Israel’s election.

Many things can be said about Israeli elections but this last one was more than ever an election where “two Jews with three opinions went to vote for the right to live”
The election day was cold and rainy. Many political activists were concerned that the weather would cause people to stay home. According to statistics, however, there were a 3% rise in votes.
We ended up with 28 candidates for Kadima with Tzipi Livni, 27 for Likud with Bibi Netanyahu, 15 for Israel Beiteinu with Avigdor Lieberman, 13 for Avoda with Ehud Barak and the rest spread out to smaller parties. The tree first parties belong to the right in politics.
The total number of members to the Knesset is 120.
All Israeli governments have been coalitions, but most of the time there has been a clear majority of votes for one of the parties. What makes trouble this time is that they are too close. It is not clear who will be the Prime Minister as that will depend on who is capable of putting a government together. That will take quite some bargaining. We will probably not know until mid March and if no solution is found there will have to be a new election.

What these results show more than anything is that people want politicians who are willing to fight to secure their lives. As rockets continued to fall down on Israeli territory many people thought that the war was ended too early. We know that Hamas is far from being defeated and that they actually are gaining support from even more Palestinians both in Gaza and in the West Bank. When these facts are seen on the background of Iranian support for Hamas the picture becomes more threatening.

This is not about “feeling afraid” but about having a very realistic reason to be scared. In times like these people do not want to see politicians “sitting and talking” but rather “on their feet actually doing something”.

Elin Elkouby