18-Year-Old Still Thinks Her Vote Matters

Haifa, December 9 – Dahlia Moshe wasn’t old enough to vote in the most recent municipal elections, but the upcoming Israeli national elections in March have her eager for the opportunity to participate in the democratic process, since she has yet to realize how futile an exercise it actually is.

Ms. Moshe has yet to decide which party she supports, but her parents have loyally voted straight Labor in every election from the Knesset on down, for all the good it accomplished. She appreciates Labor’s social positions and is ambivalent on security, but also wants to see how ex-Likud Moshe Kahalon’s candidacy shapes up. “I’m itching to make my decision and put that ballot in the box on March 17,” gushed the woman, who finished high school in June and will be drafted into the IDF this month, oblivious to the fact that no matter who earns her vote, Israel’s policies will remain more or less the same for the foreseeable future.

“I remember discussions around the dinner table last time there were Knesset elections,” she recalls, referring to early 2013. “My parents were strong supporters of [then-Labor Chairwoman Shelly] Yechimovich, and I couldn’t wait to be old enough to participate,” said the naif, unaware that her voice will be drowned out by moneyed interests, lobbyists, corrupt officials, international pressure, and political exigencies.

Ms. Moshe is hardly alone, says political consultant Olga Valdt. “Every election there’s an influx of new voters excited to engage in the democratic process, people who haven’t learned it simply doesn’t work that way,” she explains. “It takes a good two or three more election campaigns before most folks finally grasp the pointlessness of it all.” Fortunately, says Valdt, it has been decades since a government last served out its entire four-year term, and that rude awakening has, for most Israelis, occurred in less than twelve years.

The most likely scenario for Ms. Moshe, says polling expert Nate Silver, is that Ms. Moshe and her similarly misguided peers will either be co-opted by the interests that currently exert control over ostensibly open, democratic processes, or lose interest in participating in those processes as the pointlessness of engagement in them becomes more and more evident. Thus the more ignorant and more manipulable masses will continue to serve as a democratic fig leaf for starkly undemocratic undertakings.

Valdt and her colleagues watch the cohorts of new voters closely, as the moment of dawning realization of the futility of it all is one of the few genuinely human experiences in Israeli politics.

Another possibility, though more distant, for Ms. Moshe is that she will double down on her denial, and persist in believing that further participation in elections is the only thing that can make the system healthy again. “There are a few nuts in every generation, and if Dahlia turns out to be one of them, she will become what they all do: interesting, entertaining, and perhaps even powerful, to a small degree on a local scale, but ultimately of marginal importance,” said Silver.