Wednesday Morning

In 1918, a few months after General Allenby entered Jerusalem, the British military governor Ronald Storrs issued the rule that still requires the outer walls of the city’s buildings to be faced with stone. A lover of music, letters, and whatever struck him as beautiful, Storrs saw Jerusalem as a city built, quite literally, upon rock, and so he wanted every new building to wear that rock. The pale limestone granted his wish in slabs a few centimeters thick, while the reinforced concrete of the modern buildings remained on the inside, where the steel can rust for years without the stone changing color, which makes Jerusalem the best-dressed city in the Middle East and one of the hardest to inspect.

This October, our democracy presents a facade worthy of that rule, because the sixth election in seven years is also the first since 1988 to be held on the date set by law. On Tuesday, October 27th, we vote, and our ballots tell us as little about the state of the steel as the stone does, though they are just as indispensable. So I will set aside the party you favor for another day and ask you which Israel you want, whom that Israel protects, and whom it leaves out, questions that change the course of a political conversation that tends to dissolve into shouting before the second sentence.

Separating the person from the project lets you like a candidate while rejecting a proposal or two, or loathe a politician while conceding that he once got something right, an exercise in honesty that I manage with almost everyone and that collapses in the presence of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. With the disgust of a man reaching into a clogged drain, I have searched both men’s careers for a single salvageable act, and my hand has come back filthy and empty. No one needs to become a saint or a monster for us to judge what each candidate proposes, and I will not pretend that the choice makes no difference, because some projects come far closer to the country I want for everyone. None of them is exempt from vigilance once in power, least of all the one we like best, because it counts on our sympathy to work without witnesses.

The steel of a democracy is made of the rules that bind the winner, too, and the first of them says that nobody owns the country or the right to compete for it. We disagree with one another with an enthusiasm that deserves a stanza of its own in Hatikvah, and diverging from an opponent’s path is a sign of good health, something quite different from blocking his path altogether, a move the Central Elections Committee attempted last month.

The committee is made up almost entirely of representatives of the parties in the Knesset, which means the competitors themselves decide who may compete. On Wednesday, September 23rd, it granted the petitions of Likud and of Ben-Gvir and voted to bar Ra’am and the Joint List, the two main Arab-majority slates, in a country where Arab citizens make up one in five of us. On Thursday, it rejected, by nineteen votes to ten, the bids to bar Ben-Gvir’s own party, even though the Attorney General’s office had warned it that the list came close to the line of prohibited incitement to racism, though it stopped short of the evidentiary threshold set by the courts. On the Friday of the following week, nine Supreme Court justices unanimously returned both slates to the race, because the material presented against them fell short of the standard required to ban an entire list.

Turned against criticism, the same move nearly silenced Galei Tzahal, the army’s radio station, which was marking seventy-five years on the air, drew the third-largest audience in the country, and gave room to voices opposed to the government when Defense Minister Israel Katz decided to shut it down on the grounds that it was harming morale and the war effort. The ministers approved the closure unanimously at the end of last year, and the Supreme Court first froze the decision and later voided it, also unanimously, after concluding that the government had tried to punish the station for coverage it regarded as critical. Justice Yechiel Kasher called a government that behaves this way frankly undemocratic, Ben-Gvir responded that the Supreme Court was carrying out a coup against democracy, and I have yet to hear a sentence that swaps the puncher and the punched with such aplomb.

There remains the most intimate question we carry to the polls, the question of what the next government will do for us, and it falls short until it comes paired with another, about what that government will do for those whose lives are harder than ours, people for whom Tuesday’s result decides the safety of their families, their access to rights, and their very jobs. You may be heading into this week with no room for anything beyond surviving, paying the bills, and looking after your own, and I have no wish to add a duty to that list, only to extend an invitation to open the heavy window of the mamad for a moment and look at the street.

The stone that clothes Jerusalem was chosen in 1918 by the British military governor, and the country that stands behind it has been ours to choose since 1948, this Tuesday included, when we each decide which Israel we would rather wake up in. On Wednesday morning, the stone will be the same. The country does not have to be.