Israeli Left Regrets Granting Suffrage To Non-Ashkenazim

Evidently no one ever told them that democracy only works when you vote as the educated class sees fit.

Tel Aviv, March 24 – The stunning electoral loss last week has ideologues and pragmatists on Israel’s political left wondering whether their predecessors made a mistake in allowing suffrage to Jews of non-European ancestry.

Mizrahim, as they are popularly known, account for about half of Israel’s Jewish population, but enjoy a much lower share of the country’s wealth, academic degrees, and political influence. Their electoral clout proved decisive in handing incumbent Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu a convincing victory last Tuesday, as the Left’s campaign failed to resonate with periphery-dwelling, non-academic, non-European Jews who suffered decades of discrimination at the hands of the party that ran the country through its first thirty years and eventually became Labor. That display of ingratitude now has significant numbers of leftist Israelis reconsidering the wisdom of allowing a vote to anyone from a household earning less than the median income.

Just weeks ago, few in the Tel-Aviv-centered Zionist Union alliance, lead by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, would have thought that granting all adult citizens a vote would pose such a threat to democracy. But in the wake of the disastrous choice by so many of those unfortunate to have been born outside the Ashkenazi elite, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the darker-skinned “brethren” of those who actually know what they are doing would not know democracy if it bit them on their uneducated backsides.

“There’s a good reason the phrase ‘hoi polloi’ refers to the ignorant masses – it’s just Greek for ‘the people,'” explained Meretz Party delegate Alona Kimhi. “And the people have spoken, loud and clear, in their backward, primitive voice. Evidently no one ever told them that democracy only works when you vote as the educated class sees fit.”

Others echoed Ms. Kimhi’s sentiments, noting that the prevalence among left-wing political personalities of academic degrees – in contrast to the relative paucity of them among historically blue-collar Mizrahim – should itself demonstrate who is smarter and better suited to making the important decisions. “I have degrees in both psychology and political science, so I’m automatically more qualified to weigh in on fateful issues than anyone with the last name Makhlouf,” insisted Yael Cohen Paran, who, but for the votes of the unwashed, would have claimed the 25th seat in the Zionist Union roster, which only garnered 24. “How exactly is some roofer from Dimona supposed to know enough to make an informed decision? Universal suffrage makes no sense – as last Tuesday demonstrated.”

Prospects for limiting the vote to holders of at least a BA in disciplines such as Fine Arts or Sociology remain dim for the foreseeable future, as the riffraff-friendly Likud still heads the government. The best the Left can hope for, says Kimhi, is a pugnacious Opposition that obscures the Left’s paternalism by focusing on pragmatic pocketbook issues and pretending that means they care about people whose ancestors came from the Maghreb instead of the Pale of Settlement.

Ms. Kimhi took pains to clarify that Labor and Meretz applauded the electoral achievement of the Joint Arab List, noting that dismissing them as backward simply because they did not hail from Europe would be racist.

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