STILL FIGURING IT OUT

If you have read Thomas L. Friedman’s column in the New York Times last week “The Israel We Knew Is Gone,” you can skip this preamble and scroll down to the main text.

Friedman noted that “Israeli political trends are often a harbinger of wider trends in Western democracies — Off Broadway to our Broadway. Lord saves us, if this is a harbinger of what’s coming our way. Imagine you woke up after the 2024 U.S. presidential election and found that Donald Trump had been re-elected and chose Rudy Giuliani for attorney general, Michael Flynn for defense secretary, Steve Bannon for commerce secretary, evangelical leader James Dobson for education secretary, Proud Boys former leader Enrique Tarrio for homeland security head and Marjorie Taylor Greene for the White House spokeswoman.

‘Impossible,’ you would say. Well, think again.

Ben-Gvir & Smotrich

The coalition that Likud leader Bibi Netanyahu is riding back into power is the Israeli equivalent of the nightmare U.S. cabinet I imagined above. Only it is real — a rowdy alliance of ultra-Orthodox leaders and ultranationalist politicians, including some outright racist, anti-Arab Jewish extremists once deemed completely outside the norms and boundaries of Israeli politics. As it is virtually impossible for Netanyahu to build a majority coalition without the support of these extremists, some of them are almost certain to be cabinet ministers in the next Israeli government.

As that previously unthinkable reality takes hold, a fundamental question will roil synagogues in America and across the globe: “Do I support this Israel or not support it?” It will haunt pro-Israel students on college campuses. It will challenge Arab allies of Israel in the Abraham Accords, who just wanted to trade with Israel and never signed up for defending a government there that is anti-Israeli Arab. It will stress those U.S. diplomats who have reflexively defended Israel as a Jewish democracy that shares America’s values, and it will send friends of Israel in Congress fleeing from any reporter asking if America should continue sending billions of dollars in aid to such a religious-extremist-inspired government.

You have not seen this play before, because no Israeli leader has ‘gone there’ before.

Netanyahu was also aided by the fact that while the right and the far right were highly energized by both growing fears of and distrust of Arabs — whether Israeli Arab citizens or Palestinians in the West Bank — their centrist and center-left opponents had no coherent or inspiring counter message.”

Friedman told how an old friend, Yediot Ahronot columnist Nahum Barnea, explained how Netanyahu succeeded beyond all expectations: “Israel is not divided down the middle, with 50 percent being pro-Netanyahu and the other 50 percent with a unified message and strategy opposing him. No, Israel is divided between the 50 percent who are pro-Netanyahu and the 50 percent who are pro-blocking Netanyahu. But that is all they can agree on,” Barnea said.” And it showed in this election. And it wasn’t enough. “

Haviv Rettig Gur Times of Israel political correspondent and senior analyst explained the 50-50 division of the Israeli electorate differently, less dispassionately.

“As the election results came in, two things became clear. One, Netanyahu’s rightist-religious bloc had won a sweeping, unassailable victory. Two, it had done so without fundamentally changing the actual numbers of votes.

Two political parties, progressive-Zionist Meretz and Palestinian-nationalist Balad, failed to meet the 3.25 percent vote minimum required to enter the Knesset, and so cost the anti-Netanyahu half of Israeli politics about 6% of the total votes cast (well over a quarter-million votes). Whereas, Netanyahu’s 64-seat majority is almost entirely a function of stemming that threshold loss.

In Balad’s case, the implosion was foreseen for weeks, a function of its decision to run separately from and without even a vote-sharing agreement with the other Arab-majority factions.

In Meretz’s case, the same question was anxiously raised back in September, with calls by activists and centre-left leaders for Labour and Meretz to unite to avoid falling below the threshold. Labour refused, even as all understood that a failure by any one of the small parties in the anti-Netanyahu bloc to clear the threshold would break the four-year deadlock and hand Netanyahu his victory.

All understood and a great many predicted that the anti-Netanyahu camp was bound to fail simply because so many of its parties hovered dangerously close to the threshold.

In other words, the left and Balad self-immolated, their leadership too devoted to party brands, their own standing and narrow ideological nuances to respond to a clear and present electoral threat. They spoke of Netanyahu’s imminent return to power as a vast danger, but then did everything required to make that outcome more likely.

A very real and dramatic shift is underway in the politics of the democratic world, including in Israeli politics.

It is hard not to connect the rise of Ben Gvir to the astonishing 41% vote for Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election, to the victory of formerly fascist political elements in Italy in September, or to far-right politics in the US, Canada, Brazil, Hungary and elsewhere. Formerly fringe right-wing actors, now declaring themselves to have moderated, seem on the march everywhere.

The Israeli left didn’t collapse in a sudden, recent rightist lurch of the electorate. It has been in a tailspin for three decades. And three decades of failure suggest a simple, unsparing conclusion that hovers over the anxiety about the election results and the patina of moral panic that accompanies it: The left that just collapsed, in terms of raw political strategy, doesn’t deserve to exist.

It’s a point few are raising now, perhaps out of misplaced sympathy: Even if the Lapid-led camp had won, it would not actually have won; it would merely have denied Netanyahu a win.

