Something 's Rotten
In The State Of Israel

Why this highly-touted election campaign
has turned into such a flop.

INA FRIEDMAN

Israel Correspondent

erusalem — Two years ago, when a grass-
roots movement to "change the system"
managed, within days of its inception, to
fill Tel Aviv's main square with tens of
thousands of angry protesters, the mes-
sage it conveyed to Israeli politicians was
definitive: You're loathsome, contemptible, despicable
and vile.
The press, typically, fretted that the end of Israeli
democracy was at hand. The political establishment,
`-'no less typically, did its best to ignore the phenomenon.
And the fact is that by the time that heady spring had
dissolved into sweaty summer, the anger, idealism, and
hope that fueled the movement had pretty much fizzled
out.
Now, however, with the elections just days away, it
turns out that the Israeli public really meant what it said
----)lack then and nothing about the present campaign has
convinced it to believe otherwise.
Elections are traditionally a red-letter event in Israeli

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life, and expectations were that this year's campaign
would be a particularly lively one — especially after the
brief "high" and resurgence of belief in "people power" fol-
lowing the Labor Party's primary.
In the end, precisely the opposite has happened: the
electorate has essentially tuned out. In one article after
the next, the national mood has been described as rang-
ing from apathy to sad cynicism. And pundits are fore-
casting that in a country where citizens have always
displayed strong identification with the state and voter
participation runs at about 80 percent, on this Election
Day many citizens are simply going to stay home.
What's gone wrong? That may ultimately be for schol-
ars to decide. For now, however, the diagnosis on the
street, and in the press, is essentially the same as it was
two years ago. Politics have turned inward in Israel. Its
practitioners are cut off from their constituents — if not,
indeed, from reality. And the people are responding in
kind.
Nowhere has this situation found sharper expression

than in the half-hour worth of election spots run just be-
fore the prime-time news here. With slick footage and
jingles, the parties have once more sold themselves the
way marketers sell beer and soft drinks. But this time,
perhaps because Israelis have grown more sophisticat-
ed or perhaps because they take themselves more seri-
ously, the public was genuinely offended.
Then the commercials went from cutesy to nasty, with
Labor and Likud airing spots designed to demolish each
other's credibility with increasingly harsh attacks.
And the irony of it all is that the parties have been
spending millions of shekels of public funds to preach
to the converted. Surveys done over the past years show
that when national institutions are ranked for credibil-
ity, the political parties consistently come in last.
The TV spots merely reinforced what the public al-
ready believes: that the parties are self-absorbed, self-
serving, and fundamentally rotten. A sad symmetry has
evolved in Israel's political arena: if anything matches
the contempt of the parties for the electorate, it's the con-

A lackluster campaign: neither Yitzhak Rabin (right) nor Yitzhak Shamir is known for charisma, and both have avoided debating critical issues.

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

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