I HAVE some good news and some bad news,” the sergeant in the joke tells his men. “The good news is that you are going to change your dirty socks. The bad news is that you are going to exchange them among yourselves.” I am not the only person who is reminded of this old British Army joke by the current elections.
We are faced by a sorry lot of politicians, some of them documented failures and some completely free of any past achievements. There is no meaningful discussion between them about the issues. Not one of the main contenders offers real solutions to our basic problems. The differences between them are invisible without a magnifying glass.
But we cannot afford not to vote, or to vote out of spite or as a protest. If all of them are bad, let’s look for the lesser evil.
For me, the greatest evil is Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu. Netanyahu has already committed himself to inviting Avigdor Liberman, the pupil of the fascist Meir Kahane, as his first partner, as well as Shas, which has now become an extreme right-wing party. Perhaps he will also take in the “National Union”, which is even more extreme, and the remnants of the National Religious party, together with the Orthodox.
If this is to be the core of the next coalition, we shall have an extreme nationalist-racist government, a government that will reject outright any possibility of ending the occupation, setting up a Palestinian state and evacuating the settlements.
After that, Netanyahu could invite Kadima and Labor, but that would not matter anymore. Since he will be able to set up a government without them, he will get them for next to nothing. In such a government, their only function will be to serve as fig leaves, camouflage for the Americans.
Some people have brought up a Machiavellian idea: Let the Likud come to power. That way, the entire world will see the true face of Israel and boycott it. The government will fall, and we can start all over again.
Sorry, that is too risky a bet for me. Some say in the end Netanyahu will do whatever Obama tells him to do. I am not ready to bet on that either.
Tzipi Livni has one enormous advantage: she is not Bibi.
It may seem that this is also her only advantage. At this moment, she is the only person who could — perhaps, perhaps — block the road to a coalition headed by the Likud. For many, that is reason enough to vote for her. Is there any other reason? Hard to see one. She could have risen above the murky waters and presented a clear and focused message: peace with the Palestinian people and the Arab world. That would have separated her from Netanyahu and also from Ehud Barak and given her the status of a statesperson. It would have turned the elections into a referendum on war and peace. She has missed this opportunity. Like all the other candidates, she is afraid of the word “peace”.
I cannot vote for Ehud Barak. The inhuman Gaza War was a reflection of Barak’s own inhuman character.
Contrary to Livni, Barak does not even pretend to have a perspective of peace.
For a moment it seemed that Meretz was going to transform itself into something bigger. They included in their list some attractive new people. And then war broke out, and Meretz supported it enthusiastically. Their three literary musketeers — Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman — went out of their way to call for the war and laud it, each one in his turn.
Exactly as they had done in Lebanon War II.
In spite of the crime, one has to vote for Meretz because they speak about peace and social justice.
Quite another problem is posed by the three so-called “Arab” parties, one of which is the communist Hadash, which has a small Jewish component.
The problem of the “Arab” lists is that they have not succeeded in playing a meaningful role in the political arena, which has remained an exclusive fiefdom of the “Zionist” parties.
Now about the Liberman phenomenon. Liberman has created a party that is simply and thoroughly racist. Its election campaign is centered on the demand to annul the Israeli citizenship of “nonloyal” people who constitute 20 percent of Israel’s citizens.
In every other country, Liberman’s program would be called fascist, without quotation marks.
When Joerg Haider was taken into the Austrian Cabinet, Israel recalled its ambassador from Vienna in protest. But compared to Liberman, Haider was a raving liberal, and so is Jean-Marie le Pen. Now Netanyahu has announced that Liberman will be “an important minister” in his government, Livni has hinted that he will be in her government, too, and Barak has not excluded that possibility. There is also a pessimistic version: Fascism has become a serious player in the Israeli public domain. The three main parties have now legitimized it. This phenomenon must be stopped before it is too late. So, how shall I vote today?
I intend to draw up a list that will start from the worst down to the least evil. The last one on the list gets my vote.
