One of the fruitful ideas voiced during the discussion of the election results called for separating the analysis of the voting pattern of the various strata of the Israeli public from the sectarian divide, and viewing it through the level of education and income of the voters.
This observation reveals that the less educated and poorer the voters, regardless of their origin, the greater their tendency to vote for the right. It seems that this tendency can be explained by the fact that Jewishness is an integral and positive part of the identity of the popular classes.
The Zionist movement never intended to establish a Jewish state.
Herzl, an assimilated Austrian Jew, did not desire the resurgence of the Jewish people in his country, but rather sought an effective solution to the anti-Semitism of his time. Even Micha Josef Berdichevsky, the Jewish nationalist and one of the most influential thinkers of early Zionism, who repudiated Herzl's idea of a state for all citizens and advocated a Jewish nation-state, thought that the Jewish people should give up their cultural uniqueness and strive to be a people like all the peoples who were reformed in his eyes—that is, a European nation that would base its national ethos on the German ethos.
In light of the disappointment of the post-Enlightenment Jewish generation in the hope that emancipation and European enlightenment would transform Jews, as individuals, into ordinary European citizens, the idea of the Judeo-European nation that Zionism offered as an alternative path to Jewish assimilation into Christian Europe sounded quite appealing.
For why shouldn't Europe embrace a Jewish state that is governed far from the continent, and populated by a Judeo-European nation? Especially since this state promises to carry the flag of Europe in the Holy Land - a space from which it was expelled in the late Middle Ages - and to restore spirit to it.
Indeed, the Zionist idea of a Judeo-European state as an alternative path to Jewish assimilation into Christian Europe was a great success.
The fact is, today's Israel is the only non-European country in a series of important European organizations, the best known of which, even if not the most important, are the Eurovision Song Contest and the European Basketball Champions Cup.
Israel's location in the Middle East is perceived, in the context of European discourse, as part of a colonial paradigm in which the geographical living space is nothing more than a setting.
Moreover, this discourse seems to relate to Israel in the same way that it relates to neo-European nations like Australia or South Africa, and more intimately than it relates to South American countries.
The Erasure of a Nation
But for the purpose of this unequivocal assimilation of Zionism into Christian Europe, there was a need to erase the Jewishness of the nation, to separate the Jews from Judaism, to turn the Israeli Jews into Europeans, as similar as possible to the population of Christian Europe.
Therefore, from its inception, Zionism, under the control of left-wing parties, was careful to erase all Jewish attributes of the Judeo-European nation created in Israel, and to enslave them to European attributes.
Among these are: secularism, a European political system, socialist ideology, English rock, permissiveness, accelerated technological development, and high-tech.
So how did we get from here to a situation where it is precisely the need to confirm Jewish identity that determines the outcome of the elections?
The Judeo-European nation that conceived Zionism needed citizens. Based on the true purpose of the Zionist movement - assimilation into the European League of Nations - it was difficult to motivate the masses of the House of Israel to come.
Therefore, the Zionist movement presented itself as a Jewish movement, and so it marketed the Jewish state to world Jewry. But when the Jewish immigrants arrived on its shores, full of excitement and hope for the fulfillment of the vision of the prophets and the establishment of a Third Temple, they were slapped in the face by the reality of the negation of Judaism.
They were required to give up their Jewish attributes. It seems that to this day this is the demand of the Zionist left from the people living in Zion, most of whom are descendants of those immigrants who came here specifically to celebrate their Jewishness.
This holy Zionist lie (holy because there was seemingly no choice) still arises today from the tension between the way Israel markets itself to world Jewry, as a Jewish state, and the way it is actually run by the Zionist elites.
These elites - although they have formally lost power, they still set the tone in the fields of culture, the economy, and education - market Israel as a European state, which unhappily makes do with a tiny but necessary measure of Jewish culture.
The Zionist elite's contempt for everything that smells Jewish - which is also expressed in the disconnect between Hebrew culture and Jewish culture - is what distances the people from them and is what distanced the people from the Zionist camp, which represents them.
Because it was Menachem Begin who solemnly declared in the squares during the 1977 elections, "We are all Jews," at the same time that Yitzhak Ben-Aharon accepted that the people had to be replaced, and it was Professor Benzion Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu's father, a researcher of Jewish history, who dedicated his life specifically to studying the history of the Jews of Spain.
It seems that this field of activity, which seemingly indicates the inclination of the heart, was no less important to his son and the movement he heads than the warnings about the influx of Arabs to the polls in the last election campaign.
• Rami Kimchi is a Doctor of Communication who teaches at the School of Communication at Ariel University.
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