Election Day is generally a happy one, a celebration of democracy. The current Election Day is also a celebration – a celebration of the end of a dirty, shallow, and incitement-heavy campaign.
The 2019 do-over election was born in sin, the result of public opinion being hijacked and personal score-settling, and continued to represent everything we loathe – spreading hatred and stirring up fights and resentments that are generations removed from our day-to-day reality. Above all, the attitude toward the haredi sector, possibly the most persecuted and slandered minority in Israel, stood out.
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It's almost astonishing to see that while the laws of political correctness are taking hold everywhere, they skipped the haredi sector. The era of the haredim condescending to secular Israelis is over, happily; conversion therapy for LGBTQ individuals are nothing more than grounds for controversy; "Ethiopians" are now referred to as "Israelis of Ethiopian descent."
But what about the haredim? Everything goes when it comes to them. Politically correct? Don't make us laugh.
When it comes to the haredim, Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Lieberman can lie and zigzag, and change his position, and then lie again. He can wake up one morning and ignore years of stealing horses with his haredi friends and everyone will forgive him because he's now promising to lock them out.
When it comes to the haredim, Blue and White leader Benny Gantz can spend a minute visiting Bnei Brek and then decide to switch strategies and announce that a million citizens with rights will be left out.
It's doubtful there is another subject where the gap between the reality and the campaign is as big as the matter of religion and state. A person who arrived from abroad could think that on Shabbat, Israel is under siege, women are outcasts, and members of the LGBTQ community are executed, when actually, leisure spots, stores, and even shopping centers are open on Shabbat. Women are on their way to completing a justified change, and a quarter-million people attended the last Gay Pride march.
I finished my last Election Day column with a prayer for the nation, but this one should end with a moving prayer by Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk: "Place in our hearts that each one of us should see the merits of his friend and not their faults. And everyone should talk with their friend in the straight manner you desire, and one should not hate the other, God forbid."
