When the public heard the surprising news Dec. 2 about the disbanding of the third Netanyahu government less than two years after its inception in March 2013, Uria Levy, a 28-year-old resident of Tel Aviv, decided to express his own little protest. He filmed himself for a short clip in which he looks straight into the camera and says: “I, Uria Levy, pledge not to vote in the 2015 elections.” This sentence succinctly expresses the sense of growing despair regarding Israel’s political leadership, as reflected in the town square of the social media.
The Facebook page of Yair Lapid, the finance minister dismissed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, tells the same story. Less than two years ago, it was filled with hope and the promise of a new kind of politics; this week it was filled with the sounds of his supporters’ despair, as though he had suddenly grown old by the unfulfilled promise in less than half a term in office.