An Election is Called

About the Book

Since 1978, the author, a Tel-Aviv cardiologist and his wife have lived in an apartment in the city.  As 1999 approached, they felt the urge to move to the country and to open a stylish “B&B.”  The diary documents their house hunting expeditions interspersed with a real-time record of the fast-moving and turbulent Israeli political and social scene.  While they scoured the country, looking at houses and plots in the Galilee, the Carmel foothills, and the mountains around Jerusalem, Israel was seething.  1999 started out pessimistically with escalation in the smoldering Lebanese conflict, deterioration in relations with the Palestinians, and no sign of softening by the intractable Syrian leader Assad.  In the internal realm the polarizing issues that cut across Israeli society (religious-secular, Ashkenazi-Sefardi, old timer-new immigrant) reached boiling point with the trial and sentencing of Arye Deri, the charismatic leader of the fundamentalist Sefardi party.  At the helm since being voted into office in 1996 soon after the Rabin assassination and in the wake of a catastrophic wave of Palestinian extremist urban terror, the controversial and rightist Benyamin Netanyahu was voted out of office in the Knesset in December 1998 by a coalition of his own extreme right-wing and the left-wing opposition (this a typically Israeli political paradox) after having signed the pragmatic and fairly concessionary Wye accords with Yassar Arafat.  So an election was called, and the rather uncharismatic thrice-decorated ex-Chief of Staff Ehud Barak challenged Netanyahu, once his junior officer in the highly secret General Staff Commando Unit, for the premiership, promising to get the Israeli Army out of Lebanon within a year of the spring elections, to make a strong drive for peace with the Palestinians, and most of all to heal the rifts in a divisive Israeli society by a more caring attitude towards the disadvantaged.

Dr. Aronson tells of each house-hunting expedition, describing the properties they saw, the prospective sellers they met, and the biblical, historical and sociological profiles of the towns and villages they visited, concluding each day’s diary with a “news of the day” commentary on unfolding political and social events.  These include the ongoing confrontation and heavy losses in South Lebanon, King Hussein’s last days, the sensational dismissal of Israeli Minister of Defense Yizhak Mordecai,  the Likud and Labor pre-election primaries, the astounding Deri case, the sad story of Israel’s Miss Universe, and of course Election Day and its aftermath.  In between house-hunting and politics, the author takes time out to describe the Aronsons’ life style: their favorite restaurants, the drives and walks they take around Tel-Aviv, the ambience of the Jewish festivals in Israel, especially Purim as celebrated among the ultra-orthodox in nearby Bnei Brak, and their home life, including a lengthy and detailed description of their own Passover Seder.  The diary concludes during the Hannukah  festival in December, 1999, with augurs of peace in the new millennium.

The reader of “An Election is Called:  the 1999 Diary of an Israeli House-hunter” will be able to enter the day-to-day experiences of a real-life real-time Israeli professional couple, and see a side of Israel that the news media generally ignore.   Israel based correspondents tend to macro-analyse the Israeli scene, forgetting that Israel is made up of ordinary people who get up in the morning to go to work and have the same concerns, priorities, interests and pursuits as people in the U.S. and elsewhere, even if they do live in an extraordinary country.  A glance at the chapter headings of the “Diary” will illustrate the interweaving nature of the book:

Chapter One - Saturday, December 26, 1998

A visit to Yes

About the Author

Dr. Raymond Aronson has practiced clinical cardiology in Tel-Aviv since 1978. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1941 into a home suffused with traditional Jewish learning coupled with intellectual skepticism. After completing medical studies at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg in 1964, he emigrated to Israel. During the 1969-70 Israel-Egyptian War of Attrition he served as the Medical Officer of an artillery battalion on the Suez Canal. He completed his cardiology specialization in the United States during the 1970's. He is married to Shifra, a native of Tel-Aviv, who owns and directs the Education Gallery, a resource center for Israeli schools.