What will the election 73 days from now be about?
We find ourselves in a situation reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The king told his subjects that his clothes were “made of a magical fabric: they are invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position or unusually stupid.” Everyone suspected they were being deceived, but feared being branded fools. Until a child arrived and said in astonishment: “But the king is actually naked.”
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The Likud party
(Photo: Yuval Chen, Shalev Shalom, Alex Kolomoisky, Oz Moalem, Nadav Abas, Shaul Golan, Yoav Dudkevitch, Dana Kopel, Shutterstock)
You will decide at the ballot box what happened here during the four years in which we were governed by Netanyahu and his “full-on right-wing” government. Is everyone who believes the government failed in a host of areas a fool, or is the king naked?
One reminder: Polls often fail to predict election results, and not only here. Harry Truman, whom American polls predicted would be defeated by Thomas Dewey, won the presidential election. On November 4, 1948, he was photographed holding a copy of the Chicago Tribune announcing Dewey’s expected victory.
In other words: Don’t believe commissioned polls. Netanyahu is finished. Eisenkot will win. The king is naked.
The events in the West Bank village of Qusra require us to demand that the candidates seeking to replace Netanyahu answer a question they can no longer evade: What will you do with the millions of Palestinians living alongside us in the West Bank?
To this day, no government has offered a framework drawing permanent borders that would define our future in the crazy neighborhood in which we live. This is not a hypothetical question. It is fundamental to our existence.
Settlers attacked a Qusra village team
In the first years after we immigrated to Israel, every election brought two visitors to Moshav Shafir, where we lived. The late attorney Yehuda Spiegel, one of the leaders of the National Religious Party, spoke Hungarian to make sure everyone trusted him and voted for Hapoel HaMizrachi.
For entertainment, the organizers brought the late Shevah Weiss, who would later become a respected politician but was then a quizmaster, a form of entertainment.
Today, we are flooded with videos whose only beneficiaries are the people who make them and which have no influence whatsoever on the decision of any voter.
Not merely to provoke, but alongside the cheap entertainment he sends our way, I would expect Netanyahu to also be photographed in the military cemeteries, which have filled to overflowing during the last four years of his rule, and say something substantive.
And another word about the candidates.
When I woke up five years ago in an intensive care unit after surgery that had become complicated, I saw Yoaz Hendel on the screen in front of me saying he would not sit in a government with Arabs.
I shouted: “What are you talking about? Who is treating me here? Arab doctors, nurses and medical staff. Who are you anyway?”
I have not changed my mind about Yoaz Hendel.
Yoaz Hendel
(Photo: Alex Gamburg)
Gilad Erdan said he had always been a man of the right, “certainly after October 7 and certainly after we also saw terrible things from the left.”
For me, that is reason enough not to vote for him. But there are plenty of others.
For example, there is the fact that he was pushed out of Likud by the Netanyahu family and, instead of remaining there and fighting for his positions, now wants us to elect him in a different format.
Mr. Erdan, there are so many better alternatives. Find yourself something else to do.
Guy Bezek fell in battle at Kibbutz Kissufim on October 7, 2023.
In my collection of cards published about the fighters, his read: “Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Every generation and those who rise to meet it.