Elections in Israel and the Zionist dream

I had a break of a few weeks from blogging, but I hold the reverse of Descartes's dictum, 'I am, therefore I think'. My blogs encourage me to record my thought, some of them anyway. The Israeli elections made me think of the nature of politics and the Zionist dream. It is hard to understand Israeli politics from New Zealand and appreciate the issues involved, but opinions are free. Netanyahu lost a third of his support, yet he claims this as a great victory. The alliance of left parties attained almost the same number of votes as Likud, Netanyahu's party, yet they see this as a defeat. Israeli politics is fragmented, but perhaps no more than the Zionist Congresses of old were. It is in the nature of Jewish politics, as of Jewish debate, that there are as many voices as people present, and they all try to outshout each other. If any other country would face the divisions that prevail in Israeli politics there would be a political breakdown, the state would stop functioning. Yet in Israel things carry on much as before. The reason for this is that despite the great divisions among parties, there is a consensus. Israel is a state for the Jewish people and it has to be defended irrespective of the political rhetoric in the background. There is also a broad agreement about protecting the vulnerable, about the tradition of Jewish charity. The country is prospering and the divide between the haves and the have nots is growing, there is poverty, but unlike in some other countries, there is a limit to the level of poverty that is politically acceptable. So we can look forward to noisy and at times bitter debates in the Knesset, but there are few political options.