Yair Lapid
Photo: Yoni Hamenachem
Israel’s 42% revolution
Op-ed: Israel’s secular majority finally fighting back, starting to behave like a minority group
42%.
Someone sent a chain letter by email. He wrote: “I belong to the strongest group in Israel in terms of numbers, so please explain to me how the hell I’m a minority in this country?”
That’s us.
Israelis, Zionists, seculars from the Right and Left.
Once upon a time we were the most influential group in this country, yet this is no longer the case. On the one hand, we are the largest group in society, more than the Arabs (20%), more than the religious (12%) and more than the haredim (8%). On the other hand, they always defeat us, because we’re the majority, so we don’t deserve anything.
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You are a minority because you are not.
I know it sounds absurd, yet this is how it works. The majority does not know how to join forces for the sake of its own interests; the majority cannot afford to say “to hell with everything”; the majority does not hire lobbyists, does not set up NGOs that would work for its interests, and does not know how to press Knesset members from its sector, because it’s not a sector.
The majority also cannot build an illegal home, on illegal land, and then fight with the police officers who come to evict it, because the majority has a nephew in the police and loves its nephew.
The majority is neither rich nor poor, because that’s statistics. If you’re the majority, it means you are not in the top or bottom echelon. You’re somewhere in the middle. You earn too much to be entitled for government support, but too little to breathe easy.
Those below you lost, and you don’t want to be like them. Those above you play a game you don’t understand, until one day you suddenly realize that they are playing it at your expense. You’re angry about it and would like to give someone a call, but the majority never has anyone it can call. It doesn’t know the right people.
The majority’s children are already in high school and one even finished his military service, yet his sister-in-law has two children in kindergarten and pays almost $1,000 per month. The majority looks at the minorities and knows that there’s no chance they are paying similar sums, because they wouldn’t be able to afford it. The majority isn’t jealous, but wonders who arranged this for them? Who arranged life so that their sister-in-law doesn’t pay the same as the majority’s sister-in-law?
Majority is now a minority
The majority’s eldest son has been living in a tent for two weeks now, and the majority considers joining him there for one night, just so the kid knows that it thinks he and his friends are right. The majority looks at them and knows that they understood something that it doesn’t. The finance minister said on the radio that Israelis own more apartments than most other nationalities, a fact that drives the majority crazy: How could that be? Do 70% of the country’s residents have $600,000 lying around?
Because the other possibility is that the majority is the only one that paid the full price. All the others got some discount arranged. They didn’t have to pay property tax, they know someone in the Land Administration, and they have their own party who took care of them; they decided that God has to arrange a home on a hill for them for ideological reasons, with an ideological backyard.
Or maybe they just went ahead and built their home. There are regions in Israel, mostly in the south, where a person who wishes to buy a home brings his friends to do the job and starts building. The majority looks at them sometimes when it travels on Shabbat and knows that it wouldn’t dare do the same.
Just like the majority would not dare throw a parking ticket to the garbage. Only minorities can afford to throw tickets to the garbage. The majority goes to court and says that it’s truly sorry. It also adheres to the demolition order it received, at its own expense. This must truly make the minorities laugh.
The majority knows, of course, that the only reason it’s being harassed more than the others is that it’s possible. Because the majority is the only one in this country that doesn’t throw stones, that doesn’t burn anything, and that doesn’t raid the Supreme Court. The majority has never been to the Supreme Court.
Yet don’t write off the majority, because now, for the first time in many years, it has a chance. Because it became smaller and smaller and was pushed into a corner, and was angry quietly, until one day it got up in the morning, looked in the mirror, and discovered that something wonderful happened: It also turned into a minority.
It’s less than them; less wealthy, less connected, less political, and less influential. They’re the majority! They have a Knesset majority, a Treasury majority, a government majority; most budgets are earmarked for them and most decisions are in their favor. Finally, the majority is a minority and is allowed to behave like a minority.
The majority can now form alliances with other minorities. With the haredim who happen to want to work, with the religious who don’t think that Judaism is all about a hill in Samaria, and with the Arabs who want to perform national service. It can embrace them and tell them that it’s been screwed just like them, that it too had been forgotten, and that it no longer has to be the only one that safeguards the State, because the State disregards him in any case.
Why would it care? It’s only 42%.
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