If only Israeli politicians would look at each other - literally

• Author: DAVID JABLINOWITZ
• Published date: 06 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The holy month of Tishrei wasn't even over when the Israeli parliament launched a new season of deliberations on Monday, but it was as though Yom Kippur was just a very distant memory.

The problem is not our differing ideologies. It is our inability to listen to, and look at, the other person who has those differing points of view.

cnxps.cmd.push(function () { cnxps({ playerId: '36af7c51-0caf-4741-9824-2c941fc6c17b' }).render('4c4d856e0e6f4e3d808bbc1715e132f6'); });

>

In the past, I was a Knesset correspondent who sat and watched deliberations in person in the parliamentary chamber. This past Monday, I was only watching on my computer, but what I saw was Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid repeatedly looking down as opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu addressed them and the other MKs. They were reading, perhaps cracking snide comments at the head of the government table directly across from the speaker's podium. They couldn't be bothered. It was as though they were avoiding the teacher in an elementary school classroom who they refused to take seriously.

Their government is supposed to be a government that promotes inclusiveness, but Bennett and Lapid seemed to have great difficulty just looking at their political opponent.

Not that Netanyahu is one to preach. I can recall several occasions when he was prime minister, when he would be reading even as he was being addressed in the Knesset chamber. Once when a parliamentary opponent who was speaking chided Netanyahu for ignoring him, the prime minister looked up, removed his reading glasses, and recited back to the political opponent perhaps even verbatim what he had just said.

It was the height of smugness, as though he was saying, "I don't need to make any effort to pay attention to you." It was downright arrogant.

And yes, many of Netanyahu's parliamentary allies, Likud party or otherwise, barely even let Bennett get a word out when he spoke in the Knesset on the day that his new government received parliamentary support and was inaugurated in June. The Likud display of childish heckling this Monday at the winter opening when Bennett spoke was perhaps only bad, compared to the worse mockery of the disruption in June.

Through the years, there have been such verbal clashes as the Likud's Yitzhak Shamir against Labor's Shimon Peres. Sometimes, you felt that these were people who were giving their heart and soul. Other times, the talk sank to the sewer. And sometimes both.

...