As Israel Goes to the Polls Next Tuesday:
Part One — Understanding the Parties and the System
by
DOV FISCHER
April 6, 2019, 11:01 AM
Israel
goes to national elections this Tuesday, April 9. Except for the third
paragraph herein, this article does not advocate but seeks to explain to
the curious reader how democracy works in Israeli national elections:
specifically explaining (i) the contending parties and (ii) the
electoral system. My next column will review highlights of the
three-month campaign and predict the results. This review is a bit long
because there are so many parties contending and such a curious system
to describe.
Because
Israel is the only country in the entire Middle East that is an
American-style democracy, it is hated by radical-left faculty and
student activists on American campuses. They would boycott Israel, force
their universities to divest holdings in American companies that
operate in Israel, and they would impose sanctions on Israel. There even
are campus boycotts of a company that makes kosher hummus in Astoria,
Queens and in Virginia because the company’s name is Israeli.
By contrast, there is no American college BDS (boycott, divest,
sanction) movement aimed at Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela, Saudi
Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Cuba, or the like. The campus leftists
advocate for terrorist groups like Hamas, the PLO of Abu Mazen (Mahmoud
Abbas), Islamic Jihad, and such. That is the state of our campuses
today, where professors can advocate the most anti-American views
imaginable, all while brainwashing their young minions to hate America,
to hate capitalism, to promote open borders, and to love socialism and
bread lines. They can teach this garbage because they never can be fired
by virtue of “academic tenure.” Furthermore, they assure that scholars
who disagree with their leftist radicalism never get tenure to balance
their teachings because the professors on the inside do the hiring.
As to all the campus people, leftist activists, and dictatorships mentioned above, four simple words: To Hell with them.
OK, now to explaining this Tuesday’s Israeli elections.
When Israel’s first president, Chaim Weitzmann, initially met with
United States President Harry Truman, the latter said that he bore great
responsibilities as President of 150 million people. Weitzmann
responded, “Yes, but I am President of nearly a million Presidents.” In Israel’s free-wheeling democracy,everyone has an opinion and knows that it is safe to express it. Thus, dozens of different political slates compete for Knesset (Parliament).
Unlike here, where you choose between two major-party candidates or perhaps among three or four people on a ballot when minor parties also compete, in Israel you vote for a political party.
Each party internally selects its prospective MKs (Members of Knesset)
and publishes the list of names in order. Thus, if the party wins
eighteen seats, the first eighteen names on their list get in. There are
a total of 120 seats in the Knesset (“Assembly”) because the Jewish
people were led 2,500 years ago in Babylonia by the 120 “Men of the
Great Assembly” (Anshei Knesset HaG’dolah),
and modern-day Israel’s founders thought it would be cute to emulate
that name and number, linking to Judaic heritage. In terms of
brilliance, wisdom, and insight, they don’t make ’em like they used to.
Contemplate a ballot with dozens of
parties. Here we have Democrats, Republicans, sometimes a Green Party,
sometimes Libertarians. Obama’s CIA chief, Jim Brennan, had the
Communist Party to vote for. But dozens? The main two parties are Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu’s Likud (pronounced: Lee-kood’) and Benjamin (“Benny”) Gantz’s Blue & White. Or, as the Jew-hater Ilhan Omar might say: “It’s about the Benjamins, baby.”
1. The Parties
The
Likud (literally, the “Consolidation” because it comprises a merger of
several parties) is a politically centrist-conservative party, akin to
the Republicans. That is, compared to the other guys, they are
conservative, but not consistently so. Like the GOP they talk a
conservative game, especially at election time, but then consistently
disappoint once elected. That is why there are so many smaller, more
ideologically committed parties competing against them. It may be
compared to a situation where the Tea Party here regularly would field a
slate to run against both the Democrats and the GOP.
Before returning to discuss the Blue & White and other smaller
parties on the Left, a closer look at the smaller parties to Likud’s
right.
Avigdor
Liberman, an anti-communist from Russia, was a chief of staff to Bibi,
but they had a falling out. So Liberman formed his own party, appealing
primarily to the hundreds of thousands of secular Russian émigrés who
fled to Israel in the 1970s and 1980s from the former Soviet Union. They
all have one thing in common: they hate communism intensely.
