Leon's Jerusalem No News Bulletin.(15)

Sat 1st April 06

Dear friends and family,

The resuts of the elections are now final. The citizens of Israel have decided that the 120 seats in the Knesset will be occupied, untill the next elections, by 12 political parties. As I've said before we are made of a variety of different sorts of people. This election makes that clear.

The party that got the most votes (29 seats), but by no means the majority, is Ariel Sharon's Kadima party, headed by Ehud Olmert in Sharon's absence. The second highest number of votes went to Labour (20), headed by Amir Peretz.

The man who will be prime minister is the one who manages to form a coalition of parties that will give him a majority in making decisions critical to the future of Israel.

This is why people should vote for the party who they think will adopt the best policy for the country as a whole and not just for a small section of it.

In fact most people voted for the party which they thought would adopt policies that would be best for them personally and not for the country as a whole.

This is why the majority of the votes didn't go to the two main parties but to small sectarian parties. These range from a party representing the pensioners to parties calling for more funding for religious groups, parties who stood for the Arabs of the Galillee, parties who stood for the Jewish settlers in predominantly Arab areas and so on.

This means, basically, that government decisions, such as a peace agreement with the Palestinians, will get support from the sectarian parties only if they recieve money for their sectarian projects.

The succes of Sharon's government was that he had a majority without the small parties. That's why he could take decisions for the good of the country as a whole.

Now, with Sharon out of the picture and the majority split umpteen ways, we are back to wheeling and dealing which is going to impoverish the country, as it has always done, since the establishment of the State of Israel. The government is going to have to pay ridiculous amounts of money, which it doesn't have, to all kinds of small interest groups if its going to make any progress on the national and international level.

History shows, however, that if Olmert is going to make his mark on Israel's history he'll have to strengthen Israel nationally and internationally and not worry about satisfying the demands of the sectarian parties.

This was why Sharon was popular even though his government reduced social benifit payments more than any previous Israeli government.

This is a pattern throughout history. David ben Gurion is famous as the State founder, despite the terrible poverty and the need to absorb millions of poor Jews, that faced in Israel in his time. Saul united the people and forced them to go to war, David established Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Solomon built the Temple and expanded the country to the borders of Syria, Suleiman the Magnificent built the walls of Jeruslem and so on.

The strange paradox is that people vote for their personal benifits but what they really want, deep down in their hearts is a government that will give them national security and pride among the nations.

One of the greatest examples of the truth of this statement is Mohammed's success in building the Islamic religion through demanding of his followers denial of physical pleasures in this world in return for these same pleasures in Paradise.

Wishing you a great no news day. Leon.