Everyone in Israel, and many in the Diaspora have what they believe to be the obvious solution to the political maelstrom created by the six parties Likud alliance. (1) No one appears to be trying to understand how Israel arrived at this point and what conditions are required to ensure peaceful change.
In a distant future historians will examine the issues that caused the crisis in Western (and that includes Israeli) parliamentary government. This crisis has encouraged a populist revolt against democratic norms. Mutual tolerance and consensual political conduct have been replaced by political polarisation and unrestrained public hostility. The only possible outcome of behaviour our politicians have encouraged is division and national fragmentation. We have lost sight of society’s necessity for unity. It cannot happen under the current Likud coalition nor is the opposition capable of gathering sufficient votes to win power. I do have a solution but first we must go back to basics.
What is government? In a democracy, it is an elected group of representatives given the authority (by virtue of their successful election) to manage the affairs of state. To paraphrase Hillel, all else is commentary. In order to manage this, compromise is needed so that the greatest number of people within society are, if not happy, then comfortable with the decisions made on their behalf. The government sets taxation policy; redistributes taxes collected and any other sources of revenue. In short, it keeps the lights on and the people safe from harm.
Everything else is open to negotiation. Usually, change is incremental, not radical. People on all sides of the political landscape will feel that they share the future through constructive engagement in the political process.
In theory, parties coalesce around an ideology that binds all its members. Political parties are supposed to have a vision for the kind of society they want to see, and they achieve that vision through how they manage the country’s resources.
Simple so far.
If we examine the current government and the previous one, each constituent party had and has its red lines that are difficult if not impossible to reconcile with constructive coalition membership. The Likud is conservative, nationalist, liberal and populist. Religious Zionism is exclusive (therefore uncompromising) and ultra-nationalist. United Torah Judaism (UTJ) is two parties – the one, ultra-orthodox the other, non-Zionist. Otzma Yehudit is radical right-wing and theocratic while Noam is religiously messianic and conservative.
Fragmentation and mutually antagonistic ideologies do not create stable governments but can be profitable for their constituents if they exclude everyone who did not vote for them.
The parties of the Left have never understood that success means broad-based identification with their ideologies. They have always been more comfortable making “back-room” deals and imposing their will on the nation. “We know best” is an attitude of political blindness; it is patronising and condescending. Unsurprisingly, the Left has failed to attract voters to the parties of the opposition in sufficient numbers to win power. It is an attitude that has rendered the parties of the Left an Israeli anachronism.
Menachem Begin, the quietly modest, religious leader of the Likud rose to power in 1977 on a wave of popular Mizrachi discontent that had been brewing since the mass immigration of the early independence period; the parties of the Left were obsessed with their own image, even as it worked against them. The irony is that intermarriage between Western and Near-Eastern Jews, which was running at 22% in the early 1970s, has been increasing at a rate of 1% per year ever since. (2)
I am going to refer to all English-speaking people as well as all Europeans in Israel as “Western;” they are not all Ashkenazim, so that description is inaccurate and misleading.
Non-Westerners are an absolute majority, and the children of intermarried families are not even counted. So, the irony of the Right governing Israel, almost exclusively from 1977 until the present time is that Mizrahim have risen to the top of Western institutions and Western parties while simultaneously attacking, the Western “elite”.
One simple example of how dysfunctional the argument over ethnicity is, happened recently when a Likud activist declared that all Israeli Westerners should be (or should have been) murdered while admiring the ultimate symbol of the Western elite, Benjamin Netanyahu. The Likud survives because it encourages feelings of victimhood. It feeds off of feelings of resentment and anger and it is willing to transfer any amount of money its religious partners ask for in order to survive.
Patronage is defined as funding that primarily or exclusively benefits one group of people even though the funding comes from a much wider community of taxpayers. It is Israel’s time-honoured means by which parties cling to power.
Secularism, liberalism, and the pursuit of Western ‘norms’ are the traits of the opposing parties, but why are these traits so important? The Western World has managed to celebrate anti-Judaism almost as an act of secular faith (in spite of the Shoah) while ignoring (or worse, justifying) nearly every egregious act of terror carried out by the non-democratic nations of the world. It does not make an attractive model to emulate. It seems logical to assume that the only thing the Western world is good at, is making money and hating Jews. Is all else in the West hypocrisy and lies?
Over 30% of Israelis (of all faiths) identify as religious. Pork Barrel politics is a not a recipe for long-term survival because there are so many different communities all of which can lay claim to being communities of special interest – Arab, Druse, ultra-Orthodox, Circassian, Christian or Bedouin. There will be others I have insulted by omission. Each can legitimately claim that they deserve distinctive consideration to the exclusion of the rest. It represents disintegration instead of unity. Pork Barrel Politics is the deliberate misuse of large amounts of public money aimed at retaining the loyalty of special interest groups at the expense of everyone else. It defines how a corrupt regime retains power. It is not what Israel needs for its survival. Being a nation state begins with encouraging unity, not separation.
