The Million Dollar Question

On March 28th I will vote for the first time as an Israeli citizen. In American I had to wait years to be able to vote in my first election, but in Israel it turned out only to be a matter of months until my first chance comes along. Of course the question then arises: “Who am I going to vote for?” To help answer such a difficult dilemma I attended an evening of “Meet the Candidates” for the English speaking community.

The format of the evening was standard: each candidate would speak for 5-6 minutes and then they would field questions from the audience. Of course in Israel nothing is that simple. Firstly, there are close to 70 political parties in Israel. These parties range from the ones with very narrow agendas to all-encompassing ones; ones who do not have enough votes to pass the threshold to get a seat in the Knesset to the possibility of holding over a third of the total seats. These parties change names, splinter off and go through scandal after scandal. Just understanding who is running is hard enough, but who to vote for is even more difficult. To make matters more complicated, currently in Israel one votes for a party, not a person and it takes a coalition of parties to hold a majority in the Knesset. Therefore, some talk about voting strategically in the hopes of getting the right combination of parties in power.

This evening there were 8 parties present ranging from the big names of Labor and Likud, to lesser known parties like the National Union and Tofnit. David Horowitz, the Editor-in-Chief of the Jerusalem Post moderated the evening and was by far one of the highlights. Each representative was supposed to lay out his or her party’s agenda, but really everyone spoke about whatever he/she wanted. Sometimes it was on topic, other times less so. Some people tried to use the scare tactic of “you should vote for my party because if bombs can fall on Ashkelon, Tel Aviv is next! You need us for protection” Others took the softer sell route and said “you should vote for my party because we care about immigrants.”

The question and answer section was even more unclear. Instead of actually answering the questions, some candidates decided to heckle those candidates that just spoke about the false things they just said.

After two hours of trying to absorb all of this, the program ended and I felt no better informed. A month from now I will cast my vote….for who is still a mystery.