Liberman has been Israel’s Defense Minister and for a while even served
as Foreign Minister (Secretary of State). He is very firm on defense
matters and has criticized Netanyahu for not striking hard enough at
Hamas in Gaza. For peace, he would offer a land swap: Israel would
receive regions of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) that have heavily
concentrated Jewish populations, and Israel would give the Arabs
similar-sized regions in the Galilee that are heavily Arab populated.
The idea is a non-starter because neither side will agree to it. His
party also is somewhat anti-religious because they all grew up under
atheist Marxism, and that stuck. They resent that Israel’s Chief
Rabbinate oversees matters of marriage, divorce, and religious status,
and they resent that Israel gives draft deferments to full-time adult
yeshiva students. There is a Judaic tradition of two thousand years that
people who spend all day every day in academies that
teach advanced Torah and Talmudic studies (“Yeshivas”) also thereby
contribute to the nation’s well-being. The secular founders of Israel
agreed in the 1940s that such young men would receive exemptions from
military service, much as America gives a 4-D deferment to clergy. Liberman’s party opposes those exemptions.
Israel’s Orthodox Jews who are most identified with “old world” traditions (the “Haredi” Jews, pronounced: khah-ray’-dee)
— and who are recognized by their black coats, black fedora hats, and
white shirts — are strong advocates of those military exemptions for the
full-time adult yeshiva students. The Haredi Orthodox also advocate for
other traditionally conservative social and religious values, and they
run three separate slates. One slate, UTJ (United Torah Judaism), merges two parties that represent different streams of Haredi Ashkenazic Jews whose lineages trace to Eastern Europe: the “Hasidic” stream and the “Lithuanian” stream. (For now, we shall leave it at that.) A second party, “Shas” (pronounced: shahss), represents Haredi Sephardic Jews who trace back to North African Arab Muslim countries (Morocco, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, etc.) from which the Arabs and other Muslims hatefully expelled them. (When Fake News speaks of “Palestinian refugees,” actually the Arabs drove out 850,000 Jews.
The reason those Jews are not deemed “refugees” is that Israel
welcomed, cared for, absorbed and integrated them into the society. Many
are darker-skinned, and the Sephardic Jews actually comprise half of
Israel’s population.) The Shas party stands for the same things that UTJ
stands for, but they run separate slates because of ethnic differences.
There was yet another such party, Yachad (pronounced: yah’-khod), representing Haredi Jews from Tunisia,
but that party recently withdrew, telling its backers instead to vote
for UTJ because the Yachad leader had been a leader in Shas but got into
a kerfuffle with them. If this is sounding confusing, now you know why
this article focuses on explaining the convoluted.
Many of Israel’s Orthodox Jews are more “Modern Orthodox.” Unlike the Haredi Orthodox, the Modern Orthodox
go to secular universities, watch television, go to movies, read
secular publications and books, and more likely engage in secular
professions. They wear knitted yarmulkas instead of black fedoras. In
Israel, the Modern Orthodox are known as “Religious Zionists.” They are
splintered like all the others. In this election, two of their main
segments are running together as “Union of Right Wing Parties” (URWP —
too many words in Hebrew to pronounce). One party within the URWP slate
is Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home), which stands for religious
studies and training, Orthodox social and religious values, and also
strongly participates in all aspects of everyday social life. Their
young men proudly join the military, and they have an arrangement (hesder)
with the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) that allows them to study Torah
and Talmud during periods of their military service in return for longer
service. Bayit Yehudi strongly supports Jewish rights to live in and
populate communities throughout Judea and Samaria (what the UN, MSNBC,
and CNN call the “West Bank”). The other party merged with them is Ichud Leumi (National Union), and they are very much like Bayit Yehudi, only more so. That
is, they advocate even more strongly for building new Judea-Samaria
communities. (The UN calls them “settlements.”) Those two parties merged
for this election.
The
Religious Zionist URWP was jolted at the outset of the campaign when
their leader, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, broke from the party
with Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked to form a new party, “The New Right.”
