“I know this is spitballing.”
Tel Aviv, March 22 – A political activist sparked outrage among her colleagues today by floating the notion that in a democracy, the best way to ensure one’s preferred policy outcomes involves engaging enough voters to secure most of the parliamentary seats for one’s faction, and not, as many of her colleagues insisted, relying on ideological capture of unelected institutions such as the courts, ministerial legal advisers, and the State Prosecutor’s office as the vehicles through which to attain and exercise power.
Sivan Harpaz, who has participated in every demonstration in Tel Aviv and two in Jerusalem against the Netanyahu government’s proposed legislation to reform Israel’s judiciary since the current wave of protests began last month, attracted criticism from others in her activist group Wednesday when she mused aloud that it would be easier to implement and maintain important progressive policy goals if progressives generated enough votes to gain legislative and executive power, an achievement that the Israeli Left has failed to reach in any meaningful way since the 1990’s.
“I just think we’d have a smoother time of it if we articulated directly to the people who vote why our vision is superior,” she said at an activist planning meeting this evening. “In a democracy, which I think we still are – otherwise what’s with all the slogans we’re shouting about protecting it – votes equal power. So we could – and I know this is spitballing – we could try articulating positions that lots of voters like, instead of what we’ve been doing, which is articulate positions that we know our political opponents don’t like.”
“I know it sounds heretical to even imply that we don’t have to automatically disagree with Netanyahu on everything,” she continued, her voice rising to counter a crescendo of objection from other present, “that maybe the voters who installed a right-wing government have concerns we could address instead of dismiss, and that way we could actually achieve something meaningful by literal democratic means.”
Harpaz attempted to add further clarity to her argument, but the volume of the other activists’ yelling rendered the exercise futile. Four colleagues accused her of fascist sympathies, two others called for her to just join the Likud Party already if that’s what she thinks, and several others demanded that her employer fire her for unspecified violations of “everything we stand for as a society.”
Harpaz’s opponents discovered afterwards that their efforts to oust her from the group had failed, because her brother-in-law is the only member competent in the finances and logistics to keep it functioning.
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