In her majesty’s service

This week, the Walla website published an expos about Kadima’s behind-the-scenes involvement in the tent protests. The diligent reporter found dozens of protest signs, which had been carried during the latest demonstrations, stored at the party’s headquarters. Two and a half weeks earlier, Channel Two’s Rina Mazliah reported something similar. Nevertheless, the Walla article drew a torrent of emotional responses from people who took the bait.

Interestingly, Kadima’s reaction to both expos s used almost the exact same wording. “Over the past two and a half years, Kadima has taken advantage of every opportunity to convey its messages opposing the government of taxes.” Then came Kadima’s emphatic assertion, in both expos s, that they did not start the protest.

In my opinion, this is hardly an expos at all, as Kadima itself is likely behind these leaks. Paradoxically – or not – Kadima is the protests’ main casualty. The protest has indeed aroused the left wing, mainly the ideological Left, which “suddenly” discovered that Kadima was actually neither socialist nor social-democratic, and held a neoliberal economic worldview which, to some degree, resembles that of the Likud. This renders it superfluous not only as a kind of Likud II, but also as the leader of the left wing and the successor to the Labor Party. Meanwhile, the strength of those parties that have consistently focused on socialist messages, such as the Labor, Meretz and Hadash, has increased.

Various polls conducted over the past month show that Kadima has lost seats to the parties to its left. While it is not certain that the trend will last, it is clear from the polls that even if the general public identifies with the issues which the protest has brought to the fore, it also identifies the protest itself, at least politically, with the Left. Therefore, the Likud has not really been harmed. While criticism of the government from the Left does not have much of an effect on right-wing voters, it does bring the left-wing voters back home - at Kadima’s expense.

When Kadima's leaders saw that things were not going well, they sought to soften the criticism. If they announced openly that they were actively aiding the protest, the protesters who were not interested in making an overt connection between the social protest and politics would have come out against them. For public consumption, they would have claimed that it was not accurate, while for internal consumption, they would have criticized Kadima all the more for ruining the protest, which was supposed to be “neither right-wing nor left-wing.” Therefore, Kadima officials decided to leak the story to the media, which would present it as an incriminating “expos .” They did not have to do so directly (though that could still remain an option). Having a middleman sell it to the reporter would suffice.

However, Mazliah’s first “expos ” on Channel Two did not really help Kadima’s political stability among those who were supposed to be its home team on the Israeli Left. Therefore, the “expos ” was recycled this week in order to signal the public that had fled from Kadima: We were behind the protest the whole time. We just did not want to “give it a political flavor,” as Rina Mazliah explained it (or give it a “political hue,” to use Walla’s version).

So much for Kadima’s interests. But what about the interests of the press? It is a matching or perhaps even a double interest, since the courageous reporter gets an expos and the label “objective.” Nobody ever claimed that Walla had any interest in promoting the political Left at the expense of its ideological rivals, or that Rina Mazliah was serving Kadima. Heaven forbid.

Nevertheless, Matzliah’s supposedly innocent wording should give us pause. “We know that there is a Meretz tent camp, the Labor Party and Hadash are active, but Kadima’s activity is taking place mainly behind the scenes.” Here, she provides details of all of Kadima’s good deeds during the protest.

I would like to concentrate on the word “mainly.” In other words: Are you having trouble deciding whether to vote for Meretz or the Labor Party? Well, you should know that Kadima is the main party that is active behind the scenes of the protest.

Incidentally, Walla’s expos has a similar tone, but there they quote sources other than Kadima to the effect that Netanyahu and his people are responsible for this information.

This is where a commentator with a view the opposite of Mazliah’s should have come and pointed to Kadima’s interest in such a report, thus neutralizing the covert politicization of the expos . Don't hold your breath. Well, at least we will hear about it in an article published in the periodical that critiques the media, The Seventh Eye. But wait – in that publication too there is only one eye, and it is located on the correct side.

From the start, there was never any connection between the actual protest and its amazingly hysterical echoes in the media, whether in the inflation of the number of demonstrators or the fact that they were mentioned and emphasized more than any other news story, no matter how important. For the most part, the media’s interests have never been social, but rather political. On the Internet, one can find varied statements by honest journalists that confirm this.

The media is not interested in social issues in and of themselves unless they have a “political flavor,” mainly one that can hurt Netanyahu and his government. That is perfectly all right at the level of a demonstration, and it is even democratic at the party level. But what does it say about the Israeli media-

These expos s confirm the politicization of the protest, but not at the level of the bait that the "leakers" tried to feed the public, as if to confirm that the protest had a political aspect. We knew that already. The covert politicization here is from the media, which makes it even worse, because as has been said many times, the media long ago abandoned its role as reflector and mediator and became a political player in every respect.

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Go and see the film "Almanya: Welcome to Germany." Funny, touching and gripping, it is a journey into different cultural worlds, with all the magic that cinema can provide.

A Turkish migrant worker arrives in Germany in the 1960s looking for work, along with millions of others. Fifty years later, he returns with his extended family for a nostalgic trip to Turkey. Besides the fascinating family dynamics, the film explores universal questions of identity in the second and third generation – the film’s protagonists, each in his own generation, deal with the question of whether they are Turkish or German. Of course, the film raises the problem of the foreigners in Europe in general and in Germany in particular, but in a friendly way. A film of reconciliation, its directors are German women of Turkish ancestry who wish to include all the various worlds even if they are sometimes contradictory. If only we could do the same.

We cannot refrain from making a comparison with the situation here in Israel. Not only regarding the treatment of foreign workers or infiltrators, but also that of the large Arab minority in our midst. Does society’s mainstream deal with the issue or leave it to political candidates on the fringe? On second thought, the main conflict of the Jewish population is not political, but rather has to do with identity. This has been true since the Enlightenment period, through the establishment of Zionism, to our own day. The question has got us by the hair and refuses to let go: who are we – Israelis or Jews, or perhaps both at the same time-

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