Bennett aspires to be Defense Minister with Shaked continuing as
Justice Minister, and they felt they could expand their appeal to
conservative but secular voters by running on a slate less identified
with religious focus. Bennett would bring a much harder line as Defense
Minister to the way Israel responds to Hamas rockets and other attacks
from Gaza, while Shaked has proven especially effective in breaking the
decades-long stranglehold the Left has had on Israel’s judiciary.
Kulanu (pronounced: koo-lah’-noo)
was formed by Moshe Kahlon (thus a play on his name), a long-time Likud
Knesset member who formed his own party to work more actively for the
economically disadvantaged and lower class. (As with Liberman the
Russian, many individuals within a party’s leadership find they have
limited impact in getting their party to focus on their pet issues, so
they eventually form their own independent parties to push their issue
of choice.) Meanwhile, another former Likud Knesset member, Moshe
Feiglin, was pushed out of Likud and therefore formed his own party, Zehut (pronounced: zi-hoot’).
He is well known as a long-time advocate of annexing Judea and Samaria
to Israel (as Israel did with East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights). He
also advocates several libertarian economic, educational, and social
principles. Initially, he was not expected to do well, but he thereafter
expanded his libertarian platform to include legalizing marijuana.
Historically, the “weed vote” went to the “Green Leaf Party” (seriously,
no joke), but they did not file to contend this year (lots of jokes
why), and Feiglin has attracted the marijuana vote. Dude!
On the other side of the aisle, back to the other major contending party: Benny Gantz’s Blue & White. Three retired generals (Gantz, Moshe Yaalon, and Gabi Ashkenazi) each decided to run. Gantz formed the Resilience party, and Yaalon formed the Telem party.
As polls showed them both doing poorly, they decided to merge and
invite Ashkenazi to join them. They agreed that Gantz, who was polling
best, should be their leader. Next they had to figure out a way to
create a centrist platform that still might attract some on the left
since the parties described earlier have locked up the center-right.
However, they still were not running well in the polls. They therefore
further merged their parties with Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid (There
Is a Future) party. Lapid, a former journalist and TV news anchor, has
been in the Knesset for six years, was Finance Minister, and his Yesh
Atid (pronounced: ah-teed’) party therefore was more
established. Convinced that all their respective parties would fall to
the Likud coalition, Lapid and the generals finally merged into the
“Blue & White” (colors of Israel’s flag). The sticking point was
that Lapid, the most politically established, would not merge unless the
generals would agree that he would be their candidate for top spot,
prime minister. However, the others insisted on Gantz. In a compromise
after weeks of horse-trading, they agreed that, if Blue & White
wins, Gantz will be prime minister for the first two years with Lapid as
foreign minister and Yaalon as defense minister. Then for the second
two years of the four-year term, Lapid will alternate as prime minister,
Gantz will be defense minister, and Yaalon will figure out something to
do.
Historically, from 1948-1977, the powerhouse party in Israel had been the socialist Labor Party. At their zenith they
regularly would win 45 or so seats. All the famous left-wing socialist
Israeli leaders whom America’s Democrats and media adored — David
Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Abba Eban, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon
Peres — were Labor socialists. By 1977, Israelis had gotten sick of
socialism, elected Menachem Begin, and Israelis have shunned the Left
ever since. On the one or two occasions when people voted for a change,
so elected Labor, those governments collapsed very soon thereafter and
were replaced by alternative center-right coalitions. Over time, as the
country’s voting population has moved to the right, Labor has lost sway.
They are expected to win one-fourth the seats they used to win.
Another even smaller party running even farther to their left is Meretz. Meretz has been around for several terms in different iterations, and they round out the serious left. There also are four Arab parties running.
One outright advocates communism. Another is running on a platform that
pretty much would terminate Israel. Those two Arab parties have merged
for the election. Two other competing Arab parties are less radical and
separately are merged. So the election includes four Arab parties merged
into two blocs. (And American leftist professors and their BDS student
radicals question democracy and freedoms accorded to Arabs in Israel?)
