Israeli Election coverage

With the amusing exception of a couple of fistfights, this election looks like it will be most noteworthy for being a dud.

By 2 P.M., voter turnout in Tuesday's election for the 17th Knesset was the lowest in Israeli history.

At 2 P.M., only 30.9 percent of voters had turned out compared to 35.3 percent in 2003... The total expected voter turnout is some 66 percent - around two percent lower than the rate in the 2003 elections, the lowest turnout in Israeli election history. The prevailing assessment is that low turnout will work to the detriment of Kadima and Labor.

Andrew Friedman from Ynet offers an explanation, one I think is quite convincing.

...Whatever the description, a large part of the settlement community feels not only that it has been abandoned, but also that Israeli democracy is little more than a club with which to beat political opponents over the head.

True, the Gaza move was technically "legal", but even supporters of the Gaza disengagement now admit that the process of approving the move was something significantly less than Jeffersonian democracy. To paraphrase another not-quite-kosher move in the annals of history, the whole thing stank.

...It is not only the settler community that seems to be opting out of the election process. The current election is the country's sixth in 14 years – an average of one election campaign every 2.3 years. The same candidates that have failed to take responsibility for their failures and have failed to serve the country's needs again and again and again, have the audacity to spout the same election jargon as they did 10 years ago –without the slightest hint of shame.

With several notable exceptions, our elected representatives are not in the game to serve the public. They are in the game to serve themselves. More than that, the parties have made their disdain for the public clear by assuming people will vote for them simply because the country has called elections. Party chairmen have been scant in the news, and potential foreign, defense and justice ministers have remained entirely absent from this campaign.

Nor is it merely the large parties that take the public for just so many morons. The Meretz Party calls for "dialogue" with the Palestinian Authority, offering neither apology nor explanation for the fact that such talks produced the bloodiest terror offensive Israel has ever known.

And right-wing leaders spout on about "saving" Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria without acknowledging that their anti-Oslo/anti-disengagement campaign of the last 13 years has yielded exactly nothing, and without bothering to tell the public what their plans are to solve the demographic threat that many demographers say is less than a generation away.

The notion that our politicians simply have no shame, that they view the electorate as little more than a bunch of morons, defines every single political party in the country.

Sad, but all true. In light of Friedman's explanation, the turnout results really don't seem terribly surprising (and also seem to jive with the "election day surprise" the pollsters were warning about).