Everyone knows what the Israeli elections are about. The choice is stark: on the one side, the dream of a Greater Israel “from the sea to the river”, which would in practice be an apartheid state; on the other side, an end to the occupation and the creation of peace. Some would add a social choice: on the one side, the existing neoliberal state with the widest inequality in the industrialized world; on the other side, a social-democratic state of social solidarity. So is the country plastered with posters about war and peace, occupation and settlements, wages and the cost of living? Are TV programs full of them? Are they occupying the front pages of the newspapers? Far from it. Five weeks to election day, and all these subjects have practically disappeared. War, peace, social justice – they just raise a collective yawn. There are far more interesting matters which electrify the public mind. Bottles, for example. Bottles? Elections about bottles? Yes, indeed. Bottles. The entire country is preoccupied by what Sherlock Holmes would have called the Mystery of the Bottles. Israel is an ecology-minded society. It felt threatened by discarded plastic and glass bottles. So a law was enacted that obliges supermarkets and other retail businesses to demand a small deposit - a few cents – about 13 for a plastic bottle, about 30 for a glass bottle – to be returned in exchange for the empty bottle. Many people, like myself, don't bother. But small sums can become large sums. Many poor elderly people earn a kind of living by collecting empty bottles from the dustbins in the streets, mostly for organized crime families. All the returned bottles are treated for reuse. The environment is saved. Everybody is satisfied. So how did this become a hot election issue, pushing everything else from the national agenda? Enter the First Family: Benjamin Netanyahu, wife Sarah and the two just adult sons. The family is housed by the state in the official Prime Minister's residence in the center of Jerusalem. It also owns two private dwellings – an apartment in a well-to-do Jerusalem neighborhood and a sumptuous villa in Ceasarea, a neighborhood of the very rich. By law, all these residences are kept by the state. The public purse pays all living expenses, such as food and drinks, as well as the staff that mans (and womans) them. Since the beginning of the Netanyahu terms, news and rumors about the goings-on in the three residences abound. It seems that Sarah Netanyahu, the would-be-queen, is a difficult person to deal with, especially for domestic employees. Several of them have sued her in court for mistreatment. Human turnover is frequent. Dismissed personnel complain. One disclosure was that Sarah'le (as everybody calls her, not always out of love) has removed garden furniture from the government-owned residence to her private villa. Another was that the chief of the domestic staff was woken in the middle of the night at his home and ordered to bring some hot soup at once to his mistress' bedroom. It seems that she frequently yells at the staff for small omissions. All this was brought up in various court cases, to the great delight of the masses. For example, it became public that the Prime Minister's residence has ordered ice cream for hundreds of thousands of dollars during the year. Always pistachio. Complaints about the Prime Minister's love for luxury are not new. For years now, the Attorney General has been making inquiries about “Bibitours”, the habit of Netanyahu and his family to fly first-class and stay in luxury hotels all over the world without paying a shekel – all expenses paid by foreign billionaires. Since he was Minister of Finance at the time, this was against the law. And now come the bottles. One dismissed employee disclosed to the media that Sarah'le habitually sends two government employees in an official car to the bottle collection station to return empty bottles and get the deposits back. Instead of returning the money to the government, as the law demands, she pockets it for her private use. Big deal? Seems so. When first caught, the family returned to the government 4,000 shekels, almost a thousand Euros. Now it appears that the sums are much larger, and that Sarah'le has continued with the practice since. This may be a criminal offense. The Attorney General and the State Comptroller, both Netanyahu appointees, threw the file at each other. Now they may be compelled to do something before the elections. A Yiddish expression comes to my twisted mind. Long before Alois Alzheimer, the German doctor, discovered a hundred years ago the disease that bears his name, the symptoms described by him were called in Yiddish “over bottle”. This is derived from the Hebrew “over battel” – nothing-doer, useless old fogey. About the Netanyahus one could say now, in a more literal sense, that they are over-bottled. For weeks now, this is the hottest topic in Israel. Bibi-haters, with which the country abounds, are happy. This will surely hurt Netanyahu and the Likud grievously. Does it? As of now, not at all. On the contrary, after several days in which the “Zionist Camp” (aka the Labor Party) overtook the Likud in the polls by one or two seats, the Likud has rebounded and taken the lead by two or three seats. No Labor djinn has emerged from the bottles. The country was amused. The bottles provided the stuff of unlimited quantities of gossip, cartoons and satire, but did not change the political attitudes of the voters. A friend of mine, who has a conspiratorial turn of mind, has suggested that the whole bottle affair was really brought up by Netanyahu himself as a ploy to take the public mind off the fateful problems facing Israel, for which he has no solutions. For better or for worse, the bottles have centered public attention on him. His pictures fill the TV screen, his name features in the news. His opponents, without bottles or pistachio ice cream, remain discreetly in the background. Those of us who feared that Netanyahu might provoke a war on the eve of the election, might say: better bottles than battles. — Uri Avnery is an activist and an advocate of Palestinian rights. He can be reached at [email protected]
