Meretz Still Living February 2, 1993

“An inability to assimilate the fact that the assumptions of the pre-Oslo, pre-Gaza-Disengagement eras have been thoroughly debunked by reality.”

Tel Aviv, February 2 – Neurologists have diagnosed one of Israel’s premier left-wing parties as suffering from a rare condition in which the patient experiences the same day over and over again, local news sources have reported.

An anchor of several Labor-led coalitions and a key player in the Oslo Accords that established Palestinian self-rule, the party suffers from Groundhog Day Syndrome, a condition that usually forces the patient to relive the same day repeatedly until a constructive, life-changing, positive personality adjustment is made. In the case of Meretz, said political neurologist Dr. Harold Ramis, the condition presents not in its classic form of an individual trapped in a time warp of the same day, but in a variety that condemns the patient to a mental reset each morning, resulting in complete obliviousness to the fact that a day has passed.

“I suppose this variety of the condition might better be called Fifty First Dates Syndrome,” said Ramis, referring to a case first described by Sandler and Barrymore in a 2004 work. “But the effect is analogous. In practice, for Meretz it means an inability to assimilate the fact that the assumptions of the pre-Oslo, pre-Gaza-Disengagement eras have been thoroughly debunked by reality. So they will keep pushing for further surrender of Israeli control over various areas, blissfully unaware of the traumas and frustration that such moves brought about in the real world.”

Palestinian Terrorism continues to plague Israel and the areas ceded to the Palestinians either by agreement or unilaterally have become hotbeds for more such violence, noted Ramis’s colleague Phil Connors. “Meretz inhabits a world in which it still seems possible to give people who want to destroy you some guns and political power, and have that result somehow in them suddenly not wanting to wipe you off the map,” he explained. “In this instance of Groundhog Day Syndrome, the patient evidently believes that negating one’s identity, rights, historical connection, and millennia of yearning – thus, abandoning one’s dignity – will cause an existential foe to want to make love like sea otters at sunset with you. For anyone who lived past February 2, 1993, and especially the summer of 2005, such notions are naive and dangerous, but for this patient, they are sacrosanct.” He added that repeated political suicide has not improved Meretz’s medical condition.

“I paid a house call to Meretz recently,” continued Ramis “While medical confidentiality requirements mean I cannot divulge too many specifics, I can share that Sonny and Cher’s ‘I Got You, Babe’ was on continuous loop there.”