The observation that Israel is in the midst of a particularly polarized period, even by the already divided standards of the only democracy in the Middle East, is very basic these days.
Every person has an opinion, every demonstration camp, every sector and every media outlet has its own insults, and its own determination to prove that its opinion is correct and that it has the upper hand. The Israeli division procedure is not new, as stated, and has accompanied the public in waves since the days of the settlement, before the establishment of the state.
And yet, even in the realm of tribalism and resentment, the Jewish head managed to invent a patent and create a new equation: the numbers are also mobilized to fight for hearts and minds and control of the state. The last, numerical nature reserve, the one that is seemingly difficult to turn into a weapon by virtue of being measurable, falls robbed in the trenches of division and revulsion.
The first arena in which it is clear that, unlike in the past, empirical data are also flexible plasticine – is the reports on the numbers of demonstrators sweeping the streets and blocking the roads. The distortion and subjugation of numbers, by the way, come from all sides.
A certain channel will report hundreds of thousands of excited Israelis showing up to express support or protest, while the opposing channel, which happens to oppose that expression of support or protest, will make do with tens of thousands.
On one website, the meters in the demonstration area will be measured to prove with signs and wonders how many enthusiastic demonstrators were crammed into one square or another, and on a site that thinks completely differently, drones will be sent to prove by technological means that this is actually a sparse gathering. The data is no more than a justification for what every surfer, presenter, tweeter and commentator thinks even before the first demonstrator leaves his home.
But while analyzing demonstration data can be said to be a difficult task, the second and more serious field in which numbers and mathematics are nothing more than a recommendation is the field of surveys. The media consumer encounters a reality in which the gaps in surveys are so large that the only conclusion that can be drawn from them is that nothing can be drawn from them, except that someone in the office of some polling company deliberately creates a bias in the numbers.
You don't need a trained statistician to explain that if in some polls the projected number of seats in the current coalition hovered around 50, and in other polls the government actually scratches the 60 seats successfully, this is just another political column, not a representative and reliable sample of the population.
And so the poll numbers became just another recruited detail for propaganda and meaningless political bullfighting, from which nothing can be understood. This reality, of course, is only expected to exacerbate the rift, blind the public and distort reality, which will reach even more areas of spiraling out of control.
In a social and political world where there is nothing measurable, not even the numbers, there are not many ways left to mediate and give a logical interpretation of what we see before our eyes: an equation with a million unknowns, none of whom is reliable, will surely lead to a state of zero ability to speak or reach agreement.
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