Israel's dysfunctional politics pose a direct threat to the future of the state
Between 2003 and 2015 there were five national elections in Israel. That number is not unusual for a parliamentary democracy, where who forms government is decided by which party or coalition of parties can command a majority in the legislature, while states that use a presidential system tend to have longer, fixed terms. However between 2019 and 2022 Israel also had five elections, including two in 2019 separated by just five months. The most recent election, in November 2022, produced yet another weak and fractious six party coalition that seems unlikely to last. Indeed, some analysts are predicting another election within the next year. What has happened to the country that a stable government that lasts a full term now seems like a thing of the past?
There is a large body of political science research dedicated to examining how differing electoral systems, that is how votes cast translate into seats won by parties and candidates, affect government outcomes. To complicate the already complex, there are almost infinite variables at play. From the type of system – parliamentary or presidential, the party system – two longstanding parties or one in constant flux with parties emerging and then declining, to the number of elected entities – a single national parliament such as in Israel or both a legislative and presidential system combined as in the United States, and so on. What is most important to understand is that these electoral mechanisms have real world consequences for the political culture, security and even stability of any democracy. To pick an obvious example: without the anachronism of the United States Electoral College, Donald Trump would never have become US president.
Therefore to understand how Israeli politics has become almost hopelessly divided, resulting in a sclerotic parliament that now only briefly sits between endless elections, the focus must be on that country's electoral system. To look at, this appears to be designed to be both simple and fair. In each national election voters elect members to the 120 seat Knesset. This is done through party list proportional representation, with the threshold set at 3.25% (votes are cast for parties, not individual candidates). Thus any party that exceeds that threshold earns that many seats in the Knesset, so 25% of the vote would equal 25% or 30 seats. The party or parties that can then form a majority of 61+ seats form the government. In theory this sounds like the ideal way to translate votes into seats as accurately as possible, far more so than countries that still rely on a two party system. However in practice this does not always produce functional let alone representative governments.
You don't need to be a political scientist to recognise that achieving just 3.25% of the vote is an exceptionally low bar to clear in order to achieve parliamentary representation. This in turn has engendered a political culture of niche rather than large, catch-all, parties. And in turn, at every election these fracture into ever-smaller entities, often with only academic differences between them ideologically. For example, in the 2015 election 10 parties won seats out of 25 that contested the poll, however by the 2022 election while once again only 10 parties cleared the threshold, 40 parties (a large number in a country of only 9 million people) offered voters far too many confusing choices. This is because these parties are continually uniting in temporary coalitions, merging with other parties or simply dissolving. So the electoral landscape is one in constant upheaval.
The second major consequence of this electoral system is that it incentivises personalist politics. These small parties are usually centred around an ambitious leader, and the party's focus becomes promoting its leader, satisfying the party's core supporters and strengthening its bargaining position for the inevitable coalition talks after the election (no single party has ever won a majority in the Knesset, so all governments are coalitions, the current one being made up of six parties). Further down the list of priorities is governing in the national interest, with leaders often willing to negotiate downward in order to be a part of the next government. Of course ambitious politicians putting self-interest first is not a failing unique to Israel, the difference compared to other democracies is the personalist nature of the parties and their transience. Other democracies usually have long established major parties that either have a chance at governing in a majority, or clearly articulated policy positions they couldn't abandon without facing serious electoral blowback.
Israel's political system has remained mostly unchanged since its founding in 1948, what has shifted dramatically is both the makeup of the state and its position in the world. And it's these factors that have lead to the current political fracturing. For its first couple of decades the new country's politics was dominated by the centre-left Mapai Party (which today's Labor Party is descended from), led by Israel's first Prime Minster, David Ben-Gurion, from 1930 until 1965. Then from the 1970s into the 2000s there was essentially a two party system, with Labor and the centre-right Likud Party (founded in 1973) alternating control of the government. However in 2006 there was a split within Likud, with popular (if controversial) PM Ariel Sharon taking many centrists into his new party, Kadima. However Kadima could not last (in Israel's brutal and fast-changing political culture the party that won the most seats in the 2009 election was defunct by 2015), and Likud revived itself as a far more conservative entity, now very much a reflection of its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.
