Endgame

Looking through the latest news reports from Israel this morning, I am reminded of a few lines from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot that seem especially poignant. In the opening scene of Beckett’s most famous play the two protagonists, Vladimir and Estragon, appear lost, mercurial and wholly unaware of their purpose or the fate that awaits them. In a fit of confusion, they angrily begin to question each other on their predicament - attempting in vain to validate their choice of time and place.

ESTRAGON: You’re sure it was this evening?

VLADIMIR: What?

ESTRAGON: That we were to wait.

VLADIMIR: He said Saturday. (Pause.) I think.

ESTRAGON:  You think.

VLADIMIR: I must have made a note of it. (He fumbles in his pockets, bursting with miscellaneous rubbish.)

ESTRAGON: (very insidious). But what Saturday? And is it Saturday? Is it not rather Sunday? (Pause.) Or Monday?   (Pause.) Or Friday?

VLADIMIR:  (looking wildly about him, as though the date was inscribed in the landscape). It’s not possible!

Like Vladimir and Estragon, we also wait for the results of an election that most believed was concluded over 10 days ago. And like the two doomed characters of Beckett’s drama, many of us have attempted to rationalize and validate our expectations.

On Friday, with Tzipi Livni effectively ending any possibility of a (somewhat) centre-right government in Israel by refusing to join a Likud-led coalition, the endgame was decided - with Netanyahu almost certainly set to become the next Prime Minister with Avigdor Lieberman close by his side. Livni has described the likely partnership as an ‘extremist right-wing government’ - one she refuses to collaborate with choosing instead to lead an opposition party to help balance the dangerously conservative coalition set to take the reigns as early as this Sunday.

Interstingly, Livni’s party, Kadima, having been formed by Ariel Sharon himself - a man whose policies most Western political observers would recognize as far-right, militarily aggressive, and religiously motivated - has been characterized by the media over the last few weeks as ‘centrist’, a label that that can only be applied when compared to Netanyahu’s Likud, or Lieberman’s Israel Beiteinu. Indeed, in attempting to discern the levels of ‘conservative’ between the parties in these last elections, the media has been forced to include titles such as ‘ultra’, ‘far right’, and ‘extreme right’ to describe the coalition that is set to govern in a week’s time. Thankfully, we have not yet been subjected to terms such as ’super duper conservative’, or ‘mega mega conservative’ - but of course only time will tell.

Leaving aside the range of what we in the West would consider ‘right wing’, and focusing instead on the inevitable combination of the three hardline parties of Israel likely to form the government - Likud, Shas, and Israel Beiteinu - it is important to recognize that the only common ground these groups occupy is perhaps the media’s defined nomenclature of ‘more conservative’ than Kadima.

As a minor example of the contrasting sentiments of the new coalition’s leaders, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef - the spiritual leader of the ‘mega’ religious right-wing Shas party - recently called Avigdor Lieberman “the devil”. Netanyahu himself has been loathe to award any power to his long-time rivals - and as publicly stated over the past month, everyone involved in this ‘conservative coalition’ thinks the other is either too conservative, dangerously imbalanced, or not nearly conservative enough.

None of this bodes particularly well for populations living on either side of the Green Line - or more widely, throughout the entire region.

Perhaps in the end, the rest of us watching from afar are not like Vladimir and Estragon after all. Perhaps the metaphor of a quarreling, confused collection of absurdist characters should be applied elsewhere.