This is the prime minister Israelis miss – and who has been pushed to the margins? | Amit Segal
Begin leads confidently, Rabin serves as a mirror image of the opposition, and Ben-Gurion is pushed to the margins due to the statute of limitations. The map of longing.
If we were asked to carve the Israeli Mount Rushmore tomorrow morning, it is likely that the workers would not equip themselves with chisels and yellowing history books, but would arrive armed with the voting segments of the latest poll. The data from this table reveals a rather cruel truth about the nature of our national memory: Israelis do not really reminisce about the past with clean hands, they simply recruit the dead for active reserve duty in the tribal wars of the present.
Menachem Begin does indeed look out from the top of the mountain with 22% sympathy among the general public, but the deep political story is hidden in the sectoral cross-sections. Begin is the undisputed leader of the coalition (38%), the Likud (35%), and the religious public (41%). However, the most surprising and fascinating figure in the table is the level of longing for Begin specifically among Gadi Eisenkot's voters. This sympathy in the camp of the Chiefs of Staff does not grow in a vacuum; it testifies both to the distinct right-wing roots that still exist there, and to the use of the image of the statesman Begin as a nostalgic and effective tool for attacking the current Likud.
On the other side, Yitzhak Rabin (17%) functions exactly as the political mirror image. He is the patron saint of the opposition (35%), the secular (27%), and the Arab sector (29%). With Rabin, the checkmark in the poll is long since not just a longing for the man or a political process, but a burning yearning of an entire camp for the "old" Israel and the government it lost.
And where did the man who founded the state disappear to? David Ben-Gurion is scraping the bottom with only 6%. This crash is not happening because of historical errors, open political accounts, or crossing lines. The reason is much more prosaic and cruel: the time that has passed. The Israeli "statute of limitations" is working overtime. Millions of citizens were born or immigrated to the country decades after Ben-Gurion passed away. Without an active political base in the present to maintain the legacy, even the founder of the state is pushed to the margins.
