By Sam Litvin
TEL AVIV, Israel — I was running through the hot-like-a-sauna streets of Tel Aviv, sweat dripping from my brow, my large backpack swinging by its shoulder strap. Tel Avivians followed me with an indifferent yet quizzical gaze. The polls close at 10 a.m. My GPS tells me that I have 8 minutes to go and there are 4 minutes left. I spot a rental scooter, hop on. I can’t miss this election. I must vote. I worked at another poll station all morning, and I planned to vote there but when I arrived, I was told I couldn’t vote there, only at a location some 15 minutes away. I worked all morning for Blue and White. Last election, I screwed up my vote. I can’t be late this time.
These thoughts streamed in my mind as I clutched my ID in my left hand while also gripping the left handle of the scooter, and my phone with the open GPS and the right handle with my other hand. I’m riding through the narrow packed streets of central Tel Aviv, avoiding cars, almost falling over several times. I’m almost there, I can see the school. All polls are at schools. This is why the day is off for Israelis, because elections are held at schools and if schools are closed then the day needs to be off for the parents as well. So families are out at the beach and at the malls and at the polls.
All morning I stood at the poll. I had left my information with volunteers after I heard Benny Gantz give a talk to the Anglo-speaking Israelis at the Dan hotel and they called me for help at the polls. In Israel, it is very easy to see most prime minister hopefuls, all except for King Bibi. I saw Lapid, I saw Gantz, but Bibi hid from the English-speaking Israelis, because he knows we’re not his crowd. His crowd is the uneducated; the older Russians who fear anything socialist; and the religious. The less they think, the more they fear, the more they like him. The more they are used to him, the more they fear change. This has worked for him for 20 years, and regardless of the bombs and stabbings and ramming that he has done little about, regardless of rising prices and lowering quality of health and school systems, the poor keep electing him, because he can point the finger better than anyone. Hamas shoots, he pays them off to be quiet, and then we vote. We know the drill and yet we vote for him. Well, not all of us, it’s a parliamentary multiparty system so he gets 25-30% of the vote, and as long as his Likud party is the largest grouping, he gets to create his coalition. So we are represented by the largest minority, and the whole world thinks he represents us.
This is why I rush to this poll. This is what I think of as I park. I think of all the work I did covering the entrance to the polling station, of all the kids I gave stickers too, the social media with Chinese and American tourists, the puppies with the Pei Hei ballots I posted to Instagram. I did too much, I can’t fail now.
I get a text from Howard at the station where we are supposed to be checking the veracity of the vote:
“They won’t let me watch the vote, they need some paper.” The paper is in a small cardboard table with graphic of the Blue and White party. Even though it was there when we arrived, someone dismantled it and the paper is gone. I don’t trust the stereotypical arsim at the polling place. They are just the type to vote Bibi. They are uneducated, tough, small-minded, hardworking. They are the backbone of Israel, here from Morocco, religious, love Israel, they don’t leave Israel like the educated, even if they have ability to. They serve in the armed forces, in the toughest combat forces, they lay down their lives. They don’t care about me and my educated friends and what we think is best for the country; they feel that they will be fine regardless of what Bibi does. They will be happy to dump our votes just to one-up us for one day.
I realize this, and so I have to vote. If it’s the last thing I do. I’m there, I’m two minutes early. My sweat is dripping of my face as I look at the hall with twenty other Israelis my age waiting to cast their vote. I sign a paper saying I couldn’t vote at my poll. I couldn’t, I didn’t think I’d make it there. I take care to write the information carefully. I do my best to do everything perfect. I can’t screw up again.
This is the re-do election because Bibi couldn’t form a coalition the last time around, so he disbanded the Knesset, took ownership of four more ministries and called for elections. No one understands how this country is even running. No one seems to be running it. His son Yair is on Twitter causing international fiascos, Bibi and his wife are under police investigations.
The last time I voted with my wife I screwed up and my vote didn’t count. When we were voting, people ahead of me were taking so long inside the booth that I thought there was something complicated. But in the booth there is just a placard of the 30+ parties: the conservative, the liberal, the Arab, the religious, the green parties and the worker parties and every type of combination thereof. And a wooden box with compartments for the papers with the letters of the parties. All I have to do is take one, put it into the envelope and vote. Only those parties that receive over a minimum percentage of the total vote get into 120-member Knesset.
Next to the box, I saw a pen, it was meant for write-in candidate, I thought it was that you could write a message on your ballot. I wrote “Am Israeli Chai”: People of Israel Live. It was corny and stupid, but I was proud of this fact that Jews are voting in their own country and that I am one of those Jews voting for the leadership of a Jewish nation. But when I was asked by my wife what I was doing so long, and I told her, the old man working at the poll told me that I just invalidated my own vote.
That’s was why I had to make it perfect this time. I had to make it count. I was given another chance and I wouldn’t waste it. I had planned to pick a coalition member that was weak that could be strengthened by my vote and be part of coalition, but there was no time. I chose Gantz and voted. I got a quick selfie, dropped my envelope, and left the to meet with my friends at Teder, where if you showed them a picture of yourself voting, you got a free beer. On the way out, the security officer opened the door for me, on the other side was an older Mizrahi man with his olive skinned 10-year old son. “I’m sorry gever, the poll is closed.” I felt for the man, he just failed in his son’s eyes. I had a nasty thought: “I bet he would have voted Bibi.”
As I walked to Teder, I thought of this crazy country, how easy it is vote here compared to the States: just a card into an envelope and that’s it: no giant booklets to read, no dozens of comptrollers and issues and judges to vote on. It’s simple, the politicians and bureaucrats do their job, you just choose the bureacrat. It creates a simple system for people to vote and so they vote. The public transport is free, the day is off, it and as a result, 70% of the country votes.
But not only is it easy, somehow the elections are also less contentious. There aren’t endless campaigns, no debates, no 24-7 coverage. I was worried about our votes being dumped, as that does happen sometimes, but there was a worker at that poll station, and he helped me set up, even though he said he was voting for Bibi. He and I talked about Trump and about what is good and bad for Israel. He told me that Likud pays volunteers like me a 1000 shekels a day. “Why do you work for free? Are you stupid?” Maybe I am. I work for free shirts and a sandwich. Three sandwiches actually, I gave him one of mine, the other extra one to my coworker.
I discussed politics with my fellow Blue and White volunteer, Gary from Sydney, who knows many of the members of Parliament in Australia and here, and yet he was on the street with me, handing out stickers. He used to be Likud, but felt there was a bit too much corruption in the Bibi court. I talked to a United Democracy party volunteer who set up his table next to mine. He’s French and lived in Israel in the seventies. His wife didn’t like it, they divorced, he moved back. He now runs a meetup for Tarot cards in Florentin. As we talked to voters, he and I and the poll worker didn’t feel like we were rivals. We were fellow citizens, doing best to continue this democratic nation.
And so I arrived at the bar, got my free beer and sat with the fellow American wrestlers, who made the same crazy decision, to say good bye to the place where they were born and move to a country where they don’t know the culture or the language, but where they are for the first time a majority, for the first time they don’t have to explain themselves, where they define they future and no one can tell them how to define themselves. That’s what having a nation means to me, this is why I risked my life to vote. Because if you don’t vote, someone makes decisions for you, and we don’t have to do that anymore.
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Litvin, a former San Diego resident, is a freelance writer based in Tel Aviv.