"Now imagine former Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat were still alive. On a scale of 1 to 10..."
Tel Aviv, May 20 - Political surveyors continued their crucial efforts today to confront members of the Israeli electorate with hypothetical questions about possible elections by posing scenarios that involve political figures reconfiguring themselves under different party names but offering no prospect substantive change.
Polling organizations, both with and independent of established political parties, sent out new surveys this week to gauge Israeli public sentiment regarding the possibility that figure A, whose soaring rhetoric has never led to concrete political or security achievement, might ally with Figure B, whose checkered performance on crucial security and separation-of-religion-and-state issues appeals to a different narrow slice of voters.
"Which party will likely get your vote if elections took place today?" the pollsters asked, followed by, "and if not the party you chose for the previous question, for which of the following would you vote?" and then presented the respondent with at least a dozen options of parties real and imagined, led by figures real and theoretical, featuring groups of candidates whose only common thread appears to be that they are not Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
"Please rate, on a scale of 0 to 10, how attractive to you a party boasting former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, celebrity Chef Asaf Granit, and the younger sibling of Yesh Atid chief Yair Lapid's second cousin's former babysitter would be?"
"Please rate from 0 to 10 how certain you are of that rating."
"Now imagine former Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat were still alive. On a scale of 1 to 10..."
Analysts observed that polling agencies appear unable to conceive of voters whose primary considerations in deciding whom and what to support involves policy more than personality. "It's telling that the most vocal political faction specifically opposes one person, regardless of the faction's myriad competing and mutually-exclusive constituent ideologies," noted Gil Lulim of the Hebrew University Statistics Department, in reference to the anti-Netanyahu voices.
"The surveys don't even ask about policy positions," he elaborated. "It's all what-if-narcissistic-personalities-x-y-and-z-formed-a-new-party. No wonder voter turnout has been falling for thirty years."
Lulim did acknowledge that polls sometimes ask questions about specific policy issues, such as how and whether to prosecute the current war against Hamas, but seldom, if ever, do such issues feature in electoral surveys. "It's almost as if the vast majority of career politicians in Israel don't actually have any specific political ideology or vision, and see a career in 'public service' as just another vehicle for self-promotion."
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