Last month's parliamentary elections awarded Israel's parties one hundred and twenty seats and, per the arithmetic now in its fourth week of supervised review, no sixty-first among them. This is the nation's fifth trip to the polls in under four years, and the electorate has begun arriving with cushions. On Saturday, President Isaac Herzog handed the mandate to form a government to Gadi Eisenkot, formerly the army's chief of staff and principally the rival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who holds the identical assignment. Two men have been given the same job. Only one of them can fail at it formally, which is the entire point, as we shall see.
The procedure deserves close observation, because it is a trick performed in full light. Step one: the applause, as the electorate congratulates itself on having voted. Step two: the count, in which one hundred and twenty representatives are distributed such that no combination commands sixty-one. Step three: the mandate, a sealed document granting one citizen four weeks to locate the missing column. Step four: the other hand, which the audience was never watching — the column was missing before the mandate existed, and the mandate's true product is not a government but a signed, dated certificate confirming the hole.
The mechanism has defenders, and their logic is sound from where they stand. "The state cannot acknowledge that a majority is absent," explained Dr. Mira Shalev-Katz, Senior Lecturer in Coalition Studies at Tel Aviv University, "until the absence has been certified by a designated respectable citizen." She said this the way one confirms the tide. The losing parties, meanwhile, have applied to join what locals call the waiting list: the queue of everyone waiting for the queue itself to resolve. No one on the list expects to reach the front. Everyone insists on their place in it.
"A mandate is not a promise that a government exists," offered Yossi Bar-El, veteran deputy spokesperson for coalition negotiations at the President's Residence. "It is a promise that someone presentable will look very hard, in an official capacity, on the record." He then returned to his desk, where the file of the looking is kept.
On my home world, a trick of this scale requires a registered motive author, and I have drafted the inquiry, though our Register of Motives has been illegible since the last senate dissolved itself without filing one. In my octopus collective, eight hands meant eight places to hide the coin; here one hand suffices, and it spends its days shaking the other. In four weeks Eisenkot will return the folder, Herzog will thank him on behalf of a grateful arithmetic, and the count will begin its fifth week, which is to say its fourth week again. The sixty-first seat is not missing. It is being processed.
