Give In, Get More

Could the elections no one wants have been prevented with a little humility on all sides?

In Israel they’re calling it “the plonter,” a Yiddish word that best describes the knotty state of the country’s attempts at forming a democratically elected government. Assuming readers are looking on with concern at this impasse and wondering how Israelis will be going to the polls for the third time in less than a year, the answer to that question, at least, is simple. The root of the problem is bad middos — gaavah in particular. That favorite tool of the yetzer hara has a firm grip on all the key figures in this political traffic jam: Bibi, Benny, Yair, and Avigdor.

Gaavah, foolish and unwarranted pride, is dictating the behavior of all these men, shaping their view of the problem and triggering their responses. Their sense of self has prevented them from engaging in meaningful, productive dialogue and finding a way out of the plonter.

Each of them, dazzled by the vision of his own competence and confident that he’s right and must therefore emerge victorious, fails to see that he’s actually a victim of his own bad middos. Each of them is sure that his motives are ideological, that they stand only for the pursuit of justice, only want to uphold the rule of law. Never mind that the law permits Bibi to continue to serve as Prime Minister as long as he has not been convicted by a court of law; the righteous Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid could never sully themselves by sitting in a government with a leader who’s been indicted. Never mind that if we were to dig into their own pasts, we could easily find similar indictable offenses, and they know that. “Anything but Bibi” has become not just a slogan, but the guiding principle of their lives for which they’ll apparently do anything, including leaving their country in this ridiculous stalemate.

Truth be told, the Blue and White Party has no unified ideology. It’s essentially a shopping cart of politicians and retired generals, leaning both leftward and rightward, with only one goal in common: knocking Bibi off his perch. If resolving the stalemate were truly important to them, some form of compromise would have already happened.