This Year in Jerusalem

Or close by anyways… I was invited to spend Pesach in Israel at a good friend of mine’s relatives home in Rishon, about a 20 minute drive from Tel Aviv. My friend Benny is Persian so I went to my first Sephardic seder this year. Other than being completely in Hebrew, which still might as well be Chinese to me, things were similar. There were a couple of odd differences though than my usual gefilte fish and matzah ball soup filled holiday. One of course being the lack of acting out the entire story of the exodus from Egypt with puppets on popsicle sticks and stuffed animals, but really this could very well be restricted to something only my family does. Another was the addition of rice and ohmygod the best charosets EVER. It was blended and when I was handed it on a bite of matzah, I could only assume it was chopped liver as that is exactly what it looks like at my house. As I prepared for the deathly agonizing dense taste of animal innards, you could not begin to imagine my pleasure at the sweet yet, kind of a spiciness tastiness to the charosets. Mmmm…
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Okay really here’s the weirdest part that I still didn’t really get an explanation for. About halfway through the seder, handfuls of green onions were passed around. And, you’ll never guess – everyone started HITTING each other with them! Yup, I swear. There was an old grandmother sitting next to me smacking me with a green onion. And some of the kids were really whacking each other with the onion part. So much so that I was really glad I picked the seat by the grandma. Anyone know anything about this?

Four glasses or more of wine later and after eating all this new delicious food (really, I even ate tongue!... but I’m not putting that in the delicious category) the boys at the table started singing and drumming on the table. They sang so many songs, one of which I actually knew which was really fun. Almost for an hour after dinner, they went non-stop. Amazing. I don’t think I could even sing Madonna songs for an hour without stopping and knowing all the words. All in all the night was another great cultural exchange for me in Israel and I really really like the addition of rice related foods for the week.

So Those Pollings Are Never That Accurate

Elections for the new parliament were held on March 28. Lucky for me even though I didn't have a vote, I still got the day off, as Election Day is a holiday in Israel. Relieved of my fruit duties and feeling the tingle of change in the air, I jumped on a bus to Jerusalem to see the action first hand.

Unfortunately there wasn't anything. As it is in America, apathy is a problem among the population when it comes to voting. Kadima was predicted to win by a landslide and most Israelis were fine with this outcome. Other than the litter strewn throughout the gutters having more of a common theme than usual, Jerusalem was in its normal state of being. I felt disappointed, because it turned out that Tel Aviv would have been a better place to spend my time, as there were rallies and election parties to attend. At the end of the day the polls closed at 10pm and the votes were tallied up. However, despite the topical appearence of indifference, the election results were suprising and spoke of an Israel more ready for growth of self than ever expected.
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The final results are as follows:
Kadima 29
Labor 20
Shas 12
Likud 12
Israel Beiteinu 11
NU/NPR 9
Pensioners 7
UTI 6
Meretz 5
United Arab List 3
Balad 3
Hadash 3

I'm not going to go into the different parties and what all these results might mean, but send me an email if you are interested in what I think.

Really, what I want to write about is how interesting the high tally of the Labor party was and how low Likud and Kadima did contrary to predictions. Throughout the campaigning, debate rarely strayed from talk of borders, security issues, and Hamas. Actually, Israel rarely seems to stray from the security issue anytime in past decades. Likud and Kadima both have strong but different voices on this topic, whereas Labor barely mentioned it, and so it was assumed that the people would vote to the way they felt about security.

But the results as they appear tell a different story. The closeness of Kadima and Labor suggest that Israel might be ready to move on from this land obsession and focus on other needs of the country. Labor concerns itself with internal Israeli issues such as the ever growing socioeconomical gap, horrendous education system, workers rights, and other concerns any good socialist nation should take a look at every now and then. While keeping the Israelis and everyone within the country safe from attack is important, what are we saving if systems within the country are falling apart both economically and socially? By Israel putting the power in Labor's hands, a new trend of acceptance is shown towards unilateral withdrawal and concern for helping the nation mature. I have seen a lot of social injustice during my year here and it feels good knowing the country feels ready to move in this direction.