It gets worse. Even this goal will soon be out of its grasp. Last week’s election highlighted a point long known but adamantly ignored by the left’s political institutions and leaders: It is losing the demographic contest, and quickly.

Israeli politics are built along cultural, religious and ethnic divides often called “sectors,” or “tribes.” The electoral system itself — a single nationwide constituency with a proportional vote for party lists — is built to reflect and express these tribal affinities as cohesive parliamentary actors.

The specific delineations of the “tribes” are not as rigid as Israeli identity politics suggest; Haredi-Sephardi Shas and traditionalist Likud have exchanged voters over the years, as have Labour and Yesh Atid. But these self-defined boundaries are nevertheless the most basic predictors of Israeli political behaviour.

Ethnicity is a factor in constructing these tribes. In last year’s election, according to a study by the Israel Democracy Institute, Meretz and Labour’s voters were majority Ashkenazi (70% and 55% respectively), Likud and Shas’s mostly Sephardi (58% and 75%).

So is income. Yesh Atid voters were more likely to have above-average income (46%) than below-average (30%), Likud the reverse (29% above, 46% below).

But by far the most successful predictor of voting patterns is level of religiosity. The centre-left is startlingly uniform in its secularism. In the 2021 election, religiously-minded voters (who self-defined as ‘ultra-Orthodox,’ ‘religious,’ or ‘traditional-religious’) made up just 2.5% of Meretz voters, 6% of Yesh Atid, 7% of Labour, 8% of Yisrael Beiteinu, 12% of Blue and White and 14% of New Hope.

The opposite was true on Netanyahu’s side of the aisle. “Less than 1% of Shas and [United] Torah Judaism voters defined themselves as secular, and among the voters of the Religious Zionism party, the figure stands at just 5%.” Likud may be the most religiously diverse Jewish-majority party, with 28% of its voters calling themselves ‘secular,’ 35% ‘traditional non-religious’ and 23% ‘traditional-religious’.”

And that’s a political cataclysm for the left as it is currently constructed, because some of these ethno-religious tribes are growing much faster than others, almost entirely by the tried-and-true method of having more children.

Two unique features of Israeli society make this a uniquely potent method for political expansion: Israeli society is younger than other democracies, and young Israelis, more than in other democracies, remain loyal to their parents’ political preferences.

Israel is among the youngest populations in the developed world. Its median age is 30.5, compared to America’s 38.1, France’s 41.7 or geriatric Germany’s 47.8. Some 35% of the population is under 20 (compared to America’s 25%), and some 15% of the electorate is under 24, more than any other Western democracy.

And these vast cohorts of young people hail disproportionately from the religious side of the divide. Haredi women, according to Central Bureau of Statistics 2021 data, average about 6.5 children per woman; among religious but not Haredi women it’s 3.9. The average for all Jewish non-Haredi women, including the secular and “traditional,” is 2.5.

And they vote, as noted, like their parents.

“One of the most interesting things about the youth vote in Israel is the rate of conformity to the families they come from,” Prof. Tamar Hermann of IDI and the Open University told Channel 12 recently. “In many other countries we see young people who turn away from or even turn to the opposite [political choices] of their parents, a rebellion against the parents. But the young Israeli is very, very conforming to their family, and the result is that at most we see radicalization from the home they came from. In most homes where there is radicalization, it’s in the same direction but sharper. There’s very little jumping in the opposite direction.”

In fact, these tribal politics stick around even when religion is abandoned. “Haredi or religious young people who left their religious communities, often changed their relationship to their religious lives, but they remain in the same political camp. It’s as though you can be forgiven for one deviation, but two already makes Friday dinners too difficult.”

The steady decline of the Israeli left’s factions and institutions is thus about more than just the failed peace process. It reflects deep social changes. If the left does not fundamentally redraw the Israeli political map — that is, fundamentally reconceive itself — then the recent elections result will be more than a single painful failure. It will be a harbinger of the foreseeable future. It is this reality that drives the ‘end of the country as we’ve known it’ panic.

But as with any failure, once the problem is clear, constructive paths forward emerge. To that end, there are three points of good news for the left in this latest debacle.

The first is that almost nothing actually happened on the ground. Without diminishing from the valid fears about an incoming government dependent on what were once considered extremist and illegitimate political forces, it’s important to note that the rise of Itamar Ben Gvir was not driven by any significant shift in votes.

In the 2021 election, the two religious-Zionist factions Yamina and Religious Zionism won a combined 499,477 votes. In 2022, the single party running from that sector Religious Zionism, won 516,146 votes, just 3% more. Their total share of the vote actually declined, from 11.33% to 10.83% amid a three-point jump in turnout.

This was no Le Pen pivot or Meloni takeover.

In fact, except on the edges, in poor development towns or in tense, ethnically mixed neighbourhoods, most voters didn’t seem to register Ben Gvir’s presence at all, despite the anxiety his candidacy aroused on the left and abroad.

