TORONTO — The people may have spoken but the politicians, it seems, cannot hear them. More accurately, it is Israel’s political system that is deaf.
Prof. Arye Naor
“The people spoke more than a month ago but the prime minister-designate is still waiting outside the delivery room,” Prof. Arye Naor observed in a recent talk at York University. “Why does it happen? Why does it happen again and again?”
The reason for Israel’s perennial political paralysis, Naor bluntly put it, is “a very bad electoral system.”
A professor of public policy and administration at Ben-Gurion University, Naor is visiting professor of Israel studies at York. His talk was the inaugural lecture in the Israel studies program, part of York’s Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies.
In most parliamentary democracies, the prime minister is the leader of the party that receives the most seats in the legislature. But that didn’t happen in the Feb. 10 Israeli election, in which Tzipi Livni’s Kadima party won 28 seats to 27 for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. Netanyahu was chosen to form a government because a majority of members of the Knesset said they favoured him over Livni.
Naor blames a “multiplicity of parties” for the mess. Israel employs an electoral system called party-list proportional representation, based on the strength of political parties across the spectrum. In the last election, 33 parties vied for 120 seats. Twelve of them actually won seats thanks to a rule that a party needs at least two per cent of the popular vote to win a seat.
With that kind of patchwork, it’s little wonder that every government in Israel’s history has been a coalition, said Naor, who served as cabinet secretary to former prime minister Menachem Begin. As a result, Israel is in “permanent crisis” politically.
“It leads to government dysfunction. It is very difficult to function properly when the decision-making group is divided from the inside and competing all the time with each other.”
Major decisions surrounding the peace process and national budgets often suffer as a result, he said. “It’s impossible to run a country under these circumstances.”
Compromise is “usually the worst solution because it is ‘neither nor.’” But political compromise may be the only solution, and it would “find the necessary compromise inside parts of Israeli society.”
While radical change in Israel “is out of the question,” Naor recalled two old reformist ideas. One, formulated by the country’s founding fathers, suggested dividing Israel into 120 “constituencies,” similar to the British riding system. The plan was rejected by founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion’s own party.
Another is fashioned on a German model. It would divide Israel into 30 or so electoral regions, each choosing three or four members of the Knesset. “That’s been under discussion for 40 years,” Naor said.
A third is to turn Israel into a republic that elects a president via direct popular vote. Another, and more realistic approach, is to allow the leader of the party with the most seats to begin acting as prime minister right away, which would put pressure on other parties to enter a coalition quickly.
Like other pundits, Naor predicted that Netanyahu will cobble together a narrow right-wing unity government.
The controversial Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the rightist Yisrael Beiteinu party, which won 15 seats in the election, the third-highest total, was designated as foreign minister last week in a coalition agreement with Netanyahu.
Naor said Netanyahu’s “real difficulties will begin” when he forms a coalition, tries to balance cabinet posts among his partners, and may have to sacrifice his policies. “When politics and policies collide, you know which one prevails,” Naor said, noting that it was Netanyahu who, as a hardline former prime minister, ceded the West Bank town of Hebron to the Palestinians.
But as a young nation, Israel “is a society and a country still in the making.”