By Ira Sharkansky
JERUSALEM–The glass of the political activist is never full. If it seems full, it is only a momentary surge of partial victory.
The tea cups of the American extreme right might appear full after their man’s victory in Kentucky, but they are a long way from achieving their dreams. Barack Obama is a sure thing until 2013, and if the Alaskan darling wins the Republican nomination, he is likely to stay until 2017.
If he goes home earlier, there will still be Congress, courts, and 50 state governments to protect what has been added to public services and taxes over the course of 230 years.
For anyone close to the mainstream, it is also true that the glass is never completely empty.
Iranians were celebrating and Israelis mourning for some hours when leaders of Turkey and Brazil signed that agreement in Tehran about outsourcing some of Iran’s nuclear enrichment, but that may not have been enough to derail an increase in UN imposed sanctions. If the rabbis in the White House heard what was really on the President’s mind, those sanctions may allow more pressure from the European Union and another uptick from the United States.
None of that will solve the problem of Iranian madness, and might not even derail that country’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. But it would signal that serious powers are intent in limiting Iranian influence, as well as that of aspiring sycophants like Turkey and Brazil.
The color grey, along with the glass neither full nor empty is a lesson unlearned by libertarians, anarchists, mad leftists who see Israel as the lone country guilty of everything, and those who are certain that Barack Obama is a Muslim anti-Semite who will put Israel back into its smallest outline.
Struggles never end and messiahs never arrive.
The United States will continue to have the worst health delivery of any western democracy despite the improvements engineered by the Obama White House. Partly because of those improvements, the country will have a debt load comparable to that of Greece. However, an economic engine much larger than that of Greece should save us all from the shocks that would end our world as we know it.
Iraq shows few signs of achieving the democracy planned by George W. Bush. It may have had more violent deaths since the American invasion of 2003 than during the 24 years the country was ruled by Saddam Hussein. American efforts in Afghanistan have not yet reached the point where the White House decides that it has done enough, and will reduce its commitment with a fig leaf of claiming success.
Oy gevalt will continue as Israel’s de facto national anthem, despite economic and other accomplishments that forced the OECD to grant it membership, years after letting in economic and social laggards like Turkey and Mexico.
Hizbollah now has enough missiles to bring destruction to every corner of Israel. Will what Israel did to parts of Lebanon in 2006 and the greater damage done to Gaza in 2009 be enough deterrence? Will estimates of 200 or so nuclear weapons and several means of delivery restrain Iran?
Certainty is one of those things that is as elusive as full glasses, final victories, and the messiah’s arrival.
Secular Israelis and religious moderates can celebrate the removal of graves from the place where ultra-Orthodox politicians had blocked the construction of an emergency room at the Ashkelon hospital. Reports are that ultra-Orthodox rabbis are pondering their failure to recognize the limits of other Israelis’ tolerance.
Yet we are still a long way from a well balanced society where all the schools prepare their pupils for an adult life of productive work. Many of the country’s Muslims view their country as illegitimate, and some of them can be provoked to violence by religious leaders. The Bedouin of the south are on their own cultural path, resistant to efforts to wean them from child marriage, polygamy, birth rates that compete with those of the ultra-Orthodox, and a tendency to spread their settlements across the landscape oblivious to any efforts at planning.
For those who have not shed conceptions of success because of constraints inherent in public issues, there are also the frustrations of overweight and aging.
The point is not victory, but playing the game well. That, too, has no meaning widely accepted.
Politics is usually more banal than exciting. Pleasure comes from small victories, and the survival of hope. Paradise and the messiah have their roles, providing that one can distinguish between aspiration and expectation.
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Sharkansky is professor emeritus of politial science at Hebrew University