The second piece of good news for the left is simply the clarifying effect of disastrous failure. The divide of the left into Labour and Meretz is a distant echo of now irrelevant differences between two leftist factions at the birth of the state, when socialist Mapai and communist-Stalinist Mapam found themselves on opposite sides of the US-Soviet global divide. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then, but the basic institutional divide inexplicably remains embedded in the political psyche of left-wing elites.

After Tuesday last week, the left can no longer pretend that its old political structures were an appropriate way to build a liberal political camp. While there are differences in self-reported political identity between the two constituencies (in Labour, 24% call themselves ‘far-left,’ 44% ‘moderate left’; in Meretz it’s 58% to 29%), these are not fundamental divides that justify the danger of a recurrence of last week’s result. Failure is unpleasant, but it is also liberating from old orthodoxies. Handled properly, it can rejuvenate.

And third, there’s a growing awareness on the left of the need to rebuild itself in ways that better fit its potential electorate.

This might be a successful way forward. But there’s some chance that a clever, ambitious political left can do better. The cultural-religious-ethnic divides are fundamental, yes, but they are also more porous than they seem in snapshot polls. When it comes to the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi divide, in every single electorate, including the voters for the two Haredi parties UTJ and Shas that are defined by their Ashkenazi or Mizrahi bent, double-digit percentages of voters are no longer willing to tell pollsters whether they are one or the other, in most cases because they are both, the children of mixed marriages.

Nor is religion, so successful a predictor of political behaviour, quite as hard and fast a question as the simplistic categories of pollsters might suggest. The line that divides the religious-Zionist from the Haredi has blurred, producing a hardal community, a word that combines the Hebrew terms for ultra-Orthodox and religious-Zionist. This porousness drove some Haredi voters to Ben Gvir last week.

Similarly, the ‘secular’ Israeli tends to be a more traditionally minded animal than his or her Western counterpart. Families are larger, birthrates higher, and religion-based rituals more widespread among secular Israelis than secular Europeans. Much of everyday Israeli life, even the most prosaic elements like the calendar or the country’s geography, is tied in some way to religious ideas or traditions. A French-style secularism may not be a sustainable political model even among the secular. In this, too, Israelis, including on the left, are closer to the Middle Eastern societies from which most Israeli Jews hail than to the European progressive politics to which the Israeli left often feels it belongs.

At the moment, the future belongs to the tribes that are producing more children. But the lines may be blurring. A left serious about shaping the Israeli future must reorient itself to take advantage of these changes.

It is tempting to mourn and conclude that the world is ending. It is, indeed, the expectation in the age of Twitter and TikTok.

But there remains a large liberal Israeli political camp. The left’s most basic failure is simple: Its venerable institutions, heirs to political structures dating back to before the founding of the Israeli state, no longer correspond to significant social or political realities on the ground.

Had Meretz and Labour been less concerned with their own institutional success and more with the way the voters themselves think, they would have arranged themselves differently in the runup to last week’s elections. Had the left contested the elections as a bloc unified along the lines of voters’ fundamental political impulses — as the right did — Netanyahu would likely now be trying to explain to his voters why they must back him for a sixth attempt. “

From a comparative perspective, the electoral threshold in Israel (3.25%) seems perfectly reasonable. In the vast majority of democracies, this figure ranges from 2% to 5%. Every percent plus or minus comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. When the threshold is higher, there is a greater danger that votes will go to waste. This is what just happened in Israel, where the lists that came up short of the threshold now find themselves out of the Knesset. But this is not predestined: whether parties clear the threshold or not, depends on their use of their political intelligence.

In the recent elections, the electoral threshold had a knockout effect: Two lists that were represented in the previous Knesset came very close, but ultimately fell short—Meretz and Balad. Since both belong to the anti-Netanyahu bloc (if we include Balad in this category), this means that many votes cast for the bloc were wasted-around 300,000 in total. The result is that although the vote counts for the two blocs were almost identical, the Netanyahu camp will have a clear majority of 64 seats in the new Knesset.

However, we must bear in mind, that the electoral threshold is an intrinsic feature of the proportional representation system. Even if the threshold is not defined by the law, in practice it derives from the number of seats in the parliament. In Israel this means 1∕120, or 0.83%.

Too high a threshold is likely to eliminate the representation of small minority sectors; but one that is too low - encourages extreme political fragmentation, which has a negative effect on the parliament’s performance and stability and contributes to social "disintegration."

In the final analysis, it is hard to predict the effect of tinkering with the electoral threshold. Moreover, this is not what we should be focused on. There are much more important changes that should be made to the Israeli system; starting with a Basic Law: Legislation, which would entrench constitutional principles and rules of government, through a devolution of powers from the central to local government, and on to a modification of the electoral system that would strengthen the link between the public and its representatives and the latter’s responsiveness and accountability (for example, by incorporating an individual and regional component into the system).

Maybe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

There’s a persistent rumour that Likud is sending out feelers to Yisrael Beiteinu in an attempt to cobble together an alternative coalition government.

Netanyahu is beginning to regret that he got what he wished for and wants to rid his coalition of extremists, especially the messianic parties.

Anyway, if you have managed to read this to the end, thank you.

 

Have a good weekend

 

Beni,                                                   10^th of November, 2022.