Blog/September 2019/Sep 20th
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| September 20th | Comments or questions? Click here! |
Lots to tell, this week. Hold on!
Things started off slowly enough, but then Election Day came. We had resolved to vote and then continue northward to visit family and friends. And so we did.
Voting was quick and unremarkable, but for the unusual result that the party I voted for this time actually did make it across the finish line. More on that, later.
We wended our way up north, taking the scenic “Jordan Valley road”. There was almost no traffic, and the weather was pleasant. Mom got to see Jordan (the country) and noted that it looks pretty much like Israel, unsurprisingly. As we journeyed farther north, I pointed out the landscape’s transition from brown to green. Finally, we made it to the city of Ṣefath (aka “Safed”, “Tsefas”, and others).
I remembered the moment we entered the city how much I dislike it. But that’s not the point…
We met my nephew Chaim and his wife Ariele at a coffee-shop, where we had a “brunch” of sorts and talked. The view from our table was beautiful — the only good thing I can recall about the city. After we finished, we repaired to their (new, to them) apartment where we hung out for a while and ate some of Ariele’s fine cookies.
Having spent several hours with them, we made our way westward to the tiny burg of Nahariya, where friends of ours had relocated this past year. Back in the early ‘80s I had lived in the area, and Nahariya was indeed a “tiny burg”, with only a few thousand residents. Now it’s larger than Ma’ale Adummim, and bustling. I was quite impressed by how much it had grown while I wasn’t looking. Anyway, we spent another several hours with our friends before Esther’s obligatory dipping-of-the-toes in the Med and heading south again.
We stopped on the way in Ra’anana (which seems like a small town but is half again as large as M”A), and had dinner before wending our way south-east to our desert paradise of M”A.
It was a very long day, but we enjoyed it.
Of course, it was Election Day: the polls were open from 7 until 22 (that’s 10pm for you USAns), and the prognosticators kept flapping their yaps the whole time. By the next morning most of the votes had been tallied, with the result that nobody had won a decisive victory. Which is where things stand now. The current (as of this writing) results seem to be that B&W gets 33/120, Likud 31, Joint List 13, Shas 9, Yisrael Beytenu 8, UTJ 8, Yamina (for whom I voted) 7, Labor-Gesher 6, Democratic Union 5. That makes Blue and White the biggest party, and in all likelihood President Rivlin will tap them to try to form a coalition government.
Yesterday, Netanyahu asked Gantz (of B&W) to enter discussions with him about forming a “unity government”, but Gantz rebuffed him (as of yesterday afternoon). They could have formed a ruling coalition without needing any other parties, but the respective leaders despise each other. So we get to suffer.
The real result of the election (as of the one in April) is that Israelis prefer large centrist parties, and the fringes are just that. Neither the Left nor the Right can claim any kind of mandate. And since B&W’s policies are not very different from Likud’s, the whiners around the world will soon discover that Netanyahu was not the problem they kept saying he was. They’ll have to admit that their problem is with Israelis and more specifically Jews, rather than the Israeli government; and that Israel is not an “apartheid” state at all.
Other than politics? Well, Esther was working like a fiend all week (except for Tuesday, as noted). I was also fiendishly working on customer support and projects. In cooperation with one of my users (who reported the bug), I fixed a long-standing but previously unreported bug in 8th’s network handling routines on Windows.
The weather has been nice, but the past two days were quite warm. Sadly, the warmish weather will continue for the next week, though it won’t be as warm as it was two weeks ago.
We’re back to the three of us for shabbat. We look forward to:
homemade ḥalla,
spicy chicken wings,
homely meatloaf,
sweet-potato fries,
various and sundry salatim,
raḥat lokum,
baklava,
and ice cream.
Until next time,
shabbat shalom!
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