While he had three fairly undistinguished years as prime minister in the late 1990s, since he regained the top job in 2009 Netanyahu has become the dominant figure in Israeli politics. Like his mentor, Sharon, Netanyahu is polarising and controversial, but his status of Israel's longest serving PM is no accident. It's obvious, if unacknowledged, that he has no real interest in negotiating a permanent peace with the Palestinians, indeed settlement building in the West Bank has greatly increased during his tenure. However what foreign observers often miss is that the Palestinian question is often not the central even a major one when it comes to judging the success of a government, and by other metrics Netanyahu has been a skilful and very successful leader. A fluent English speaker, he has travelled widely, enhancing Israel's standing in the world. Before the COVID-19 pandemic his governments had also delivered a decade of strong economic growth.
However, most crucially, Netanyahu heads Likud, Israel's largest and most cohesive political party, and he has been the biggest beneficiary of the decline of Labor, which hasn't led a government since 2001. There are many reasons for this, the failed Oslo peace process of the 1990s which was driven by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (who was assassinated by a Jewish ultranationalist in 1995) being considered central. Labor seemingly surrendered a lot of its credentials as the vanguard of political Zionism, with offers such as ceding Jerusalem to the Palestinians, yet ended up with nothing to show for this. The rocky leadership of Ehud Barak was also a factor, with the party even having a schism of its own in 2011. So with no meaningful major opposition to consolidate the anti-Likud/anti-Netanyahu vote, and the country drifting ever more rightward, Bibi is inescapable.
There are two major reasons for this rightward tilt. The major external factor was the collapse of the Soviet Union, as since 1990 almost a million Jews from former communist countries have moved to Israel. While just about every other country puts migrants on a (long) path towards citizenship and voting rights, seeing these as privileges to be earned, under Israeli law new arrivals can vote in elections and thus instantly become part of the political culture. Over the last three decades there have been measurable difference in attitudes from these more recent arrivals to those who have lived in the Middle East for generations. The trend has been that Jews who coexisted with their Arab neighbours for several generations tend to have more sympathy for the Palestinians' cause than recent arrivals from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and these new Israelis vote accordingly.
The largest internal change has been the rise of the ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jews. Overall Israeli birthrates are comparable to most other developed economies, however the birthrate for the ultra-Orthodox is 6.7 children per woman, and by 2050 this population will make up one third of all Israeli Jews. With this fast growth comes increased political power, yet this is not matched with contributions to Israeli society. In 2021 the unemployment rate for Haredi men was 44% compared to 14% for their non-Haredi counterparts (yet close to 80% of Haredi women engage in paid work and thus pay taxes). Consequently, in 2019 44% of Haredis lived in poverty. What the men do instead of work is study, 40 hours a week or more until the age of 40, and only Torah study, with many of these “graduates” being unsuitable to enter the workforce or the military, never having learned mathematics, English, finance, anything useful for the modern world. (Also in 2019, just 1222 Haredi men and 0 women joined the Israeli Defence Forces, in a country with mandatory military service.) And the state subsidises all this at a cost of roughly US$8 billion per year. Any suggestion of cutting these generous payments, including the childcare allowance that permits Haredi women to work outside the home, is met with furious opposition from the ultra-Orthodox political parties, and as Netanyahu needs these as part of his coalition, progress is unlikely.
So through this combination of factors politics in Israel has become gridlocked. The voting system designed in the 1940s no longer produces working governments, and the original decision to subside the yeshiva studies ultra-Orthodox Jews was not an threat to the future of the state when this community only numbered in the thousands. With increasing political representation of Arab Israelis and no consolidated centre-left bloc, the country is likely to remain dominated by the priorities of Benjamin Netanyahu, proved in the most recent government forming negotiations that he is prepared to say, promise and do anything to stay in the office of prime minster and out of court or prison. The mass protests over his proposed extreme judicial reforms are the price Israel is paying for Bibi's determination. As with Donald Trump's malign influence on American politics and society, it could be another generation before Israel can move beyond the Netanyahu era.
Considering all this, it is hard to be optimistic about Israel's future. One suggested remedy has been to raise the threshold to enter the Knesset from 3.25 to 5% of the national vote. This, it is hoped, might discourage the maintenance of multiple overlapping small parties and encourage mergers which would result in more manageable coalitions. Israel will also have to start seriously considering how to better integrate the fast-growing Haredi population into broader civil society, which may include some of the unpopular (with the ultra-Orthodox) policies of the previous government, but addressing this would take more political courage than seems to be in existence at the moment. And of course there is always the threat of a third intifada. As Israel struggles with its own problems, the urgent Palestinian question remains defiantly unanswered.