Replies

Actually, no, it's not. It insures greater democracy and participation. Also, please realize that Likud is not medium sized, or wasn't before the Prime Minister broke away and formed Kadima. Likud won seven of the last nine elections and with 40 seats in the last Knesset it was by far (as in by almost double the next party) the largest party in Israel.

Please don't compare us to China or the Soviets. We are a democratic state.

According to the article, Likud has 130000 members who will be voting in primaries. For a party of such a size the 3000-strong Central Committee sounds megalomaniac, to have 1 Central Committee member for every 43 party members. I picked communist parties as the reference point simply because these were/are the largest parties known, and not as a veiled accusation of Likud having communist leanings. When a party with some 20 million members had a 500-something strong CC [like CPSU did] it sounded more proportional. Even its general congresses were only about 6000-strong affairs.
More, even if one was to take "central committee" in the case of CPSU extremely broadly and add to it every member of every subordinate territorial committee from the district level and up [Likud in all probability would not have such an elaborate structure if only due to the country size], even then the ratio of these officials to the general party membership was much smaller than 1:40 - it was on the order of 1:400 at most. Hence the megalomania diagnosis.