Espouse the vacuous, the hollow slogan; appropriate the show, the gestures. Lose the content, the vision and the values. Do not let a position or an opinion stand in your way, pick-pocket the opinions of others before they take your idea first. Conduct public opinion polls and tell the masses what they want to hear. Do nothing, because in any case it is unnecessary.
This is the advice that Haaretz editor in chief Aluf Benn gave this week ("Yair, watch your back," May 20 [2]) to politicians in Israel.
This advice is not new in the political sphere; I have heard it in the past from strategists, advisers and commentators who market the politics of nothing as a victory formula and political survival as sophistication.
The situation in which Israel now finds itself and the kinds of decisions it needs for its future require a leadership that will take dramatic steps to save it from societal, political and moral decline.
We cannot allow ourselves to have a leadership that is dragged along after public opinion; that is the historical lesson of the Jewish people. After all, the people saw the fleshpots of Egypt as preferable to the journey to the Land of Israel. They would have stayed in the desert with the golden calf and not accepted the moral value system of the Ten Commandments. The Zionist movement would not have been established if not for a leadership that worked to awaken the people from dangerous lethargy.
For years we sought to educate a generation about the importance of leadership and of not being led passively by the voices of the masses. We taught that in the Bible, King Saul lost his realm because he was pulled along by the people, we quoted David Ben-Gurion who said that he does not know what the people want, what is important is what the people need, and that that is what he would fight for. Parents explained to their children how not to knuckle under to group pressure; the rhetorical question was: "And if they told you to jump off the roof, would you do it?"
The answer, clear to any child, has turned upside-down. The new message is: Dance to the tune of the opinion polls, in any case it will do you no harm; on the contrary, you will remain in power, even if everyone else gets hurt.
This is the message of nothingness. Why lead, if one can be led? Why risk controversial decisions if one can chose not to decide at all? It is also the death knell of ideology - of all places in a newspaper that seeks to promote a worldview.
We can also stop doing the math of political blocs in the Knesset. What makes someone part of an ideological bloc if that person has no ideology except to be elected and join any government, whatever its path? What makes someone part of an ideological bloc, if unity has become an empty word and no longer exists around a goal or shared vision?
On second thought, if the whole thing, as the article states, is about being like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the purpose of replacing him, why replace him? We do not need opinion polls either. We will all make do with the ruminations of Big Brother and the reality shows, to the glory of the State of Israel.
Ze'ev Jabotinsky described leadership that is swept along wonderfully well: "Our children will be astonished when some day they read the real biographies of those personal leaders who are so numerous now in all countries. They will be astonished when they discover that many of them, and quite often, were no more than soft cotton rags in the hands of their coincidental surroundings."
Praising political skill as an alternative to a path is costing us dearly. Political wheeling and dealing cannot replace the wisdom of statecraft, and the ability to survive personally is not a recipe for national security.
Now more than ever, Israel needs the wisest leadership to initiate a diplomatic agreement, to extricate Israel from isolation, to set egalitarian principles without political and sectoral considerations. Such leadership must reject the empty advice of slogans and image and lead with a message of vision and content.
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