The season of silliness

There are times when opinions suddenly run rampant. Maybe it's because of a conference that attracts national attention. The start of the election campaign is a season that invites a plethora of nonsense. The outbreak of rhetorical folly particularly stood out against the background of the politicians' silence during the days of anxiety surrounding Ariel Sharon?s collapse.

Who seemed to say something interesting this week? Benjamin Netanyahu. At the Herzliya Conference he said that Palestinian population centers must be departed, meaning, in effect, most of the West Bank. Sounds good. But the entire issue was born suddenly and will die suddenly because the Likud polls promise him more Knesset seats if he moves a little to the center. The voters aren't stupid. It's the old Netanyahu, and the Likud continued crashing this week.

Avi Dichter, for example, was silent as a fish in every interview he gave on every issue until it finally came out how he ended up so high on the list of Kadima. Shaul Mofaz must speak in the name of security, so he compared Haman's fate to that of Iran's, because of their bomb. Tehran heard about the Scroll of Esther, and was quick to understand Shaul the Jew as threatening the mass murder of the people of Persia.

At the edges of this season of folly, Yigal Amir's lawyer popped up in the Haaretz weekend edition, with his deep impressions of the murderer's good sense and sensitivity. And journalist Ari Shavit let loose at Omri Sharon's trial, seeing in him nothing less than "the lost Israeliness."

The main stupidity clung to the most important event of the week. A large majority waved the danger that Hamas would succeed in the elections. The Israeli choir continued the chorus, even after it became clear just how much that movement draws from deep roots in Palestinian society. Common sense should not be frightened by Hamas' sensational achievement. Now it will face, with all its sharpness, the choice of realpolitik: to turn moderate or to ruin the international relations of the Palestinian Authority and the financial and moral support granted to it by the West. At the heart of the revulsion from Hamas still lies the idiotic assumption that the Israelis have the ability to dictate what ballot the voters of the territories should cast. Alongside that also lurks the empty presumption that we will manage to reach an arrangement with them using the methods of owner-masters.

A lot of the nonsense gathered at the Herzliya Conference. It's a sophisticated event, another one of Prof. Uriel Reichman's enterprises. Shelly Yachimovich was wrong to regard the conference as the privatization of the public discourse in Israel. It is a true reflection of that failed debate. MK-Professor Yuli Tamir rightly found unbridled incitement against the Arabs. Prof. Yossi Agass heard fascist things said. The organizer, Uzi Arad, made all the trains run precisely on time. Until he opened his mouth.

He said Israeli Arabs are not really loyal to the state, and therefore, guilty for their condition. A foolish "Loyalty Index" - a particularly low form of imbecility that academia is capable of occasionally producing - he said the patriotism of Israeli Arabs was only at 27 percent. They are also a sixth of the population, but almost none of them were invited to the summit of the elite, which was free of Arabs except for the unavoidable Ahmed Tibi and a few other notables for decorative purposes. The unjust talk of repatriating blocs of Arabs in Israel to Palestine of course came up; quiet talk, without too much opposition, about a clean "agreed" solution to preserving the Jewish character, and therefore the moral character, of the state.

But if the Herzliya Conference was the fitting essence of the public debate, its very own essence was brought down to the words of Nobel laureate Prof. Yisrael Aumann, one of the heads of the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University. Aumann is an example of the unnecessary connection between scientific excellence (such as that of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center) and insight. As he lectured against the Oslo Accords, Aumann said that their violations "weren't even a public issue for us," as if the incitement against Yitzhak Rabin and his assassination did not reverberate enough.

He finally deigned to connect game theory to a commentary on the national situation. He doesn't deserve a Nobel Prize for the demagogic connection he made. Its main point was that the Palestinian side in the game ("just like in Germany") benefits from the weakness of our position, from Israel's desire for peace now, and "then we go and destroy beautiful settlements - sacrificing that enterprise on the altar of the God of peace," and other nonsense.

A few days later, at some religious convocation, he added the proposition that "the Satmars were right": the anti-Zionists were right in their war game against the state. The Nobel laureate's bumper sticker could read, "Aum, Um, U," some personal version of the pseudo-Bratslavian "Na, Nah, Nahman of Uman."

The exact opposite of all this was what Ehud Olmert said at the conference. But at the start of the season of silliness, which will only reach a climax with the elections, even game theory will have a difficult time guessing what will come out at the end of the season. Certainly not according to Aumann.