Election Activists To Overcome Your Disgust By Getting In Your Face About Voting

“The only way… is to get all up in the business of as many voters as possible, not to allow them the one thing that protects what remains of their sanity.”

Jerusalem, March 2 – Representatives from all the parties registered for today’s parliamentary elections redoubled their efforts today to get a disillusioned, disaffected electorate sick of politics to cast their ballots, by engaging in more of the same behaviors and rhetoric that created the disaffection and disillusionment in the first place.

Campaign workers and volunteers from the dozens of parties seeking election to the Knesset today – the third such election in less than a year, following two abortive attempts since last April – vowed last night and this morning to get in your face as much as possible to bug you about voting, with the rationale that only such a display of rudeness and provocation will penetrate the shield of apathy you have constructed over the last year to protect against precisely that type of unpleasantness.

“We must get through to more voters,” urged Likud field organizer Atz Bani. “Repeated elections have numbed the electorate to the importance of casting votes, while the futility of the two most recent contests has turned them ever-more cynical as to the utility of participating in the democratic process. Neither has it helped that the more politically-engaged and active among us have adopted progressively more offensive and insulting tactics and phraseology to make our points, further contributing to voter alienation. The only way to remedy this, I believe all parties agree, is to get all up in the business of as many voters as possible, not to allow them the one thing that protects what remains of their sanity.”

“This provides a rare point of unanimity among groups who otherwise bitterly, even violently, oppose one another,” concurred Labor-Gesher-Meretz campaigner Go’al Nefesz. “There’s even, I daresay, a sort of camaraderie that has developed over the last month or so around this issue. People who under normal circumstances call one another the most extreme things – Nazi, traitor, kapo, racist, terrorist – have bonded over the need to take some of that vehemence and channel it toward harassing voters to perform their civic duty, instead of scoring rhetorical points or looking good on social media.”

Observers note that this phenomenon indicates some encouraging developments in Israeli democracy. “By the time we hold the inevitable fourth election in this series later this year, we might see a transformation,” predicted analyst Nati Segen. “Not in terms of the voters, who will continue to stay away in droves, because, really, what’s the point anymore? Rather, in terms of the small core of activists, who are now beginning to show signs of common purpose lacking everywhere else in Israeli polity.”

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