Streaming Israel’s Election Returns

The Israeli news anchors play with big touch screens and fancy holographic graphics just like -- well, almost like -- their counterparts on CNN.  They drag Knesset seats this way and that, forming hypothetical coalitions.  They also speak too fast for me. I get about 50% of what they say the day after, streaming the number-one news program, Mabat, onto my laptop while it’s still Israeli Election Day in my east coast time zone.  The candidates, by contrast, speak a nice slow Hebrew; I get every word of their predictable victory speeches, whether they've really won or are just pretending. 

But I’m happy.  I’m happy like the Mabat news anchor women seem happy, in the same way that American newscasters could hardly conceal their liberal media delight when Obama got elected and re-elected.   Israel has not veered sharply rightward, as so many had feared.  The specter of a triumphant “Jews are different” Naftali Bennett sweeping to second place with his HaBayit HaYehudi party, described in David Remnick’s New Yorker portrait this week, has not come to pass.  The Israeli center has come out of hiding or hibernation to reassert a desire for normality and democracy that I am very relieved to see.

Naftali Bennett was the pick of my kippah sruga (knitted kippa, Modern Orthodox) relatives (at least the 20-somethings, I see via Facebook) and the nightmare of my friend and fellow high-school alumna Judy, who moved to Israel 35 years ago or so, when immigration from the U.S. was (by definition) Zionist but secular left-leaning, not like it’s been the past 25 years.  Everyone fits their demographic; my relatives are hard-working, middle-class, third- and fourth-generation Israelis who have no faith or interest in a two-state solution and whose second generation delivered the Bat Yam vote to Bibi.  Judy is triply slotted into the left via academe (TAU PhD candidate), home address (Tel Aviv) and artsy profession (theatrical lighting designer).

Less predictable might be my other friend and fellow alumna who left Brooklyn in that same era and wound up in the north.  Ann might have given Bennett her vote but for his anti-woman religious bedfellows, she says.  That’s an association Bennett tries to dispel, coming on as very hip and approachable to the American press, and giving a secular woman, Ayelet Shaked, the fifth spot on his ticket. Ann said she’d vote for Bibi instead.

Ann’s gone through two tours of military service with two sons, ducked Kassams and spent time in shelters.  It’s easy to see how that might move one rightward.  Certainly, it’s a test I’ve never undergone. At the same time, it’s also easy to see what makes Israel-minded American Jews queasy when Israelis deprioritize democracy.  How can American Jews agree,  when democracy and equal rights for minorities are precisely what's allowed us to do so well here?  

On the third hand, I shouldn’t pretend to care so much about the spread of democracy; a lot of the world seems totally unready for it.  I just don’t want Israel ruling over a hostile population whose disenfranchised will come to outnumber its citizens. It will coarsen their souls and cost them serious business. Neither do I want Israel to count only the US, evangelicals and Micronesia among its friends. 

On the fourth hand, we Jews have been a non-threatening, good little minority here, well-behaved and productive for the most part, and happy to be American. The great thing about America is that in the peoplehood sense, it belongs to everyone and to no one.  Ever since we killed off the Indians, as my Netanyahu-supporting relative once pointed out.