Last week was the world of communication as a pharmacy. A new name has emerged on the name exchange, the hopes of the center-left camp: Major General (Res.) Gadi Izenkot. A Haaretz professor was quoted as saying that Izenkot would be considered a "worthy candidate to bring the country back to sanity." A Mako journalist explained that he was an attractive candidate, as he was "the son of Moroccan-born parents, born in Tiberias, who grew up in Eilat. His father was a laborer, his sister lived in a settlement.  

Since the 1990s, their masters have been sitting in the state control room and pharmacists candidates who might break through the walls of the right-leaning people. They learned that the public longs for a security figure, preferably a Mizrahi who keeps tradition. By virtue of their (poor) training, they have learned that this is the center of gravity of the public that may move politically. This is how they pinned their hopes on Itzik Mordechai, later on Amir Peretz, Avi Gabay and Gabi Ashkenazi. It is clear that the campaigner and the customer, keeping an interesting tradition as snow last year; In their hearts they despise the character and the public. Another important element in the masters' overarching strategy over the past decade has been: creating a wedge between Netanyahu and Likud voters, in terms of: "Guys, we are with you; the problem is Netanyahu." 

Whether the algorithm derived from the strategy will save or not, one thing is clear: it is not for himself to teach came out, but for the masters. Here is what can be learned from this about the ways of thinking of those who claim to run the country: first, the national bloc can be molded as material in the hands of the creator; It is a passive, clan-like public; Give him some national wink with oriental spice, and you bought it. What they miss is that the mileage Netanyahu has accumulated for more than 30 years, the insults hurled at him, the constant friction with the veteran elite - act as a powerful vector, and therefore they are an asset: the friction-confrontation with Netanyahu authentically reflects the friction-confrontation with much of the people. That is, the pathetic-manipulative attempts to skew public opinion act like a boomerang.  

The miss is also of the strategic advisors. These, ostensibly, operate in accordance with the logic of the market economy, i.e. strive to bring about a political return, and therefore emotionally disconnect from the product. But - and this is the hot thing in the world of research in the field: strategists, experts as they may be, will never develop a bound algorithm for their "sociological imagination", meaning that they will produce a formula that to some extent reflects their preconceptions. 

A poignant expression of this could be found in the campaign that accompanied Avi Gabay about a year ago, in which the camera focused on Gabay's mother and guys from the neighborhood, with one of them announcing with a wink: "Our own Moroccan." Beyond the fact that the campaign was an insult to intelligence, it was blatantly ineffective. Because this is to know: At the community and municipal-municipal level, a significant portion of the Israeli public prefers a "our own" candidate; Not so at the national level, where everyone is asking for a supreme leader whose ethnic identity is irrelevant. 

Here's another crucial link that masters and marketing contractors are missing: the group memory of the people. A very powerful mechanism in the establishment of Israeli society, which is deeply rooted mainly in those who visit the synagogues (ie among the Likudniks) is: grouping postcards and merging postcards. That's the story. The vast majority of the public longs for a mixed society that, even if it is delayed, will come. This fits in well with Menachem Begin's resounding cry on the eve of the 1981 election about his uncle Topaz's "folly": "Ashkenazim? Sephardim? - Jews!" 

This is exactly the problem: when the ecology, the habitat, of the detached part of the people, the campaigner and the customer, encourages cynical thinking that nationalism and grouping postcards are an invention; When most of the elites spend time in cafes and less in synagogues, no work is done to refresh and maintain group memory, and then merging postcards is "grandma's stories" anyway, a matter for the monkey tribe; Hence it is natural that they will see the target group through ethnic glasses. This is insulting, and the insult is an important force multiplier in the political conduct of the people, and rightly so. 

Dr. Yitzhak Dahan is a lecturer and researcher in Israeli society and political culture