I did not expect to cry while watching Barack Obama’s election night speech. But I did. It was amazing to see a black man elected president only one generation after the civil rights movement. And it was inspiring to see how he succeeded in making individuals, who for their entire lives had believed themselves disenfranchised by much-fabled big business interests, feel empowered and hopeful as a result of having participated in the democratic process.
Sure I rolled my eyes at the giddy BBC World news anchors, whose live coverage of the election results could easily have been confused with a tent revival meeting (do I hear a hallelujah and a praise the Lord?); and of course I don’t really expect one man to fulfill the near-messianic expectations projected onto him. I also wish it were possible for an American politician to make a speech without mentioning his wife, his children and God, which always strikes me as inappropriate and falsely intimate. Still, I could not be unmoved by a man who so eloquently expressed the possibility of making things better.
November 4 is a significant date in Israel for another reason: it is the day that Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated while leaving a Tel Aviv peace rally, which was attended by hundreds of thousands of then-hopeful Israelis who believed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had been resolved.
Thirteen years later we find ourselves in a period of political stagnation and hopelessness that shows no sign of ending. So no wonder the Israeli media cheered for Obama: he represents a vision of hope that we claim we are too cynical to believe in, but long for nonetheless. Take a look at the following headlines:
Yedioth Aharonoth‘s headline is, “The Hope” (Hatikvah), which is also the name of Israel’s national anthem. Notice that the letters are in blue, like the Israeli flag.
The headline on Maariv, Israel’s second-largest mass-circulation daily, is: “He has a dream.”
And here’s Haaretz on election day, with a self-explanatory headline in English on the front page of Israel’s most prestigious Hebrew-language daily broadsheet.
Channel 10′s Raviv Druker and Ofer Shelach
Raviv Druker and Ofer Shelach put together a 12-minute piece on Obama’s victory for their Friday night news magazine show. It’s called “the dream that became reality,” and you can watch it here in streaming video. Druker introduces the piece by announcing in mock-amazement that he nearly had a car accident upon hearing that Shelach, supposedly a tough, seasoned reporter, had leaked a few tears while watching Obama’s election-night speech.
Meanwhile, 65 percent of Israelis who visited a site called If the World Could Vote (for the president of the United States) chose Obama; and on a similar site called The World For, 82 percent of Israelis clicked on Obama.
Amongst Jewish Americans 78 percent, including New York Times columnist Frank Rich, voted for Obama.
And yet, the international media come to the conclusion that, as the IHT put it, “if Israel were on a US map, it would be bright red.”
Look, here’s the Associated Press reporting that Israelis were totally into McCain, by a margin of three-to-one. The LA Times’s correspondent in Israel, Ashraf Khalil, reports the same story on his blog for the newspaper’s website: apparently 76 percent of absentee American voters polled in Israel said they would vote for McCain, and most Israelis were barely controlling their panic at the prospect of an Obama presidency.
So, let me get this straight: 78 percent of Jewish Americans voted for Obama; somewhere between 65 and 82 percent of Israelis who participated in two online polls indicated their preference for Obama; and the Israeli media was practically holding a party for the Democratic candidate on election day. And yet, a sizeable proportion of the international media is reporting that Israelis prefer McCain to Obama by a margin of three-to-one. Doesn’t anyone think this discrepancy a bit odd?
Actually, I happen to know one person who did think it very odd indeed. The JPost’s news editor, Amir Mizroch, took the trouble to call up Mitchell Barak, the guy who conducted the polls of American voters in Israel, and ask where he got the numbers. Barak had reported his findings to the international media at a press conference he convened in Jerusalem. Here’s an excerpt from the JPost’s report:
Mitchell Barak, of Keevoon Research, Strategy and Communications, immediately acknowledged to The Jerusalem Post that the 76-24 percent McCain-Obama poll had “over sampled” voters from the Orthodox community to a certain extent.
Two of the events at which voters were questioned were conducted in Orthodox institutions in Jerusalem. The third was held in a Tel Aviv brewery. “It could have been better if there were other events around the country,” Barak said.
Barak confirmed that 60 percent of the people he polled described themselves as Orthodox. And while the belief that Orthodox Jews must, by definition, hold hawkish political opinions is as misguided as any other generalization, statistics show that Orthodox Jews who immigrate from the United States to Jerusalem tend to lean heavily toward the the Greater Israel / nationalist-Zionist movement, which receives strong support from the fundamentalist Christian Right of the Republican party.
Let’s say that 60 percent of American-born Israelis are hawkish, right-wing Republicans. This could well be true. But there are only 85,000 American-born Israelis out of a total population of 7 million. Even if all 51,000 who define themselves as Orthodox really are McCain supporters, and assuming not only that they are all old enough to vote, but that they all took the trouble to cast an absentee ballot, they still form only 0.72 percent of the population of Israel.
Based on that tiny, non-representative sampling, a significant number of credible media outlets reported as fact that Israel was overwhelmingly pro-McCain – even though all the real evidence shows the exact opposite.
What I can’t quite figure out is, why were so many people willing – perhaps even eager – to accept as fact a story that was so easy to discredit?
This post is dedicated to Jamie Katz. Two years ago, over lunch at a Yemenite restaurant in South Tel Aviv, this visiting American journalist told me about a gifted young senator from Illinois who might be the next president of the United States. I think I told him that America didn’t seem ready to elect either a black man or a woman – of any colour. I might be right about the latter, but I’m glad I was wrong about the former.
