The Lease

I am being asked to sign a one-year lease on an apartment near the center of Tel Aviv, starting in a month. The landlord wanted it signed last Friday. She has been patient in the way that landlords are patient when there are four other people who would like the apartment, and I have been responding with the kind of answer that is not an answer, delivered in a Hebrew just broken enough to buy me another day.

I cannot vote tomorrow.

Both are versions of the same decision, which was to keep myself free to go.

I want to be precise about why I cannot vote, because it is not that Israel will not have me. The Law of Return has been sitting there the entire time, perfectly available, asking nothing of me beyond a morning at the Ministry of the Interior and a willingness to be counted. I could have been a citizen months ago, with a ballot and a polling station and a day off tomorrow that meant something. I sat in seminars all year with people who wanted this and could not have it, because the door is not open to everybody and it happens to be open to me. I told myself I was holding out on principle. In fairness to the principle, I have also been told what the queue is like.

So what I feel watching this election is not disenfranchisement. It is closer to having turned down a job and then resenting the person who got it.

I want to be clear that none of this is because I do not know what I think. I know exactly what I think this country needs. I know who I would vote for, and I have known for months, and if you sit next to me at dinner you will find this out within the hour. What I could not manage was the paperwork that would have made any of it count.

There is a complication here that I should probably disclose, which is that I come from generations of procrastinators and have never once made a decision when an adjacent delay was available. I own a watch that runs an hour fast from spring to autumn because I cannot be moved to change it, so it is correct for five months of the year and I have made my peace with the other seven. Asked to choose between the peanuts and the pretzels, I have requested time to think it over.

So I have spent a year acquiring opinions about a place and no standing to hold them anywhere it matters. Tomorrow several million people will settle a question I have very firm views about, and my contribution will be to have views about it.

Tonight everybody has somewhere to be in the morning. Ilana is driving to Jerusalem because that is where she is registered. Alma has been arguing all evening with Rena about who to vote for, in the manner of people who have had this argument before and will have it again. Somebody will bring up the exit polls at ten.

I will go to stay with my mother, who has flown in to vote, and then I will refresh the same three websites until I fall asleep, which is the civic participation available to me and which I intend to perform with great seriousness.

Nobody talked me into staying this long, and nobody could have. I am not here because the country is easy, and not because I think it is behaving well. I came to understand a place I had spent a year arguing about from a dorm room, and I found it worse than I expected in some ways and more mine than I expected in others. There is a beach fifteen minutes from my apartment and I have been swimming in it all summer while the news got steadily harder to read, and I have not worked out what that says about me either.

Tomorrow the country closes so that people can vote, and I will have the whole day and nothing to do with it.

The lease is on the table. The landlord wanted it last Friday. She will ask again today, the way she asked yesterday.

And I have not stopped arguing. I argue with the people at that table, who think I am naive, and I argue with the people I left behind in New York, who think I am something worse, and I do it in both directions with equal conviction and equal uselessness. The man who was relieved I cannot vote has been hearing from me ever since. What I have never done is the one thing that would have let any of it register.

Tomorrow I will not vote. By Thursday I will be arguing about the result. And in regards to the lease, all bets are off.