Israeli Apathy (1): An Introduction

Friday night, on my way back from Jaffa with CZ, I decided to walk into the cliche and talk to the taxi-driver about politics. You know what’s meant to happen next: lots of xenophobia and flag-raising, judgements instantly disappearing into the night air like the cigarette smoke from the driver’s mouth. This is how liberals indulge themselves everywhere, isn’t it? 

I asked Yossi who he was planning to vote for in the upcoming elections. “None of them, they’re all a bunch of shits,” he told me. Now fifty years of age, he had voted for various parties over the years, but hadn’t voted in any of the recent polls. “They only look out for themselves. The day they start caring about me, I’ll start voting. Now, though, it doesn’t make a difference.” I argued that it does make a difference, even if only a small one, and that it is perhaps elections like February’s – the ones which attract little interest – which end up being significant. He was not moved. “I don’t know how long you’ve been here,” he told me, “but you’ll soon learn.”

On reflection, this was another cliche. The idea that the democratic process makes no difference is a common one. What’s sad is how quickly and recently the idea has taken root in Israel, a country known for its robust participatory politics. Even more interesting is how this apathising process has gone almost unnoticed, despite the close attention Israel receives around the world. Israel is seen as some ideological relic, a place where decisions are made because of absurd attachments to nineteenth century notions like blood and land, a state where the national ideology – Zionism – drives policy and leads to war or peace.

Somewhere along the way, though, Israelis just started watching Big Brother. And that, in a nutshell, was that. We’re not quite at the stage where the latest developments in the programme will make the front page of the newspaper (although you shouldn’t quote me on that), but reality television does now seem more important to us than the driving false dichotomy of Israeli political history: peace or security.

An opinion poll published this week bears this out. According to Haaretz, only 51 percent of every Jewish 18-35 year old (rates of political participation in the Arab sector are difference; hence the usefulness of surveying them separately) are sure that they will vote in the February elections; 69 percent of the same age bracket think most politicians are corrupt. Those who are certain they won’t vote give a number of reasons: it doesn’t interest me, it’s not important to me, there’s nobody to vote for, I don’t believe in anyone…

More cliches, then. And were I in Britain, I might have more sympathy. The first-past-the-post system is one in which millions of votes are rendered redundant; in such circumstances, apathy becomes almost inevitable. In Israel, however, we have proportional representation, a system not without its flaws, but one in which nobody can say that their voice won’t be heard.  Despite this, I’m going to stick my neck out and predict that February will see the lowest turnout in Israeli history. The considered cynicism of the taxi-driver, borne of experience, has become second-nature to the nation’s youth, a development which favours only the right, hence Likud’s lead in the polls.

I’ll be voting in the elections (assuming that the rumours that olim can only vote three years after arrival aren’t true), but I know I’ve been as apathetic as anyone in the last year or two. Consider this series on Israeli Apathy an attempt to rouse myself out of the stupour, to audaciously hope that Bibi Netanyahu will not be the next Prime Minister of Israel, and that change is not far away…