Why I hate Israeli politics

The dirtiness of politics does not faze me; it never has, and it never will.  The sheer number of backroom deals that take place in jurisdictions all over the world are simply the name of the game.  Pure insanity, however, is quite surprising: on one hand, there are countries like Iran since the revolution, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Cuba... and then, there's Israel.  It's not that Israel is a country lacking in democracy.  It isn't.  When you delve underneath the surface, though, you start to see that politics in Israel is so far gone from either the British model or the European model that it's almost
incomprehensible.

A lot of this stems from the way the sheeple... erm, people... of the great flock named the Holy Land elect the man that will lead them.  In any country, this is called an electoral system.  Great Britain, Canada, and the United States of America use a system called first-past-the-post.  America holds presidential elections separate from parliamentary ones, and there is a system to figure out who will be the presidential candidate (this is called a primary election), but when it comes time to pick the Supreme Emperor of the Universe, this is still first-past-the-post.  This system is simple.  Really simple.  It's so simple even a stoner could understand it, and this is why athletic races use this system too.

In first-past-the-post, the country is divided up into little chunks, and the candidate who gets the most votes in his little chunk wins.  You can only vote for one person.  It's the same system as the Olympics.  A race is run for the 100-metre sprint, Usain Bolt gets the gold; another race is run for the quarter mile, Michael Johnson gets the gold; yet another race is run for shot put, Tomasz Majewski gets the gold, and so on.  Whichever political party wins the most races gets to pick Prime Minister.  Simple, eh?

Israeli elections don't work like that.  They use a system called full proportional representation; they are in fact the /only/ jurisdiction in which this is the case.  Whenever you watch vote results in a country other than Israel, you'll get something called the popular vote.  The Israelis don't broadcast this (well, they do, but it's not called that); in Israel, the popular vote is called "who won".  It's the most democratic system in the world.  The way Israeli elections run is simple, too.  Far simpler than European elections (some of which require the use of a computer to find the winner).  Instead of cutting the country up into little chunks, everybody votes as one big chunk.  If, say, 25 per cent. of people vote for Likud, 25 per cent. of seats in Parliament will go to Likud.  This means that any party with at least /some/ support will get a seat.

Here's the kicker though.  Israel is a country with more than its fair share of villages, and every last one of these villages has an idiot or two to go with it.  When these village idiots go to cast their ballots, hilarity ensues.  A village idiot won't vote for a party like the Republicans or the Democrats.  I'm a Thatcherite Conservative, but I can understand why someone would vote Democrat; this is why we have opposition in Parliament.  As I wrote earlier, any party with a couple people willing to listen will get into Parliament, so you can pretty much count on Israel's version of the Fascists getting in... and, to balance it out, some Communists too.  These still aren't village idiot parties.  The Fascists were right in a lot of ways; look at Germany under Hitler.  Certainly, his foreign policy needed work, and his anti-Semitism and his brutal eugenics programmes (though eugenics, the art and science of improving the world through selective breeding, itself isn't a bad thing).  The Commies had it right too.

But suppose you had a party headed by Rick Santorum, separate and distinct from the Republicans.  Their agenda consists of fervently support of a bill against freedom of "choice" (abortion), and opposition to bills separating church and state, legalising the possession of marihuana, for medical reasons or otherwise, and permitting the marriage of two same-sex individuals; for all other issues, any member is free to vote according to their own, personal beliefs (no party line).  Say you had a Ku Klux Klan party too: they'd have a big foreign agenda to police other countries, and they'd naturally support apartheid and oppose immigration; again, no party line otherwise.  To top it all off, say there was a Legalise It party, with its sole party line being the legalisation of all recreational drugs, with absolutely no party line for any other issue.  Of course, only the village idiot would vote for any of these parties.  Now, Canada, the U. S. of A., and a lot of European countries have parties like these, but they don't stand a chance of getting into Parliament, so their influence is pretty fucking low.  With Israel's fairly big number of village idiots and its crazy electoral regime, all of these are represented in Parliament.  Now, you're getting /close/ to the political situation in Israel.

Of course with a country full of immigrants from all over the world, with radically different views on basically everything, and with voting preferences to match, there will be a million parties in Parliament after this goatfuck is all over and done with.  So, the chance of a clear leader emerging is roughly equal to the chance of pigs flying... out of my anus.  Backroom chat time!  So, you end up with a couple of relatively big parties sitting at a table and trying to figure out exactly which of the village idiot parties, and here are the key words, do not contradict their major party lines.  Fun, eh?

With politics being what they are, anywhere in the world, every party has to make concessions.  For instance, to gain the support of socially conservative voters, Mitt Romney (whose convictions are on the pro-choice side) had to join the pro-life cause.  Now you add the extra layer of insanity that occurs in the Holy Land.  Say the "Santorumites" (Shas) want to table a bill that will introduce mandatory minimum sentencing for marihuana possession, and another one that will require all television and wireless stations to broadcast two hours a day of content made in Israel; the "Republicans" (Likud) will vote yes, but only if Shas votes yes to attack Palestine.  This is why Israel's political system is such a quagmire, yet it stands as the most democratic system in the world.