Opinion

One day to go

February 9, 2009 23:20
1 min read

There's one day to go before the election. It is being described, inevitably, as “Israel’s most important election”, but I’ve never known the streets this quiet in the run-up to polling day.

I’ve just driven through Ra’anana junction, a busy intersection which is usually abuzz with party activists holding banners and distributing leaflets in the weeks, never mind the last few hours, before an election. It was empty.

The quiet is the result of confusion rather than apathy. These are the fifth elections in ten years and many people are thinking that they don’t know precisely what this particular one is about. Of course, peace and security are the main issues, as ever, but we haven’t been told exactly what Netanyahu, Barak and Livni will do about post-war Gaza, the future of the West Bank and the threat posed by Iran.

Israel has a multitude of other pressing problems about which we have heard nothing: the water crisis, the environment and social welfare, to name just a few. Even the economy has received scant attention in this campaign.

A live televised debate might have helped, but there hasn’t been one.

No wonder, then, that many Israeli voters are confused. The country’s leaders have spent too much time campaigning negatively against each other instead of offering us anything new. No matter how we vote tomorrow, the chances are we’ll be back at the polling station before long, feeling just as confused as we do now.