Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer
Rabbi Prof. Dov FischerCourtesy
It is amazing, but polls show that possibly 25-30 percent of all eligible Israeli Jewish voters will sit on their couches or spend the day at the beach or movies without voting on election day, November 1. I cannot grasp the lack of caring. What is wrong with those people?

So much is at stake.

Will a Yair Lapid be empowered to try negotiating away part of Judea and Samaria by pursuing his nonsensical United Nations-endorsed “two state solution,” thus creating a permanent third battle front — this one on Israel’s east — to join with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in South Lebanon?

Will Israeli maritime waters continue to be handed over to Arabs at war with Israel, with not even an intimation of permanent peace or recognized borders (as though such intimations would not be broken anyway, as with the “Oslo Accords”)?

Will the Jewish character of Israel be changed? Will quiet Shabbatot be disrupted by frequent public transportation on Shabbat?

Will the sanctity of the Kotel be permanently desecrated by the normalizing of unJewish, unJudaic, G-dless Reform worship practices at The Wall?

Will the very definition of Jewish status be reversed from the uniform standard set thousands of years ago to Reform’s Hitler-like standard that defines a Jew not by maternity nor halakhic conversion but by “bloodline,” even when only a paternal bloodline dating back a generation and more?

Will the curse of political correctness that has despoiled America, its culture, its societal values be permitted to gain a foothold in Israel?

In America, a baker who refuses to bake a wedding cake to celebrate a homosexual or lesbian “wedding” can be driven into bankruptcy by state “civil rights” agencies. They can do the same to florists, photographers, and others who respectfully refuse to devote their artistic skills to enhance a forbidden union. Is that where Israel will go? Don’t think “It Can’t Happen Here.” Whatever perversion gains frequency in America threatens to reach Israel eventually and often does. Gay Pride parades are but one salient example. Lesbian “weddings” via the internet are another.

And what of the courts and judges? Will Israel continue to be dominated by unelected left-wing judges who twist the law like a pretzel to subvert the democratically expressed will of the public as reflected by their elected Knesset representatives, with the public being forced to watch terrorists freed, public funds allocated to heterodox theologies that Israelis themselves uniformly reject, like America’s Reform Judaism and Conservative Judaism?

Polls are not an election. And even the best polls come with a science-based mathematically derived margin of error of 3-4 percent, which really can mean 6-8 percent. Inasmuch as two months of polling consistently has shown that the right-wing / religious bloc will emerge with somewhere between 59 and 62 seats in the forthcoming election, all it takes is an error of one percent to distinguish between yet another deadlock and a governing coalition. The difference depends on turnout, not on Ayelet Shaked, not on “right wing” Gideon Sa’ar, and not on “right wing” Avigdor Liberman.

Rightly or wrongly, I am among those who believe Shaked is irrelevant because her voters will not vote for Likud or Religious Zionism anyway; they ridiculously plan to vote for her implausible under-water campaign because they stubbornly refuse to vote for Netanyahu or Smotrich or Ben-Gvir, “no matter what.” Thus, as many of them would skip the election altogether or vote for Gantz if she drops out.

For centuries Jews were denied the right to vote. In Israel today the power to decide Jewish fate and destiny lies primarily in Jewish hands, dependent not only on who votes but equally on who does not vote. No vote is “only one vote,” but reflective of a mindset that defines a milieu. It is important not only to “talk up” voting for Religious Zionism, Likud, Shas, and United Torah Judaism but especially to talk up voting itself. The cost of not voting can be a sixth election and a seventh and an eighth and a thirtieth and a fiftieth. It can cost land. It can cost safety and security in the face of rising challenges of resurgent domestic Arab Muslim terror. It has economic consequences, health consequences, national security consequences. Perhaps most importantly, it has cultural and religious consequences for the very character of a Jewish country.

The candidates are not perfect; they never are. But how many families would perhaps have been spared the deaths of thousands of dearly loved ones if Menachem Begin, rather than Golda Meir, had been the elected prime minister in 1973? Would cities in the Galilee and even Haifa and Tel Aviv now be within missile range of Hezbollah if Ehud Barak had not been elected prime minister and thus empowered to cede South Lebanon unilaterally? Would nearly 200 Jewish boys have been killed during the 2006 Lebanon War if Ehud Olmert had not been the elected prime minister?

In the March 23, 2022 election only 67.44 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. In the March 2, 2020 election only 71.52 percent. In the September 17, 2019 — only 69.83 percent. In April 9, 2019 — only 68.46. Notice a pattern?

The pattern is mind-boggling: some 30 percent of eligible Israeli voters skip voting election after election. And then, after a deadlock emerges, they kvetch.

So if you have decided that you will vote this time for UTJ, Shas, Likud, or Religious Zionism, canvass the neighborhood not to persuade people how to vote, but to make sure they do vote and do not just prepare to belly-ache the next morning.

Drive them to the polls.Make sure your neighbors and family have voted.Help seniors to vote.

Let Arabs and Tel Aviv’s y’fei nefesh (quasi-intellectual Leftist “beautiful people”) enjoy the beaches and couches this election day. Only then — finally — will a right-wing religious government be set in place for a few years to continue populating Judea and Samaria, clamping down on Arab Muslim terror, correcting the deviated justice system that Gideon Sa’ar has aided and abetted, and standing strong against American influence and defying the worst of all American pressures: the never-ending unenforceable and cynical American “guarantees” to stand by Israel if only she concedes to one more foolish American demand, and then another.

The only American guarantee that is guaranteed is that America will not stand by her guarantees to Israel, whenever the chips are down in Israel or in America. It has taken Bibi a professional lifetime to figure this out, but he has been around long enough to experience first-hand how one American president’s promises to him proved unreliable when a new president emerged.

Yair Lapid not only is beyond his pay grade but is a babe in the woods, and the Lebanon maritime agreement demonstrates that Israelis have no time to waste while Lapid spends a decade learning that American “guarantees” are meaningless.

In the end, it all will come down to the 25-30 percent who will not vote - or maybe, just maybe, let us pray they will.

Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer is Senior Contributing Editor at The American Spectator, Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values, was adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools for nearly twenty years, and is Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California. He likewise has held leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations including Zionist Organization of America, Rabbinical Council of America, and regional boards of the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. His writings have appeared in Newsweek, National Review, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, Federalist, Jerusalem Post, Israel Hayom, and other major Jewish and Israeli Hebrew media. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com. To attend any or all of Rav Fischer’s weekly 60-minute live Zoom classes on the Weekly Torah Portion, the Biblical Prophets, the Mishnah, Rambam Mishneh Torah, or Advanced Judaic Texts and Topics,send an email to: [email protected]

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