Israeli youth show respect for elders

For those of you cruising blogland as we speak, you will find pages of analysis regarding the lower voter turnout, Labour and Israel Beitenu’s surprisingly good result, and Likud and Kadima’s lower than expected vote. In my humble opinion, the winning party of this election is Gil, the pensioners party, winning 8 seats according to exit polls. To the right is a photo of Gil pensioners' party leaders Yitzhak Ziv, Yaacov Ben-Izri, Rafi Eitan and Moshe Sharon, sitting on bench in Tel Aviv on Monday.

Jpost reports:

Tel Aviv buzzed with rumors on Tuesday that the Gil pensioners' party passed the vote threshold needed to enter the 17th Knesset. In the stage built by Channel 10 in the center of Rabin Square in the city's center, hundreds gathered to look at the parties' stalls. The general consensus seemed to be that "Tel Aviv was voting for the pensioners."
In front of one Tel Aviv polling booth, four well-dressed trendy-looking 20-somethings tried to convince passers-by to vote for the pensioners' party. Though the activists seemed uncertain of where the party stood on issues such as defense and the economy, they said that as young, well-off Tel Aviv residents, they wanted to do something to help the "poor old people." They also acknowledge that it was a trend among youth in Tel Aviv to vote for the Gil party.
One Gil supporter, Sonya Blikin, saying she was "voting for the pensioners because they're the only party with a platform I can support. Actually, I'm not sure what the platform is," she admitted, "but I know that old people and poor people are sitting in the streets, and I feel bad and I want to do something to help them."

And how about these kids at Rabin Square who instead of voting for the green leaf party, voted to help sabba and savta:

Back at Rabin Square, a crowd of teenage girls chanted "Save our grandfathers" on Tuesday afternoon. They said they had no official affiliation with any party, but had decided to come to the square at the last moment because "the old people need all the help they can get."

The election of Gil shows once again that Israeli youth are an or lagoyim. See also Haaretz for more on Gil’s very vauge security platform.

Too much of a good thing?

Is it possible that us diaspora fans of Zion are loving Israel too much. Daniel Levy writes in Haaretz about the new John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt study of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." He says:

It should serve as a wake-up call, on both sides of the ocean. The bottom line might read as follows: that defending the occupation has done to the American pro-Israel community what living as an occupier has done to Israel - muddied both its moral compass and its rational self-interest compass.

Interesting food for thought. Has our love of Israel blinded us to Isiah’s vision expressed in the Jerusalem program of building a nation based on the prophetic vision of righteousness and peace(justice).