MK Micky Rosenthal (Zionist Camp) on Saturday told an interview show audience in Modi’in that “the last ten people on Likud’s [Knesset] list have the same IQ, when you add it all up, as…” and didn’t complete the sentence, possibly because he realized he was courting diaster. He then commented that “a large number of these people should not have arrived in Israel’s Knesset.”
But when the host challenged him, “Do you think they’re stupid?” Rosenthal recoiled, saying, “No, God forbid,” and then, jokingly, “I was talking about EQ.”
He obviously wasn’t, since EQ stands for Emotional Intelligence, reflecting a person’s ability to empathize with others: identify, evaluate, control and express ones own emotions; perceive, and assess others’ emotions; and use emotions to facilitate thinking, understand emotional meanings.
You probably won’t score high in an EQ test by ridiculing your political opponents.
The last time Labor (a.k.a. Zionist Camp) suffered a heartbreaking loss after the polls had promised it a certain win was in March 2015, Israel’s most recent elections. Many have suggested that a singular event marked just how elitist and remote the Labor leadership as well as rank and file are: artist Yair Garbuz’s speech on March 7, 2015, about ten days before the elections, at a rally in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv.
It was an angry, 9-minute recitation against the emerging rightwing in Israel, traditional and religious, and although it had some relevance, the only thing recorded in the national psyche at the time was the Garbuz reference to “the charm kissers, the pagans and those who bow and prostrate themselves on the tombs of the righteous.”
American politics has wedge issues; in Israel it’s down to open-faced insults – secular against religious, leftist against rightist, Tel Aviv against Judea and Samaria, and, of course, the good old ethnic demon.
In that spirit, the Likud could not possibly have let this challenge (albeit implied) to its combined intelligence go without turning it into a nourishing shakshuka. And so, Coalition Chairman David Bitan (Likud) called Rosenthal a racist, adding that the voters are the ones who crowned Likud, with their full knowledge of the bottom ten MKs on the list (which is inaccurate, since several of those have been pulled out for bigger and better jobs—and replaced).
“This comment smells of snobbishness, racism, and anti-Sephardic preferences, because it is well known that our last set of ten MKs are mostly of Sephardic descent,” said Bitan. Tell that to MK Yehuda Glick…
MK Oren Hazan had the best retort, which we hope he’ll keep hammering in until Rosenthal is obligated to respond: “I invite Rosenthal to a chess match,” he told a morning TV show on Sunday.
And let Rosenthal start with the white pieces…