Are the pollsters mocking us? According the polls being touted by the media, the National Union-National Religious Party, NU-NRP is pretty marginal. The media publicizes "coalition talks" as if the elections were in the past, and Kadima got over forty seats.
But yesterday there was a news report that the results of the Hebrew University Mock Elections were exactly the opposite. The NU-NRP was the overwhelming winner, though for some strange reason the exact numbers are different in the articles from The Jerusalem Post and Arutz 7. What's interesting is that the Hebrew University is terribly left-wing, at least the professors are. Students on the "right" have to be careful, because sometimes their opinions aren't "accepted." Neither of the articles I found include the percentage of students who voted. These mock votes sometimes have a very low turn-out.
One thing for sure is that demographics are on our side. Simple numbers. The "right" and religious have larger families, with more of our children staying here in Israel. This key fact is what's behind a lot of Olmert's vicious hostility against us. One doesn't have to be a top psycho-analyst to figure it out.
Olmert's children are not following in the footsteps of his strong Zionist Revisionist family. They are very left-wing at best; not all even live in Israel.
Olmert, himself was raised as one of the "elite" of the Revisionist "princes." Among that crowd, whose parents were in the Etzel (Irgun) and Lechi (Stern Gang) were the Meridors, Uzi Landau, Tzachi Hanegbi, Limor Livnat, Benny Begin and Tzippi Livne. (Please correct me if I left anyone out.) The Netanyahu brothers were also part of that circle, though they spent much of their childhoods abroad, where their father was a university professor. Even though he wasn't considered a "prince" one must include Dr. Arye Eldad, whose father led the Lechi after the killing of Yair Stern. This puts a very different spin on a lot of today's politics.
An important point is that their parents were shunned by Israeli society. The Labor Party (Mapai) was the elite, and "Revisionists" had trouble getting work and worse. To back the prejudice, the Labor leaders kept bringing up the Alosoroff murder, which historians say wasn't even done by the Revisionists.
Their parents were arrested during the "Sezon", shot at on the Altalena, and in general it's easy to see why there are "chips" on some of their shoulders.
To understand today's Israeli politics, one must know the history. And someday, today's news will be history.
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