How did such a simple thing get so complicated? These elections were not about left and right. They did not present clear policy plans by Netanyahu or Herzog (unlike the elections held around the continuation of the Oslo Accords, for example). On the contrary, the political issue was blurred and suppressed. They were also not about reforms in the areas of religion and state. We had hardly heard about conversions and dayanim until this week, and the haredi-secular issue barely came up after a two-year coalition without the haredi parties. Even the socio-economic debate did not feature prominently. The Ethiopian protest, for example, came suddenly, out of nowhere. Not a word was said on the subject in the elections.
So what did we go to the polls about two months ago? Mainly about the question: Bibi — yes or no? We know the goods, and we were all asked if we were interested in more of it. Whether to let him continue to run the business. And the answer was — whether we like it or not — yes. Yes, with an exclamation point. 30 seats.
On the night of victory, after the many thanks to Sarah and Amir Benayoun's "hope," Netanyahu could have shut down this government in three or four phone calls. Decide whether he wanted a unity government and call Buji (even before he went to bed), or make a round of calls to Bennett, Kahlon, and Lieberman, and then immediately to the president. He could have watched this week's soccer game comfortably, as prime minister. Even uploaded a nice family photo to Facebook, from Balfour Street, with Yair and Avner.
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And what's amazing is that everyone Netanyahu has surrounded himself with and gotten into trouble with in recent weeks also worked under him in the past. Kahlon was in the Likud and went independent, Lieberman and Netanyahu have been together and separately for decades, and Bennett and Shaked, of course, ran his office. So more than just a dispute over files, there was psychological therapy here. Everyone dealt with complex relationships during the negotiations, with charged sediments from the past.
There was a sourness to all the signing ceremonies. From the body language, it was impossible to guess that a quarter of the Knesset was in the hands of the prime minister, after a personal vote of confidence, the most personal, in his favor (with all due respect to Oren Hazan).
It's not too late for Netanyahu to internalize the election results. To start governing. To govern. To accomplish goals. To do what he thinks is necessary and right in this term, in all areas. This is the public's choice. In the words of Yitzhak Rabin, it's "I will determine, I will decide, I will navigate." In more recent terms, Netanyahu needs to start flying on his own.
Last Monday, Har Hamenuchot, Jerusalem. Only about a hundred people came to Vladimir Selpak's funeral. According to the obituaries, hundreds of thousands should have been there. His friend Natan Sharansky, chairman of the agency, defined him simply: "The number one aliyah activist. An unsung hero. The central figure in the struggle to liberate the Jews of the Soviet Union.".
I called Sharansky after the funeral to ask if he wasn't exaggerating. After all, alongside the Prisoners of Zion we grew up with, no one in Israel had heard of Selpak, who died, anonymously, at the age of 87. Even "Google" barely heard of him.
""You have no idea how much we owe him," Sharansky said. "People don't know. It was a one-man enterprise. His and Masha's house in the center of Moscow was the center of our activity. Everyone knew where to go. Thousands of people passed through the small apartment, and each one represented dozens and hundreds more from the city he came from. His name, even if said between two strangers, was like a slogan. His signature on a document said it all. "Every morning at five his mother would make us a big pot of buckwheat stew. We always said she made too much, and always by three in the afternoon it would all be over because the house was filled around the clock with more and more immigration activists. He seemed to me then like Moses. A huge, strong man, with a long beard, who brings people to freedom. I remember once an old man came to the central synagogue in Moscow and said that he was from a remote village in the depths of Russia. They were completely cut off there and were forbidden to have any contact with Jews. He said that they told him to go to two authorities: either the president of Russia or Vladimir Selpak. He went to the president and was turned away at the entrance, and now he's come looking for Selpak. Of course, all the people of this village immigrated to Israel a long time ago.
""One day we received news of a Zionist prisoner who had been released. As the spokesman for our movement, I wanted to inform the press. We knew that all the phones in the apartment were being tapped by the KGB, so we went outside to a public phone. He always walked hand in hand with me, so that none of us would be arrested. It was a message to the KGB thugs who always walked around us on the street: We are together. They would arrest us from time to time for short periods. For example, when Nixon came to visit, they would immediately arrest 'troublemakers' like us, without a problem. "But this time I left the apartment, and suddenly the KGB men got into the elevator with me. Selpak told me: I'll run and meet you downstairs. But by the time he ran eight floors down, they had already thrown me into their car. I was arrested for nine years. Immediately afterwards, he was arrested too. He had no more patience, he hung slogans in favor of immigration and Israel on his balcony in the middle of Moscow, and then he and his wife were sent to Siberia for five years. We met 11 years later, when we were both released, in Washington. We organized a huge demonstration there in favor of immigration. It is safe to say that at least 250,000 immigrants, in those years, owe their arrival in the country to him.".
Now for a different kind of immigration. Right at the height of the Ethiopian immigrants' protests, I received the new book of essays by the late Uri Elitzur. "In our eyes, good absorption has always been the aspiration that immigrants become Israelis like us as quickly as possible. This aspiration was the biggest mistake in the absorption of immigration in the 1950s, and to this day we are paying the price for it," he wrote almost 30 years ago, in the face of the wave of immigration from Ethiopia. The book, entitled "In a Clear Mind," brings together dozens of articles by the veteran Zionist-religious writer. A large part of the texts were published in this supplement, and a large part of them still seem very topical.
Here is what Elitzur wrote later about the necessary approach for these immigrants: "Now we can be wiser and not repeat that mistake. There is no need for the Ethiopians to become complete Israelis. On the contrary, we need to become a little Ethiopian. The things we have to learn from them are perhaps more significant and important than the things they have to learn from us. It is important that they know that they are not obligated to change and throw away all the cultural baggage they bring with them. We must hope and work to ensure that the new immigrants will maintain their cultural values, their social and family structure, their humility, their ability to listen and be considerate, and that they will also teach us something from all of these things.".
Jewish status: ""The same action that Shabbat has on each individual, the Shabbat has on the nation as a whole" (Rabbi Kook, on the mitzvah of Shabbat that appears in this week's parsha, Parsha "On the Mountain")
• The column is published in Yedioth Ahronoth.'
