The politics of the absurd, Friday, September 23, 2005

That’s true especially if you can watch it on TV and not have to be present at the sweaty, noisy scene where anything can happen, including fist-fights, pushing and shoving over microphones, ballot-box stuffing, and backroom wheeling and dealing that has nothing to do with ideology or politics and everything to do with custom-tailored government tenders for cronies.

The committee meets on Sunday in Tel Aviv for a day of speeches culminating in speeches by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his challenger Binyamin Netanyahu. The next day, the committee reconvenes, to vote on a proposal to advance the primaries inside the party for the leadership. Sharon, rightfully, is calling that proposal a move to depose him. Sample polling of the 3,050 members of the central committee show a neck and neck race between Sharon and Netanyahu.

Making the committee session so critical is the possibility that Sharon, if he loses to Netanyahu, might walk out of the party, claiming he was thrown out. The same polls showing that inside the central committee there’s a neck and neck race, show that if Sharon forms a new party, he would win more than twice as many votes as the Likud under Netanyahu.

Nothing less than a redrawing of the political spectrum is at stake. The polls show that the elections, if they were held today, could just as easily result in a Center-Left coalition as a Center-Right coalition.

Netanyahu, say the papers this morning, is now scrambling to put together a 61-seat Rightist majority in the existing Knesset, to crown him as prime minister irrespective of what happens in the central committee. It is not at all clear that he has the votes to do so. Maybe it’s just a good headline for the morning tabloids. Maybe it’s a brilliant political stroke. In any case, he is far from being the favorite candidate of the general public; all the polls agree that Netanyahu at the head of the Likud sinks the party to third place, behind Labor, which still hasn’t pulled it and the Left together to form a credible alternative to the Likud.

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the polls that are coming out nowadays is that the number of Israelis who say they will vote in the next elections is declining – and rapidly. Israeli voter turnout has always been as high as 80 percent, and never has dipped lower than 70 percent. But the polls say that there is a growing tendency on the part of Israelis to say they have lost all faith in the system, that the politicians are incorrigibly corrupt and that their votes don’t matter any more.

That might be true for the wider electorate. But for the 3,050 members of the central committee, it’s far from true. They know their vote on Monday will make a difference, one way or the other. The trouble is, they, more than anyone else nowadays, represent all that the wider public finds so distasteful about politics – and aside from the ideological purists, whom everyone admits are now the minority of the central committee, the reasoning behind the voting on Monday has gone beyond the realm of party politics, to the dark and murky beast that lurks in the hearts of the power-hungry.

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