by Ari Sharp
Today Ari reports from an Internet Cafe just off Ben Yehuda street in Jerusalem, two blocks away from where Malki Roth, an Australian, was killed in a terrorist attack at a pizzeria in mid-2002.
In Israel, life is politics, and politics is life. It is incredible that in a country of just on 6 million people, over 600,000 are members of a political party. Of those, 300,000 are members of the governing Likud party. Mathematically therefore, 1 in 20 people are members of the ruling political party. Contrast this with a more relaxed democracy such as Australia, where political party membership is well short of 1% of the population.
One of the consequences of this higher level of civic participation is that people wear their political colours with pride. Many Israelis proudly sport political bumper stickers on the back of their car, and political propaganda of one flavour or another is draped out the window of just about any prominent public place.