You needn’t worry, not even for a split second. The situation I’m going to describe below is for ‘educational purposes’ only. There is no way in hell – well, almost no way in hell – that it has or will happen to you. So my question is just for fun.
Imagine you are strolling purposefully through your local mall, and you run into a good friend. Except that he lives way over there; what’s he doing over here? He’s here because he has an appointment nearby and he happens to have a voucher for 500NIS, and it’s burning a proverbial hole in his pocket. There are lots of items he could purchase that he could use or at least would make him feel good. What should he buy: a pair of sneakers, earbuds, who know what else. He’s hoping you’ll give him some advice as to what he should choose. My response would be: You decide, and I’ll be happy to steer you to the best place in the mall to buy it.
Talk about choices, it’s election time here in The Land, and there are thirty-five parties running, although many of them are just out for the exercise. Still, it’s confusing to many of us, even if we’re paying attention to who is on the ballot. If anyone asks me whom I’m voting for, I’ll give them a straight answer, along with the reasons for my choice. But if anyone asks me whom they should vote for, that’s another matter. In fact, at least two people have asked for my advice: a young man I met at (where else?) Power Coffeeworks, who only recently arrived here in the Land and is only now learning his way around, and a woman who’s been here not quite f-o-r-e-v-e-r, who studiously avoids paying attention to these matters, except she has to vote for somebody.
You tell me what issues are on your mind (if any) or what is your opinion (if you have one) about the current government, and we can help you at least narrow down your choices to parties that in some ways mirror your ideology. But if someone’s answer to this simple question is I have no idea who is even in the government, then perhaps some other hot button questions might elicit some kind of response. Should the IDF reassert control over the Gaza Strip? Are you concerned about violence of all kinds in Judea/Samaria? Should Arab Parties be included in a coalition government? Should there be an official inquiry into what happened on Oct. 7, 2023? Of course, the best question might be Have you given any thought to any of these issues?
There are people who do this for a living, create questionnaires ‘round the clock about people’s preferences about this and that, but it becomes an all-consuming activity when there is an actual election, and people must know a month ahead of time who is going to win. (Why bother even counting the votes?)
I know this is heretical, but when I’m having a conversation about the Israeli election that (gasp!) is almost upon us, with friends, acquaintances, and total strangers whose views on the State of the World might not be in lock-step with my own, I give them my list, not of whom to vote for, but the issues I consider crucial to the future well-being of the country.
Oct. 7. We all know what went wrong, the same thing that went wrong in 1973: the concepzia of somebody on the top, whose rear end was smarter than anybody else’s, and who didn’t need to know what the people who were supposed to see were looking at. It’s just that if the debacle gets written up in an official inquiry and taken seriously, there is the chance that we won’t have to go through it one more time.
This sh-t has got to stop. Imagine two boys who are always fighting in the schoolyard. At some point, the teacher has got to step in and say, I don’t care who started it; stop already! The violence in the area known as Judea/Samaria, Yehudah/Shomron, or the ‘West Bank’ has gone on unchecked for far too long. It used to be only Arabs attacking Jews, but now it’s also Jewish ‘settlers’ attacking Arab farmers with devastating results for our country. No, you Bibi-ists and others in the circle-the-wagon crowd, we can’t keep ignoring the problem, order and the rule of law for everybody must be established in this part of the country, regardless of ‘who started it.’
This sh-t has got to stop, Part Two. We cannot continue to allow a situation in which one part of the population maintains itself as a shadow government, making up its own rules, aided, betted, and funded by the actual government, at great cost to the rest of us.
What nobody running for office is talking about. The decline in our educational system. The deterioration of our medical system. Environmental issues, like the fact that algae is threatening to overwhelm our desalination plants.
To date, no one has objected to my list of issues. You might have some big-ticket items of your own that I haven’t considered. Maybe some of them will be addressed by the worthies that our fellow citizens choose to lead them. Maybe they won’t. Either way, we’re all in it for the long haul, so stay tuned.
