hen I was a correspondent in Jerusalem, elections were fraught affairs. Many of my fellow hacks, and some of the more idealistic voters I met, took the view that a new prime minister, leading a new government, could mean the difference between war and peace. In Israel,
that is no idle talk.
Bitterly partisan, each side loathed the other. Broadly, peaceniks praying for a Left-wing triumph led by Labor poured scorn on the security hawks, who dismissed them in turn as hippy lunatics and kept their fingers crossed for Likud.
Life and death seemed to hang on the outcome. Winners, inevitably, celebrated feverishly. Losers took it hard.
But then reality intervened. The winners took office. And once in power they realised that the first thing they had to do to govern the whole country was appeal precisely to those voters who had backed the other side and were still weeping into their coffee.
This led to some odd situations. Left of centre governments, whose supporters yearned for a successful conclusion the so-called “Middle East Peace Process”, set out instead to reassure sceptical hawks and establish their security credentials. Settlements were built not dismantled.
Then when the Right got into government, the reverse became true. So Israelis were treated to the spectacle of Ariel Sharon, military hawk supreme, ordering a dramatic withdrawal of settlers from Gaza and the West Bank.
The medical profession has a term for this: “a paradoxical reaction”. It is used to describe drugs that produce the opposite effect to the one intended – tranquillisers stimulating aggressive behaviour, for example.
Since the Brexit vote on June 23, we have seen the paradoxical reaction in astonishing effect in British politics.
A small group of people brought off the most dramatic coup in the politics of this island since 1945, garnering the support of 17.4 million people in the process – the largest single vote of support in these isles for anything, ever.
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