Here’s what Israeli democracy in action looks like:
On a rare day off from work, you head over to your assigned local polling station — perhaps with your children — and get in line. Polling Committee volunteers check your teudat zehut (ID card) against their own list and give you a blue envelope which your kids will insist on holding.
Leaving your ID card with the volunteers, you step behind a blue cardboard screen where you find a tray with neatly displayed slips of paper for each of the competing parties.
While the young ‘uns pick up, examine, and play with all the slips of paper they can reach, you select one representing the party of your choice and put it in the envelope. The screen gives you privacy to make your choice, until the kids inevitably ask why you are putting this slip instead of that slip into the envelope.
As you seal the envelope, you feel a sense of closure on weeks of campaign advertisements, SMS messages, jingles, water cooler debate, and heated discussions with anyone and everyone.
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Next, you step out from behind the blue partition and head over to The Blue Box. It’s time for the magic moment.
No flashbulbs pop as you let the children eagerly drop the envelope into The Blue Box. The volunteers witness it all with a smile, mark their list appropriately, and return your teudat zehut.
If the kids don’t split off to explore the building or look for a bathroom, you leave, passing neighbors, nudniks and news people on the way out.
Similar scenes take place in community centers and schools in Jewish, Arab, Druze, Christian, Circassian, Aramean, Ethiopian, Russian, Anglo and other neighborhoods throughout Israel. Men and women, young and old, secular and religious, sabras and olim — all social and economic stripes are casting ballots.
For now, at least, there’s no talk of winners, losers, king-makers, sea-changes, or same-old same-old. It’ll be hours till the results are known.
This blessed 24-hour respite from politics and punditry is your day.
You are the news maker. Your opinion counts.
Dramatic?
Not really. But that’s what Israeli democracy in action looks like.
Now, what to do with the kids for the next few hours?
