He wrote the book “Why You Vote Right-wing but Get Left-wing”, which led to much disillusionment among the Right camp, and in the Sovereignty Youth Hanukah Seminar, he presented the main points in the book. From Erez Tadmor’s lecture.
Media personality and publicist Erez Tadmor, the founder of Im Tirzu and the author of “Why You Vote Right-wing but Get Left-wing” was among the speakers at the Sovereignty Youth Hanuka Seminar, where he explained the main points of the revealed in the book.
The belief, explains Tadmor, that it’s enough to vote in order to express the position of the people is a fundamental mistake because politics is not only the results of the elections and composition of the government by the winners of the elections, but a war of ideas that takes place and is conducted simultaneously in a number of parallel arenas. “If you win at the ballot box but you are at a distinct disadvantage in other areas, even if you win the election many times you will find that you vote Right but you get Left”, says Tadmor.
The relevant arenas are media, the courts, culture, academia, NGOs, economy, experts and others. “These arenas are not separate from each other, as we see that those who sign petitions also run from studio to studio based on their reputation as experts and this is how academics publicize their positions in the media, so these arenas are involved with each other”, emphasized Tadmor, explaining how, as a result of a fabric of pressure, at the end of the road a politician comes to propose a law which he can present to supporters as an achievement, while he actually is only the last link in the chain that continues sometimes for years with many stops on the way.
A striking example of this, Tadmor presents as the uprooting from Gush Katif, which was preceded by many steps along the way, such as the two-states campaign, the campaign to stop the occupation, the discourse of Palestinian rights, the claims of settlers stealing land, movements such as Peace Now, B’tselem, Adallah, the Four Mothers and many more, which operated for years until, at the end of the day, Ariel Sharon came and carried out the process himself. In the Oslo Accords as well, Tadmor finds a similar scenario of a group of academics that led a long process vis-à-vis their Arab counterparts and caused the politicians to act against each other until the point when it was forced on Rabin almost totally finished.
As part of his remarks, Tadmor also presented the legislation on behalf of LGBT movements, which was based on altered values created in Israeli society by a long cultural demonstration with many characteristics, which was eventually reflected in legislation.
Tadmor explains that the media discourse, in which many resources are invested - economic and others, in campaigns, articles, debates, expert opinions, much advertising – is focused on a relatively small group in the center of the political map, not on the forty mandates that will not change their positions in the Left or on the forty in the Right . The key effort is also for the public in the center as well as the politicians in the center, those who can move from one bloc to another as a result of concerted pressure and a public battle that includes negative labeling of some political process or the other. This is what the effort was focused on during the period of the battle over judicial reform, labeling a minor legislative event as a national disaster, thus influencing a number of members of the coalition whose position could be influenced by pressure or threats in the spirit of “you will not have an army” or “there will be civil war”. So it happens that the majority that is interested in reforming the judicial system and even voted for it and received a mandate for it, finds itself losing the battle to implement its concept and its position.
“When you have a political majority but you do not have a majority in the media, the legal system, academia or NGOs, you might win elections but you are at a 90-10 disadvantage, which is changing these days in the media through Channel 14, Galei Yisrael and the social networks”, said Tadmor, who presents the key argument of the book, which is that the focal points of effort on the public manage to triumph and actually erase the victory that the Right achieves at the ballot box. This is why “winning elections is not enough”.
An even more difficult challenge than the one presented by the media is that of academia, although in the past decade, the Right has understood the importance of the other arenas and has begun to bring its own research institutes to the field and present a worthy alternative.
In order to understand the process that Israel has undergone since the revolution of ’77, Tadmor cited the words of Dina Zilber on the need to move the center of ruling power for decision making from the political echelon to the professional echelon, and that it is right to undertake the process of moving the power under the guise of neutrality and expert objectivity, bypassing democratic process and without accountability to the public at large, whose fate is determined by the bureaucratic echelon. These words express the process that Israeli bureaucracy has been leading for more than four decades and in the last decade, the Right has begun to understand the significance of the process and is trying to battle it and restore power to the people.
Tadmor states that even if the public is disillusioned by this trend, the rules of the game have been changed by the bureaucratic elite so that the call for refusal to serve, which in the past was considered to be outré, has become an acceptable bargaining chip, useful in promoting the goals of one camp, the Left camp.
Later on in his remarks, Tadmor described the key factors that led to the situation in which a clear majority of the centers of power is held by the Left. In this context, he mentioned, first and foremost, Menahem Begin, who led the upheaval of governmental control that happened after years of rule by the insiders, a regime that opened the doors to those with the red card and locked it to those who did not belong to the ruling party, which led many to the point of starvation, since the Israeli economy in the first decades was controlled by the state.
When the upheaval happened in ’77, the expectation was that the policy would totally change and even if there was no intention to persecute the Left as it had persecuted the Right, at least the doors would open to people on the Right and they would even be able to reach high office and influential positions. But Menahem Begin chose to act otherwise from the thought that like in Britain, the bureaucracy would subject itself to the policy of the elected echelon, so he stated that “we came to serve and not to possess”, meaning that no one would be let go and the bureaucracy would remain in place as it had been until then. This policy became a precedent and since then, later leaders of the Right that sought to change the bureaucracy were perceived as carrying out a process opposed to political, professional ethics. At the same time, a generation of Likud princes arose, who aspired to succeed Begin and as such, continued the same path that Begin took and did not see the integration of Right-wing people in the centers of power and influence on Israeli society as a trend.
Another factor that determined the current reality, said Tadmor, is the concern of Right-wing people to express their position in public, lest they be eaten alive by powerful committees and the academic cultural environment, so they preferred to hide their positions for a long time in the hope that in the future, when they rise to a senior position, they could reveal their views, but after passing many years with bending over, it was difficult to straighten up.
The Right, Tadmor adds, behaves in a way that lacks maturity and does not show an understanding of where it is correct and desirable to invest its resources and its funds, so it happens that Right-wing NGOs must cope with insufficient funds against a long line of leftist organizations and NGOs flush with cash, which have great influence on all public systems. The Right prefers to invest funds in redeeming land and other important initiatives, but neglects NGOs whose purpose is to have real political influence.
In order to bring about change, says Erez Tadmor, the Right must both internalize and understand the processes in front of their eyes and find the way to enforce the rules of the game so that the Left will not be able to change them for its own benefit.
Tadmor links the conduct of the bureaucratic echelon with one that takes unto itself as much power as possible, also for the night between the sixth and seventh of October, when the military echelon chose to hide intelligence information from the political echelon, as well as the year leading up to the seventh of October, when the military was restrained by the phenomenon of refusal to serve and on the other hand, was dealing with the ramifications of the judicial reform, which Tadmor defines as extortion in every way. “What we are seeing has always been there and now, things are beginning to be revealed and it is still very difficult to change things”.