Moshe Kahlon. At an unclear timing, between the sacks of potatoes and the poverty report and between the convicted Olmert and the disappointed Kerry, he popped up - almost from the ashes - and was praised. What's the connection now? What's the point today?
Only the sound of fanfare from the Mount of Olives and a white donkey climbing the slopes of Kiryat HaMalaka were missing when he pulled his political baggage from the safe and announced his return to politics. "I just don't know in what framework yet," said the former Likud Minister of Communications and Welfare. And when asked if he would return to his old party, he replied: "I have great difficulty returning to today's Likud.".
If we are convinced that the Messiah has come early, and in extending the gospel to the groaning people - the ones who now lack only a financial redeemer - then Kahlon has made a mistake.
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In his statement against the movement in which he grew up, the beginnings of a politician's path emerged and were reflected. And he had not been a politician until now, which easily made the people love him forever. He was considered a social hero, a symbol of clean hands, the ultimate proof that even a Mizrahi could do it – and he gathered around him all the strata of the people. He did not strive or pretend, and perhaps that is why he was so embraced.
As soon as he came out presumptuously against the Home faction, against Mom's kitchen - the public began to smell a tactical move, and felt the nerves in his legs refusing to rest under the Harvard desk. He immediately lost the personal element, the personality, the myth that surrounded him. If he had come out against Netanyahu, fine. But against the Likud? Here he also lost his friends.
I will not seek to determine whether Kahlon's move is doomed to failure or not. However, it seems that, similar to the political zigzags of others, Kahlon does not seek to change anything more substantial. His declaration presumes a change of government. Not a local change, not a "revolution," but a change in the structure of government itself.
Therefore, I wonder about the goal he set for himself, and perhaps about the meaning of the move itself. It seems that Kahlon's central fiction - the social story - will collapse. This is so long as his attitude towards his new political path is seen as a struggle for hegemony.
The negotiating table. Like the other round tables, it replaced the old town square, and to the same extent it serves as an imagined space of equality of power and access to ideas. Gazes intersect above it, sharpening the illusion of dialogue and reciprocity.
But, equally, it can also create a sinking into it, and the production of ongoing pain that gives rise to victimhood, resentment, and distrust.
So this is the circular, circular, ongoing situation that repeatedly implies that it has no interest in settling down and entering a square. There are no corners, no summaries. There is also no cooperative future. The existence of the talks is only possible under disguised, but effective, manipulations and violence: the Palestinians who are likely to blow everything up at any moment and go on a jihad, and the Americans who are aiming the boycotts and sanctions at our temple.
The political negotiation table shatters the imagination of the 'future of good relations', while at the same time revealing the processes of selection and interpretation that the representatives apply to reality in order to create the new, imaginary story.
For both Kerry and Kahlon, failure seems to be an effective element in the political-state space.
So what did we get this week?The Israeli people love politicians when they retire, they fight for newspaper companies when they close, and they are enthusiastic supporters of shaky deals. As long as there is no hero and no profit, there is love. Maybe we should leave it that way?
