The Ultimate Israeli Party
Every election, Israel’s parliamentary system encourages the creation of small political parties that never manage to garner enough votes to actually win Knesset seats.
This year, the process has resulted in a party so sublime in its improbable Israeliness that it can never be equaled.
JTA reports:
Perhaps the most unusual alliance in this year’s election is between the Green Leaf Party, which has no seats in the Knesset, and the Pensioners’ Party, which has six. Renamed the Holocaust Survivors’ and Grown-Up Green Leaf Party, the party’s prime issues are legalizing marijuana and pensioners’ rights, especially… Read More those of Holocaust survivors. One of the party’s TV ads shows party head Gil Kopatch smoking a joint at the grave of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.
Here’s another election commercial:
Wooooow. Israeli society and politics will never cease to amaze me. Does this happen in other parliamentary countries too?
Speaking of elections ads, Meretz has an ad in the “In the beginning they came for the communists, then the gays…there was no one left for me?” vein. Check it here. Maybe someone out there will translate it fully.
The JTA article is incorrect. This new party includes candidates who broke away from the Green Leaf Party (Aleh Yarok) and the Pensioners Party (Gil), but is not a merger between the two; both of those parties are still running on their own in this election.
Translation of the Meretz ad:
Without loyalty, no citizenship
Without Judaism, no citizenship
Without Zionism, no citizenship
Without [army] service, no citizenship
Without Arabs
Without Druze
Without gays
Without the Supreme Court
Without leftists
Unless you pay attention
Lieberman will get you too
Lieberman must be stopped
Only a vote for the New Movement / Meretz
Is a net vote
For a coalition that will not sit
With Bibi and Lieberman
Don’t compromise. Vote.