Recognition that we are not all the same means that we should aim to encourage tolerance while dispelling prejudice. This is the opposite of what the Likud and its partners is doing.
How does the opposition reconcile its secular and liberal, social democratic agenda with a need to woo Israel’s minorities? Every time someone makes a statement that disparages one of Israel’s “minorities” (45% is the maximum percentage of Westerners in Israel) it reinforces the mood that the Western elite despises everyone ‘not like them’.
When every word that comes out of our mouths should be carefully considered, one of the hallmarks of our age appears to be spontaneity of expression, no matter who we hurt. We are living in a world of social media egocentrism and irresponsibility. Instead of thinking “peace and love”, we seek out controversy; we are far more squeamish about love than we are about hate. Hate is easy and excites a dedicated fan base that can never get enough of it. This is why the Likud remains in power.
Instead of confronting those who encourage prejudice the Opposition feeds into this divisive debate by failing to act against it in every possible venue, publicly and privately.
The Cult of the Self animates Israels’ political classes and instead of aiming to create a national community, each party encourages fame or notoriety for its leadership and a social media presence that centres on personal recognition instead of political unity. Israel’s proportional representation system is a catastrophic failure because it encourages a cult of the individual and a multiplicity of isolated communities of special interest.
It cannot create unity across ethnic, class and religious grounds because every single special interest group has its own party. (3)
Thirty-nine parties participated in the 25th Knesset Election and ten passed the threshold of 3.25% to take up their seats in the Knesset. That is thirty-nine parties with separate visions. Let’s be fair, one party was run by a twenty-year-old while a second was named “The Pirates Party”. But that still leaves thirty-seven parties. Thirty-seven parties that are so intolerant of diversity, they must run on separate tickets.
If Israel’s opposition wants to create a stable and sustainable Knesset majority, it must find common ground and a shared vision for the Zionist future. That requires an appreciation of what unites the Centre and those groups around the margins of the Centre on both Left and Right. It requires appreciation of what unites us, a shared manifesto allowing as many people as possible to identify with The Party.
Before redistribution of seats, the Likud received just 23.41% of the vote. That is not rule by consent. Many in the Likud will be unhappy with the contempt that Bibi and his partners have demonstrated for rule by consent. Just as the 24th Knesset was not a mandate for radical change because it too was a government of too many parties so, neither can the 25th Knesset be described as possessing a legitimate mandate for the radical change it is carrying out. Consensus nurtures non-confrontational change. Consensus can exist between opposition and government. There is little consensus in Israeli politics, which is ironic because as a faith, Judaism is credited with giving the Western world the philosophy of the Golden Mean (4). Both Plato and Aristotle discussed it, but a thousand years later than its first appearance in Jewish ethical and moral literature. The Golden Mean is consensus and all else is commentary. The present government comprises parties that claim to be Jewishly religious and yet one of Israel’s key contributions to human civilization, is violently rejected by them. There is no effort at real compromise, no attempt to bring on board the other side; consensus is not part of the coalition platform for change.
And here lies the central issue with this Likud led government. In place of compromise, we have contemptuous disregard for unity, community, and co-existence. This is rule by provocation, a government of revolutionary change. It is undermining the institutions of the State through its constant attacks on those institutions.
Polls have consistently shown that while Israeli’s have no respect for the government there are three national institutions that have always been shown to be almost universally respected. They are the Presidency, the Supreme Court and the IDF. All have been consistently attacked from this government. Frighteningly, more than anything else this government is doing, this behaviour undermines the social fabric as well as the security of the State of Israel.
On the 13th of August this year it was reported that a senior religious figure had called for the release of the convicted murderer of three Palestinians. He had called the killers detention ‘evil.’ Both pre-World War 2 Japan and Nazi Germany came to power by undermining the judiciary and therefore, destroying the rule of law. Every time a member of the radical Right wing attacked and killed a member of parliament or another public figure, the perpetrators would either be released after a short period of incarceration, or they would be found not guilty. The Left had no such protection under the law. (5) Increasingly, fear undermined State institutions and the rule of law was replaced by state sanctioned terror.
We ignore the lessons of history at our peril.
It seems that barely a day goes by when there is not a headline concerning a member of this government attacking the military or, an ultra-Orthodox family attacking a woman in uniform. This isn’t because they believe in God’s intervention – it is hatred. Hatred for the secular world and hatred for its institutions. The IDF has protected the people living in Israel from being subjected to genocide by the Muslim nations surrounding us. How can it be justified that those who refuse to serve or were deemed unfit to serve, are now at liberty to actively undermine that institution? Perhaps the most dangerous characteristic of fascism is its need to silence anything that it is unable to control or with which it disagrees. It is a short distance from censoring your ideological enemy to seeking their destruction.
