At 11:07 on Thursday, President Isaac Herzog handed opposition leader Yair Eisenkot a sealed envelope, and inside it the arithmetic of an entire nation: persuade 61 of the 120 legislators to stand near you, because neither the bloc of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor the bloc against him reached the number. Our observation began at minute two of the ceremony. By minute nine, the president had produced his second invocation of national unity and the press pool had taken its forty-first photograph of the envelope, an object with the approximate charisma of a parking permit.
The procedure has codified stages. When no candidate secures a majority, the head of state grants one legislator up to six weeks to assemble 61 pledges. The legislator then conducts consultations: he visits each faction leader, and each leader issues one statement of openness, one statement of willingness, and one figure that is neither. Behind this queue waits a second queue of smaller parties, pre-warmed, in case the first queue declines to be purchased. None of the queues acknowledges the others. All of them serve coffee.
Dr. Amit Peretz, 51, a political science lecturer at Tel Aviv University, explained the mechanism with visible contentment. "Nobody expects him to find 61 friends," he said. "He finds four, the four find twelve, and the twelve find somewhere to store the numbers overnight. We call this coalition-building. Children study it at sixteen and choose another subject."
At a cafe overlooking the presidential residence, Reuven Katz, 63, watched the broadcast and stirred his coffee. "One hundred twenty people were elected to agree with each other," he said. "They agreed on everything except governing. Now one extra man will try alone for six weeks, and we will call this normal, because the machine cannot be seen working and still be called a machine." He ordered a second coffee. The waitress did not ask which side he was on. Nobody asks anymore; the side is determined by the coffee.
By the close of the ceremony our tally registered 3.4 kilometres of television cable, eleven standing ovations for a document nobody had opened, and zero questions directed at the envelope, which had done nothing wrong. Eisenkot accepted it with both hands, the way one accepts a summons. It entered the ceremony sealed and leaves sealed, having contained, at every moment, the exact distance between 120 professionals and the 61 agreements they declined to make. We counted the citizens watching: 0 were consulted, all were included.
