly, ill-considered. For Mr Barak, who has been trying to woo Sephardim by publicly apologising to them for the way his Labour political predecessors mistreated them in the early years of Israeli statehood, the comments were an absolute disaster. And although Mr Orr issued a public apology, he is now under heavy pressure to resign from the party.
Mr Netanyahu, savvy as ever, made an unscheduled appearance at the Knesset podium to castigate Mr Orr and rub in the damage, declaring that, in his government, if not the opposition, there was no place for discrimination against Sephardim. The Prime Minister thus ended a day he must have been dreading on a political high, while Mr Barak was left to rue another missed opportunity.