Is there any reason to doubt that, be this contest's winner whoever it may be, the several dozen fingers at his or her disposal will suffice for delivering pretty much nothing?
By AMOTZ ASA-EL0711-middle(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
Our politics having long become untenable, our parliaments are becoming noted mainly for their relentless productions of tragedy, enigma and farce.
Last decade this included a slain prime minister, a pediatrician-turned-drug trafficker and a rabbi who clowned his way from the plenary through the media into history's dustbin. This decade it featured a prime minister in a coma, his jailed son and the waitress and chauffeur that they had turned into lawmakers.
And right now this comprises a prime minister whose cumulative investigations read like a year in the life of J. Edgar Hoover, a pensioners' faction whose dynamics are reminiscent of the Three Stooges' and a defense minister whose understanding of people, politics and his own situation is about as good as that of a forgotten kamikaze still roaming the jungles where his aircraft once strayed and fell.
What would we not give to prevent the next Knesset from serving us with yet more of these foul tasting cocktails? How foretold it is that come its 15th, 20th or 25th month we will once again be deciphering this one's blindness, lamenting that one's arrogance and digesting those two's unholy alliance while decrying the emergence of this or that grocer, carpenter or glorified secretary in the thick of the decision-makers' innermost knot.
Is there any reason to doubt that, be this contest's winner whoever it may be, the several dozen fingers at his or her disposal will suffice for delivering pretty much nothing, least of all what everyone's pompous slogans are now so hollowly promising? And how long will it take for some of those fingers to change angle and turn at their ostensible leader? And how much will it cost to compensate for their abandonment by enlisting alternative fingers? And how reliable, let alone responsible, not to say visionary, original or even just witty will such new fingers' owners be? Surely, there will be no Solomon, Lincoln or Churchill among them.
THE FARCE will arrive early.
If he prevails, his strategic allies will demand from under their fedoras that he avail with no further delay that many billions for child benefits and that many thousands of new licenses to dodge the draft, in addition to the Education Ministry in its entirety and a public admission - preferably aboard the USS Missouri - that his market reforms were a lapse of judgment, an aberration of history, an eclipse of the mind and an affront to common sense that could only emerge from the depth of the abyss that yawns between his alma mater at MIT and theirs at the Porat Yosef yeshiva.
Naturally, all will be markedly different if she prevails.
If she prevails, the right of the first farce will not be with those who spend their days under the fedoras but with those who spend their nights hosting lavish dinner parties under the celestial rooftops of Tel Aviv's glistening spires. From where they have climbed, the hosts will explain, they have a marvelous view of the downtrodden, the ones whose incomes, lifestyles and value systems are so similar to those of their - the hosts' - own parents.
In fact there was a time when they themselves lived in places like those, a time when they and those impoverished masses even shared stairwells, a time when they - the hosts - had narrower horizons, bigger ideals, smaller bank accounts and more, many more, votes.
And being that they are anything but the fedoras' crowd - in fact they are their antithesis, always sure to care for faith, tribe and morals not one iota more than prescribed in the Book of Electoral Prerequisites - theirs is not a demand to put money directly in the people's pockets. On the contrary, theirs is a demand to tax the people even more heavily, but only for the sake of funding education, health and road construction. "In other words," they will tell her, clutching their dry martinis under the star-strewn skies overlooking the metropolis, "we want you to place more money in the pockets of those who run the public sector, and also leave some for several people we care about in the private sector; never mind right now who, or why, or how what you will relinquish will travel where it is predestined to arrive - just sign this affidavit and we'll take care of the rest."
THE TRAGEDY will soon follow suit.
With the budget breached and the markets ever humorless, a run on the shekel will ensue, coupled with a foreign investors flight, soaring interest rates, a dearth of funding for hi-tech start-ups and rapidly expanding layoffs here, there and everywhere. Tourism will plunge and the Jerusalem light-rail project will be suspended indefinitely, as the mayor, stroking his wild beard, will roll his eyes and say it had nothing to do with reports that the project would help secularize the city and was even less connected to his party's promise to her, or was it to him, to vote with them on this, on that and also on that, a promise that anyhow could not have been made, certainly not in return for potatoes as small as the capital's mass transit system.
Meanwhile, violence will flare, if not here then there and if not Wednesday then Thursday, or otherwise this wouldn't be the Middle East. Out in Washington the new president will demand quiet while he is busy nursing America's own wounds.
Back in the Knesset the finger owners will work extra hours, some pointing at him and some at her, some heckling this, others yelping that and yet others scolding pretty much everyone and everything above, under and beyond him, her and those surrounding them. Then a band of finger pointers will abstain, resign, defect or secede, some to the Right and some to the Left, and the Knesset, poor thing, will once again be laid to rest.
THAT IS when the overriding enigma of Israeli politics will once again beg its solution, as stubbornly as Fermat's Last Theorem: How is it that Middle Israelis and their leaders always return - like battered women to their abusive husbands - to the bizarre partners who can be counted on to vanish once there is nothing left in it for them, and well before anything worthwhile has been accomplished?
Can't the thousands who vote for Israel's large parties once and for all push their leaders into a political rehab, from which they will emerge cured of the habit to cuddle with the wrong bedfellows for the wrong reason, and ready instead to finally start delivering to the majority and stop surrendering to the minority?
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