Today’s Boston Globe has a local story about a Massachusetts resident running for Israel’s Knesset with a new party he formed with a couple of friends:
Yossef Israel Abramowitz, a longtime activist from Newton who first made a name for himself as a student activist at Boston University in the 1980s, is running for the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.Abramowitz, 41, who holds American and Israeli citizenship, will appear in the number-three slot on the slate of a new party called Atid Ehad (One Future) in the Israeli election Tuesday. Though some specialists and polls suggest that his party is unlikely to win, he says he has a pretty good shot. ”If I win, we’ll move to Israel,” Abramowitz said yesterday from New York. ”And you know what, I think we could win.”
The strange tale of his candidacy began in October, when Abramowitz introduced two of his Israeli friends, one an Ethiopian-born activist, the other a teacher. In the vacuum created by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke, the two decided to create a party addressing their two main concerns: education and immigration.
Israel has plenty of parties running and most won’t win any seats. But education and immigration are important issues. One of them is something the Globe article ignores, of course: the ability of an American to run for election in Israel and move there at will when Palestinians who were born there are not allowed to return at all. Not that kind of article, I guess.
The Globe does say this:
By appealing to the concerns of the approximately 110,000 Ethiopians, as well as parents frustrated by the disintegrating school system, Abramowitz said the math could work. The party is avoiding a stance on national security, the most divisive issue in the Israeli political scene.
”We’re the feel-good vote of the election,” he said. ”We’re not politicians, we don’t have a trail of corruption, and we’re optimistic.”
Seems to me the “feel-good vote” is more likely to go to the Green Leaf Party, which aims to legalize marijuana. In any case, both parties could help focus Israeli attention on things that actually matter in people’s daily lives rather than on how best to dominate Palestinians. Moving out of poverty, getting an education, and getting stoned are a lot more appealing than turning Israel into a fortress, an expensive and ultimately doomed project that saps money from social services and other necessities.
Go Green!