Michael R. Bernstein

Israeli Elections: The Arab World’s Favorite Soap Opera Remember when Mexican soap operas swept Morocco in the 1990s? You or Nobody, Guadalupe, and others, dubbed into Arabic, had millions of Moroccans glued to their television screens. Everyone watched them. Everyone talked about them. Years later, Turkish soap operas produced the same obsession. But why were people so captivated by these stories of love, heartbreak, betrayal, and passion? I noticed something fascinating among people I personally knew: many watched because their own lives lacked the love and romance they saw on television. They wished their relationships resembled those fictional love stories. They lived their dreams and fantasies through the characters. Television gave them a parallel world in which they could experience what reality had denied them. Now look at the Arab world’s fascination with Israeli elections. I see exactly the same phenomenon. Israeli elections are the political soap opera of the Arab world. Millions follow every development, every coalition negotiation, every political scandal, and every confrontation involving Netanyahu. They hate the villain, Netanyahu. They cheer for the opposition. They celebrate Arab parties gaining influence. They fantasize about Netanyahu losing power. But beneath all that excitement lies something much deeper. They are watching a democracy because they don’t have one. For many viewers living under authoritarian governments, Israeli elections offer a political drama their own countries rarely provide: genuine competition for power, an opposition capable of removing a prime minister, and coalition negotiations that actually determine who governs. They are voting against Netanyahu in their imagination because they cannot vote against their own rulers in reality. And that’s the great irony. They passionately debate who should govern Israel while having almost no say in who governs them. They celebrate Israeli opposition leaders challenging Netanyahu while their own opposition leaders are either in prison, in exile, or playing the role of decorative furniture in their dictators’ parliaments. They dream of Netanyahu losing an election while their own dictators keep winning with 99% of the vote. And that’s why Israeli elections remind me of those Mexican soap operas. The woman who never experienced romance cried watching fictional lovers on television. And the Arab who never experienced democracy cheers watching Israelis vote. One dreams of a lover she doesn’t have. The other dreams of a ballot box he has never truly owned. The difference? At least the woman knows she’s watching fiction. The Arab viewer thinks he’s following Israeli politics. In reality, he’s watching a democracy from the political prison his own rulers built for him. And when the show ends, Israelis get a government they voted for. He gets another episode of his dictator.