'It's not that Israelis don't care'
Photo: AP
No voter apathy here
There is plenty of reason not to vote
If media reports prove correct, Tuesday's election for the 17th Knesset will produce Israel's lowest voter turnout ever for Tuesday's general election. Much of the week leading up to Election Day has been marked by representatives of all major parties pleading with people to vote, but two days before the polls open their calls seem to have fallen on deaf ears.
Much has been written about this phenomenon, but at a recent press briefing, panelists were pretty much united in their opinion: Israelis have simply become apathetic. They just don't care.
Apathetic? Here? Seems to me our esteemed "commentators" must not have ridden in a taxi, eaten at a neighborhood falafel stand or gone shopping at any of the country's shuks (open-air markets) in the last few months.
There are certainly many adjectives to describe the current state of the Israeli electorate –frustrated, angry, hopeless immediately come to mind – but apathetic just doesn't seem to fit the bill. People may well avoid the ballot box on Tuesday. But it's not because they don't care.
On the right
Israelis' frustration with the body politic seems to cross party and ideological lines. On the right, many settlers now call themselves "former" Zionists. Others believe they are the last true Zionists in a country that has abandoned the pioneering spirit that built a national home for the Jewish people.
Whatever the description, a large part of the settlement community feels not only that it has been abandoned, but also that Israeli democracy is little more than a club with which to beat political opponents over the head.
True, the Gaza move was technically "legal", but even supporters of the Gaza disengagement now admit that the process of approving the move was something significantly less than Jeffersonian democracy. To paraphrase another not-quite-kosher move in the annals of history, the whole thing stank.
Take this democracy and shove it
Significantly, many settlers who believe the Gaza pullout was the right move for the country feel the community has been demonized, and have also lost their desire to take part in the goings-on of the country. At the press briefing mentioned above, three out of four panelists agreed about one other point: The settlers have finally been "broken", and most Israelis are overjoyed about that.
One Peace Now activist openly described the settlers as the "enemy"; another said she had a hard time "acting like a human being' towards the settlers. Rather than viewing the Gaza pullout as a "painful concession," Tel Avivians happily sipped their lattes and looked forward to the day when the country would "screw" the "settler-terrorists" again. What possible incentive could Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria – let alone evictees from the Gaza Strip – have to take part in the goings on of this country?
Not only the settlers
It is not only the settler community that seems to be opting out of the election process. The current election is the country's sixth in 14 years – an average of one election campaign every 2.3 years. The same candidates that have failed to take responsibility for their failures and have failed to serve the country's needs again and again and again, have the audacity to spout the same election jargon as they did 10 years ago –without the slightest hint of shame.
With several notable exceptions, our elected representatives are not in the game to serve the public. They are in the game to serve themselves.
More than that, the parties have made their disdain for the public clear by assuming people will vote for them simply because the country has called elections. Party chairmen have been scant in the news, and potential foreign, defense and justice ministers have remained entirely absent from this campaign.
No shame
And the candidates who do bother to present themselves to the public are the most cynical of all. For instance, Kadima leader Ehud Olmert criticizes the economic reforms of former finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently assuming the public won't remember that Olmert was an active supporter of those reforms before Netanyahu resigned.
As for Netanyahu, the Likud leader has alternately opposed the Oslo accords, then unashamedly signed the Hebron and Wye River agreements as part of that process. More recently, he voted to approve the Gaza disengagement and resigned from the government in protest of that program - again, without any hint of shame or explanation.
Nor is it merely the large parties that take the public for just so many morons. The Meretz Party calls for "dialogue" with the Palestinian Authority, offering neither apology nor explanation for the fact that such talks produced the bloodiest terror offensive Israel has ever known.
And right-wing leaders spout on about "saving" Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria without acknowledging that their anti-Oslo/anti-disengagement campaign of the last 13 years has yielded exactly nothing, and without bothering to tell the public what their plans are to solve the demographic threat that many demographers say is less than a generation away.
The notion that our politicians simply have no shame, that they view the electorate as little more than a bunch of morons, defines every single political party in the country.
Failure of democracy
This is why so many Israelis will spend Tuesday at the beach instead of at the ballot box. This election it is not a "celebration of democracy," as elections usually are. Rather, the election is an admission of failure. The system doesn't work.
Israelis care about this country. There is no country on earth that cares more about politics than this one. But when faced with a cynical, shameless body politic, the public is left without answers and sees little reason to participate in the process.
Andrew Friedman is the opinion editor of Ynetnews
