The Great Schlep

Ariely was booked in a block of coach seats that had been reserved by the America-Israel Democracy (AID) Coalition, a nonprofit based in Pennsylvania that seeks to mobilize Israeli citizens and “concerned Americans” in “preserving the democratic foundations of the state of Israel.” (Simon bought his own ticket, in business class, on the same flight.) The AID Coalition was formed in 2src23, after Netanyahu proposed that the Knesset, by majority vote, should be able to overrule Supreme Court decisions. That move sparked enormous street protests in Israel, and alarmed many Israeli citizens overseas.

When the election date was set, this past July—spurred by the legal mandate that Israel hold a parliamentary election at least every four years—the war that Israel and the U.S. had launched against Iran was in its fifth month. Many foreign airlines had paused service to Israel. On those airlines that hadn’t, prices were steep; in May, a round-trip coach seat on our route from New York was running as high as twenty-five hundred dollars. The AID Coalition launched an initiative, Fly&Vote, to help people get back to cast their ballots.

Officially, AID is nonpartisan and assists any eligible voter, irrespective of their political leanings. “We don’t ask,” Batell Blaish-Sultanik, the group’s executive director, told me. Under Israeli election law, it is illegal to provide free or subsidized trips. AID bought blocks of seats on Arkia Israeli Airlines at a commercial rate, securing around a hundred seats on each of five inbound flights before the election and five outbound flights after it. Tickets were then sold to voters at set prices at the lower end of the market rate—topping out at nine hundred dollars each way. Hagai Nassau, an environmental consultant in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who left Israel as a five-year-old and now sports a graying beard, told me that he had glanced at flights on El Al “and it was, like, three thousand bucks. So I was, like, I’ll do Fly&Vote.”

Of course, for some overseas Israeli citizens, price is no object. Soon after chatting with Nassau at our gate, I spotted Neri Oxman, an Israeli-born architect and the wife of the hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, by a barista counter in the Centurion Lounge. Ackman was sitting nearby. Oxman told me that she saw no option but to return for this election. “It’s so important,” she said, stiffening up like a soldier. “I’m doing my civic duty.” They would be flying El Al.

More than thirty-five thousand overseas Israeli citizens registered to receive information about the AID Coalition’s reserved seats, and for access to a bespoke search engine that had been programmed to find other, affordable options, with complicated itineraries and long layovers. AID estimates that more than sixty thousand will ultimately vote on October 27th.

Netanyahu’s Likud Party clearly regards overseas voters as an obstacle—perhaps even an enemy. While there is scant survey data on the political leanings of Israelis who live abroad, they tend to be secular and more educated, and it is assumed that they skew anti-Netanyahu. More than a quarter of a million people have left the country since 2src23. In August, Likud’s attorneys accused the AID Coalition of bribing voters, and brought legal action to try to block its efforts. Three weeks before the election, the chairman of Israel’s Central Elections Committee dismissed the case, but the AID Coalition agreed not to buy more blocks on additional flights. Over the summer, anonymous sources inside Israel’s Transportation Ministry, which is helmed by the populist Likud provocateur Miri Regev, leaked to Israeli media that officials were plotting to reduce capacity at the country’s only major international airport in order to stop anti-Likud voters from arriving. (The AID Coalition has distributed the phone numbers of attorneys to call if any of its passengers run into trouble at passport control.)

Besides the Fly&Vote initiative, several other efforts to bring in voters seem to be under way. A group called Mind-IL is running something called Israeli Science and Academia Week—fifty-nine scholarly conferences, ranging in topics from A.I. to zoology, which all conclude the day before the election. Organizers expect to draw well over three thousand participants, many from overseas. Guli Dolev-Hashiloni, an Israeli-born scholar and activist who is flying in from Berlin, where he is a Ph.D. student in Jewish history, categorized the conferences as “a very good subversive act of Israeli academia that enables people to come back to vote without taking vacation days.” Ran I. Snitkovsky, a member of Mind-IL’s steering committee and a professor at the business school of Tel Aviv University, insisted that any intimation that he and his colleagues were gaming the electoral system was unfair. “We realized there will be a lot of people that want to be here, and we wanted to take advantage of that,” Snitkovsky told me. The result, whatever the intention, will be hundreds of foreign-based academics flying to Israel the week of the election, many on stipends from their universities. Meital Avivi-Reich, an Israeli-born expert on the science of speech perception, who teaches at CUNY, applied for fifteen hundred dollars in funding to present her research at one of the Mind-IL conferences. That will help with the airfare, she told me, but she still plans to stay with her mother and then crash with friends during her shoestring voting-cum-conference trip, doing “a night here, a night there.”