A few weeks into the election campaign, there seems to be one conclusion from the journalistic coverage: Political reporters in Israel buy their opinions at DIY stores. They are cheap, don't require in-depth research, and can be found by everyone.
But the fast and "cool" product doesn't always pass the test of reality. Thus, to their chagrin, political commentators were forced to store in the basement the claim that Benjamin Netanyahu's victory in 2015 was inevitable.
But what, there is more than one idea for self-assembly stores. In the previous elections, it was a union between the Likud and the Yisrael Beiteinu list, which most political writers praised as the glory of creation and the key to the right-wing coalition's overwhelming victory in the elections.
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One only has to go back to the texts that political reporters and commentators issued to remember that the predictions were for 40 seats for that list.
We must also remember all those voices in the political media that called on all the centrist parties to unite, because otherwise they will collapse.
What happened in the end is well known: the right-wing Joint List drove away some of the voters, both to Yesh Atid and to Jewish Home. Avigdor Lieberman came to this conclusion immediately after the last elections, and it seems that he has not been particularly impressed since then by arguments in favor of "unification.".
This time, in the 2015 elections, the story is the list of Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni, on the one hand, and Meretz on the other, with the latter being portrayed as a reluctant bride.
This union is necessary, it is claimed, so that Meretz will not pass the threshold - although no poll claims there is such a danger. It is also necessary that the "Zionist Camp" list absorb Meretz's votes, because that is what Tzipi Livni did for Meretz in 2009, and therefore it will happen this time as well, meaning that left-wing voters will give their votes to Yitzhak Herzog so that the latter can run to form a coalition with Yisrael Beiteinu, the Haredim, and even the Jewish Home.
If this sounds absurd, it's because it is. There were also those who knowingly lied and said that the president was assigning the task of forming a government to the largest faction - even though the law states that the task falls to the one presenting the largest bloc of support.
The commentators simply don't understand.
So what causes people who are supposed to understand something about politics to copy recycled, not really well-founded ideas from each other? Ultimately, it is a matter of an inability to understand the fundamental social shift that has occurred in Israeli society in recent years.
It is about the growth of social networks of salaried workers, with very fundamental fears and a growing awareness of exploitation, abusive employment, poor social services, and a lack of hope for rapid change.
These networks are leading some of the changes in social activity in Israel, and behind them are audiences that are active on a huge variety of issues - from community defenses, to workers' committees, to political organizations.
The culmination of that social movement was, of course, the social protest of 2011. It was a movement that came from below, with dozens, or even hundreds, of local "leaders," of speakers, of initiatives that came from the ground.
All of this is still simmering and existing beneath the surface, but in the eyes of the Israeli media, the significant fact is that the two "protest leaders" were elected to the Labor Party list. The Israeli media has not heard of all those hundreds of people who are still active and proactive, of all the organizations, committees, and even informal groups where meetings between people take place.
If we want to understand the direction Israeli politics will take in the coming years, and even in the upcoming elections, we need to understand what is happening in the places where that public operates, works, and lives, and how information and opinions are transmitted on these social networks.
The power of media spin exists, but among people and groups of the same social stratum it is quite limited.
What can reporters who have never opened a Central Bureau of Statistics report know about the way people live, work, and behave in this country? What can people who have not delved into data on the level of social services understand about the fears and aspirations of the population?
Anyone who doesn't understand employment trends, anyone who hasn't tried to delve into voting rates over time, is incapable of understanding what's really going on in the country's political structure. That's why the pretense of predicting the results of today's elections is simply arrogance and stupidity, as is the claim that on election day one list will absorb the votes of another party.
The problem is that for the political media in Israel, phenomena related to social shifts are not only incomprehensible to them, they are completely blind to their existence. Therefore, we are forced to receive copious and unnecessary portions of analyses on maneuvers, mergers or "deals" at the top. Self-assembly stores, apparently, do not yet sell quick-assembly social analyses.