The main casualty of the computer age and through it, the age of social media, is nuance. If information becomes instantaneous then the only acceptable vehicle for computerized delivery systems is the carefully chosen absolute. That which is to be renounced as being outside of the collective “will” is delegitimised by repetition, reinforcement, and denial. The Orwellian reality of safe places, cancel-culture and ordained intersectional hierarchies has created our fascist present. In the Western world fascism is overwhelmingly Left-wing. In Israel it is the Right. In either case it is why populism has spread across the globe to infect and poison contemporary democracies.
The expression that “oppositions don’t win elections - governments lose them” is the best explanation we have for why the opposition in Israel has failed over a period of fifty years to win back power except for a few brief periods.
There is no credible opposition worthy of government. They have no over-arching vision for a collective tomorrow, let alone today. They sing the praises of Western democracies rife with antisemitism. In a Jewish country it is difficult to sell such a model to a religious audience. So, all they have is a secular model for an unconvinced electorate. Therefore, they represent a self-interested special interest group, rather than a national ideology.
If the Opposition is divided into separate tribal groups why vote for them?
Why have so many of the coalition politicians showed such disdain for its institutions? It seems as if the government desires nothing less than to tear down the entire edifice of the modern stated. After the Shoah, belief in divine intercession on behalf of the Jewish people is at best nihilistic, at worst suicidal.
Fundamentalism of any sort is characterised by fanaticism that defies logic. Those who make excuses for Islamic terrorism take pains to tell us that Islam is a religion of peace. But the reality is that Muslims who kill for their faith do so as an act of religious devotion and do not view it as a crime. It would be naïve to view the fundamentalism of any other faith as different. Fundamentalists are capable of an enormous potential for violence as well as hubris in the name of their creed.
Our tragedy is that the Jewish people have too often in past history been brought to their knees by religious zealotry.
The opposition must break with our post-modern obsession with individualism and its oppressive ego-worship; its desire for absolute control over everything. It must return to a vision of collective responsibility and national community.
We need unity, not division. Tribal conflict can only lead to increasing fragmentation. Israel needs an exercise in coming together; it involves something rarely heard today “self-abnegation” – It means self-denial or self-sacrifice for the common good. It starts with Yesh Atid, National Unity and Yisrael Beiteinu dissolving their parties and agreeing on a single united platform. Bring in religious moderates and Arabs to share in this vision for a unified Israel.
Appendix
(1) Likud (32 seats) Shas (11 seats) Religious Zionism (7 seats) United Torah Judaism (UTJ) 7 seats, Otzma Yehudit (6 seats) and Noam (1 seat) note: UTJ consists of Agudat Yisrael (Ashkenazi) and Degel HaTorah (Haredi non-Zionist). Total seats in Knesset: 64/120
(2) 2019 study results: Mizrachi 44.9% Ashkenazi (Western) 31.8% ex USSR 12.4% Beta Israel 3% Other 7.9% but note: the survey counts Bulgarian and Greek as Western. They are not, they are Sephardi as are Jews from the mountainous regions of Georgia as well as many of the older communities of British and American Jews. Nor is there a separate category for Israelis of mixed Western-Mizrachi heritage. Nevertheless, the current mix is estimated to be 55% non-Western verses 45% Western.
(3) Thirty-seventh government of Israel. Formed on 29 December 2022 following the 25th Knesset election on 1 November 2022. The coalition government consists of six parties. It was the 5th Knesset election in nearly four years. Thirty-nine parties contested the election. Ten parties crossed the 3.25% threshold but two of those parties that crossed the threshold consisted of two parties each. UTJ – Agudat Yisrael and Degel HaTorah; Hadash Ta’al – Hadash (Maki) and Ta’al. Turnout was 70.63% Smaller factions like Fiery Youth, run by Hadar Muchtar, a TikTok influencer who at 20 was a year too young to serve in the Knesset; and The Pirates, who campaign for the development and promotion of pirates (according to Wikipedia).
(4) Aristotle’s Golden Mean was “his theory that excellence lies in the middle way between two extreme states: excess and deficiency.” Plato also discussed it. Gautama Buddha taught the Middle Way as did Confucius. But the earliest text of the positive form of the “Golden Rule” is Leviticus (19:18) 1445-1405 BCE “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your kinsfolk. Love your neighbour as yourself: I am the LORD.” It is further mentioned in Ecclesiastes (7:15 – 16) and Hillel famously said, “what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: This is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.” (Shabbat Folio: 31a, Babylonian Talmud.) The Golden Mean has been a thread, running through Jewish history from the earliest of times. Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) is a compilation of the ethical teachings and maxims of the Rabbis of the Mishnaic period (end 2nd Century CE to start of 3rd Century CE) but based on the Oral Traditions of the Second Temple Period from 516 BCE to 70 CE. It deals solely with ethical and moral principles. In the modern era the Golden Mean is a core principle in Musar Literature (19th Century didactic Jewish ethical literature).
(5) “The courts were lenient. Till 1922 (a period of four years) there were 376 political murders – 22 by leftist extremists who received a total punishment of 248 years in prison while 356 murders by the extreme right received a total of only 90 years in prison. (The Pity of it All, by Amos Elon, Picador Books. Page 368)