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.
Continued...

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.