In the spirit of ...
... this, excerpted from today's Op Ed in the Times of Israel
I suspect that this farce will prove itself to be no less tragic.
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
... this, excerpted from today's Op Ed in the Times of Israel
Snap surveys published Tuesday night on Israel’s three main television channels ostensibly showed that, as with the previous occasions, election five will meet the definition of insanity (dubiously) attributed to Albert Einstein: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Four times from 2019 to 2021, the Israeli public elected a Knesset from which no stable, long-lasting and fully functional governing coalition emerged. And Tuesday night’s surveys were generally presented as showing that the current Knesset “blocs” — the eight parties in the outgoing Bennett-Lapid coalition, and the four parties in the Benjamin Netanyahu-led opposition — will again be “deadlocked,” with neither capable of mustering a Knesset majority, and the Joint List, a mainly Arab alliance, holding the balance of power between them.
Lazy or deliberate, this is a misreading of the electorate’s preferences. What all three surveys showed, in fact, is a sharp rise in support for the Netanyahu-led bloc — constituting Likud, the soaring far-right Religious Zionism party, and the Shas and United Torah Judaism parties. In the March 2021 elections, those four parties managed 52 seats between them. Sixteen months later, the three TV surveys put them at 59-60 seats — on the cusp of a Knesset majority.
Four times from 2019 to 2021, the Israeli public elected a Knesset from which no stable, long-lasting and fully functional governing coalition emerged. And Tuesday night’s surveys were generally presented as showing that the current Knesset “blocs” — the eight parties in the outgoing Bennett-Lapid coalition, and the four parties in the Benjamin Netanyahu-led opposition — will again be “deadlocked,” with neither capable of mustering a Knesset majority, and the Joint List, a mainly Arab alliance, holding the balance of power between them.
Lazy or deliberate, this is a misreading of the electorate’s preferences. What all three surveys showed, in fact, is a sharp rise in support for the Netanyahu-led bloc — constituting Likud, the soaring far-right Religious Zionism party, and the Shas and United Torah Judaism parties. In the March 2021 elections, those four parties managed 52 seats between them. Sixteen months later, the three TV surveys put them at 59-60 seats — on the cusp of a Knesset majority.
I suspect that this farce will prove itself to be no less tragic.