2. The System
With so many parties contending — not to mention the many others
not discussed here because they have no chance — Israel has a rule that
no party can enter the Knesset unless it obtains at least 3.25 percent
(the “threshold”) of the total votes cast. Because the Knesset is
comprised of 120 seats, any party that does meet that threshold
stands in most cases to enter with at least four seats. That means that
a party that wins enough votes for “only” three seats — that is one-fortieth of the 120-seat Knesset, or approximately 2.5 percent of the vote — does not get
in. In such case, all three seats it seemed to earn instead are lost
and wasted (similar to the way that Republican votes are lost in close
American elections when people vote Libertarian, while Democrats lose
votes when left-wingers waste them on the Green Party, Ralph Nader, the
Communist Party, and the like). This explains why so many of the parties
described above have merged for Tuesday’s elections. Fearing that they
respectively each might poll below the 3.25% threshold, two smaller
parties polling at 2% each, or three smaller parties polling at 1.5%
each, hope thereby to exceed the threshold together. Thus, they merge
lists and reorder the names. With so much at stake, where a party that
draws three percent of the vote could just barely miss the threshold,
wasting votes that could secure three seats, the two Religious Zionist
parties (Jewish Home and National Union) comprising URWP agreed to
include in their deal a third party (Otzma), more extreme, solely for
the sake of the elections; as soon as the votes are counted, the third
party will divorce from the other two and probably will emerge with one
seat.
Once
all the ballots are counted, all votes that were cast for parties
failing to meet the threshold are discarded. The remaining valid votes
are divided by 120, and every party above the threshold receives its
number of seats. Obviously, that math will leave “remainders” of votes
because parties do not get precisely the number of votes per seat. Under
Israeli election law, every contending slate may make a deal in advance
of elections with another slate to pool their “remainders” so that,
together, they might qualify for one more seat, which goes to the slate
with the larger remainder. So UTJ and Shas have a remainder deal, as do
Likud with URWP, Labor with Meretz, Bennett’s New Right with Liberman
the Russian, and the two Arab slates with each other.
Once
each party finally is determined to have won its designated number of
seats, the next round of horse-trading begins. The President of Israel,
an apolitical figure, designates the head of one of the largest
vote-getting parties, the one deemed to have the best chance of forming a
government, to cobble together a coalition. That person then has 45
days to convince other parties to form a government with his. He needs
61 seats to have a majority. Towards that end, he negotiates their
respective demands and priorities, promises them cabinet ministries they
most covet, and cobbles together a deal. This year’s horse-trading will
be a mess because so many small parties will be needed to coalesce to
61.
Most
polls show Netanyahu’s Likud running two or three seats behind Gantz’s
Blue & White for first place, but the polls also predict a combined
advantage to the several religious-right parties to aggregate to 62-66
seats under the Likud’s leadership, while the Left parties of Labor,
Meretz, and Blue & White probably will combine for 45 or so seats.
The Arab parties stand to emerge with 7-12 seats. However, when
Netanyahu starts trying to hammer together a coalition, he will find
Feiglin of Zehut demanding to be Finance Minister and to legalize
marijuana, while the Haredi parties will oppose. Liberman will demand
certain restrictions on religion that will run counter to the Haredi and
to the Religious Zionists’ positions. Liberman wants to be Defense
Minister, as does Bennett. It will be a mess. This is where Hamas,
Hezbollah, and the terrorists who are backed by Abu Mazen (Mahmoud
Abbas) help out — because, with such Arab neighbors lurking, ultimately
the parties find a way to live together.
The
Israeli religious-right coalition experimented once before with
fracturing itself into a million points of light, and that 1992
electoral disaster ended up costing them control — even though they won
the majority of votes — because several small conservative parties each
barely failed to meet the threshold. The religious-right votes that were
discarded could have accounted for three seats. Instead, the
religious-right coalition fell just one short at 59 seats, enabling
Yitzhak Rabin and Labor barely to take power and then stick Israel with
its worst catastrophe since the early days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War:
the disastrous 1994 Oslo Catastrophe.
The voting is on Tuesday. That allows just enough time to make sense of all this. Surely, this graph makes it all much more clear:
