	Generational Dynamics
	Forecasting America's Destiny ... and the World's

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 21-Mar-06
Is the Israeli election campaign too dull?

Web Log - March, 2006

Is the Israeli election campaign too dull?

Things will get exciting again when another generational shoe drops.

According to a news report on NPR yesterday morning, people are getting bored with the election campaign. There are three parties: The leftist Labor party, let by Amir Peretz; the rightist Likud party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu; and the centrist Kadima party, created by former Likud leader Ariel Sharon just before he became comatose in January, now led by Ehud Olmert. Polls have been holding steady, saying that Kadima is going to win on March 28.

The Israelis interviewed yesterday morning complained that all these candidates are boring.

They griped that there's no great leader running -- someone like Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995), Menachem Begin (1913-1992), or even Ariel Sharon (1928-). These choices aren't surprising -- these are some of the great heroes in the creation of the state of Israel and the war against the Palestinians in the late 1940s.

But alas, that generation is gone now, and no one in the generations born since 1949 can hope to measure up.

The Palestinian side was boring for a long time too, after Yasser Arafat died. Mahmoud Abbas replaced Arafat as President of the Palestine Authority, but Abbas was also pretty boring, wasn't he.

But the Palestinian side has gotten quite exciting in the last few weeks. That's because the younger generation has spoken, and elected the candidates from the Hamas militia party, whose platform calls for the destruction of Israel.

The reason that the Israeli election is boring is because Israeli youth haven't yet similarly spoken. That may happen on March 28 or it may happen later, but when the young adult generation speaks, they'll coalesce around a candidate who will take Israel into an entirely new direction. It's impossible to predict for sure what that direction will be, but chances are it will be a sharp turn to the political right, with a heavy emphasis on security and no compromise with the Palestinians.

An Israeli turn to the right will re-energize the young Palestinians to turn sharply against Israel, especially in Gaza where the the median age is 15.6.

These are the generational shoes that we can expect to drop in the next few months, and the inevitable slide toward all out war will become obvious even to the most brain-dead politician or journalist.

When the Bush administration announced the Mideast Roadmap to Peace three years ago, politicians, journalists and pundits were certain that the only thing preventing its success was Yasser Arafat himself.

I wrote that Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat might hate each other, but they'd each survived the genocidal Arab-Jewish wars of the late 1940s when Palestine war partitioned and the state of Israel was created, and they would do anything to keep such a war from happening again. Now that these two leaders are gone (well, one is almost gone), a generational change is in order, and the region is descending into chaos.

Generational Dynamics predicts, with near mathematical certainty, that the Arabs and Jews are headed for a new genocidal war that will eventually engulf all the countries in the entire region. If the current Israeli election is too boring, then perhaps the best thing to do is to enjoy the boredom while it lasts. (21-Mar-06) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 21-Mar-06 Is the Israeli election campaign too dull?

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 21-Mar-06
Is the Israeli election campaign too dull?