Tuesday, October 29, 2002

You can learn about a country’s political behavior from “The Weakest Link” TV show
I haven’t seen the American version, but we get the British and the Israeli versions. The big difference I see is that on the Israeli version (which I admit I haven’t seen a lot of), the contestants seem to be much more candid about their political considerations. They have no qualms about this. The British contestants, on the other hand, “play the game” right to the end. Even after they’ve had their heads chopped off, they seem to dislike talking openly about the unspoken coalitions that develop. Contestants would rather not come right out and say, in so many words, that they voted someone off because he was too good, for instance, or because they were in cahoots with another contestant. They’ll say it in a roundabout way, if at all. The Israelis often unabashedly come right out and say it as it is. The Israelis would call the British behavior hypocrisy, whereas the British would probably see the Israelis as coarse and unsophisticated.

Party politics is always nasty. Politicians everywhere are always conniving, devious foxes. The difference in Israel is that all the nastiness is out in the open. It may nauseate us, but at least we know where we are, and can clearly see the politicians for what they are.