Solving the Middle East, Part II: Israel Needs Electoral Reform

Sec­ond in a series

The faith of Israelis in their cur­rent gov­ern­ment is prob­a­bly at the low­est point in the country’s his­tory. Pres­i­dent Moshe Kat­sav is expected to be charged with rape, among other crimes. Prime Min­is­ter Ehud Olmert is being inves­ti­gated for pos­si­ble “shady real estate deals, abuse of influ­ence, and unlaw­ful polit­i­cal appoint­ments.” Police com­man­der Moshe Karadi resigned fol­low­ing deal­ings with orga­nized crime. Tax Com­mis­sioner Jacky Matza resigned after a cor­rup­tion scan­dal at the Tax Author­ity. For­mer Jus­tice Min­is­ter Haim Ramon was con­victed of forcibly kiss­ing a woman while at the prime minister’s office.

Israelis have lost faith in their lead­ers. More­over, the very nature of the country’s polit­i­cal process breeds cor­rup­tion. This hurts the peace process, and it needs to be changed — for the sake of Israel, the Pales­tini­ans, and the region.

For those who are unaware, here’s a crash course in the Israel elec­toral sys­tem. No cit­i­zen ever votes for a per­son. There are no leg­isla­tive dis­tricts. On Elec­tion Days, peo­ple vote for a polit­i­cal party, not a per­son. (The Amer­i­can equiv­a­lent would be a per­son walk­ing into a vot­ing booth and tick­ing the box next to “Demo­c­ra­tic Party” or “Repub­li­can Party.”) As long as a party receives a min­i­mum num­ber of votes, that party will receive a per­cent­age of Par­lia­ment seats that is roughly equal to the per­cent­age of votes it gets nation­wide: If Labor gets 20% of the vote, the party will have 20% of the seats. The party that receives the great­est num­ber of seats is asked by the pres­i­dent to form a gov­ern­ment. Since no sin­gle party ever gets enough seats to have a major­ity, the afore­men­tioned party will form coali­tions with other par­ties to gain a major­ity in Parliament.

So, that’s how the com­po­si­tion of the Israeli Par­li­ment is cho­sen. But who decides which peo­ple sit in the Par­li­ment? Not the peo­ple — the polit­i­cal par­ties them­selves! Each party cre­ates a list of its can­di­dates for Par­li­ment in order of pref­er­ence. If the party receives two seats in an elec­tion, the top two peo­ple on the list are elected. If the party receives 20 seats, then the top 20 peo­ple are elected. (The party leader is always first.) I can only imag­ine how many promises of favors and out­right bribery occurs dur­ing the times that the order of the list is chosen.

The effects of this sys­tem are wide­spread and neg­a­tive. Firstly, the Israelis do not elect peo­ple directly, so they nat­u­rally have less faith in their lead­ers. (If I vote for a can­di­date, I’m express­ing some degree of con­fi­dence in that indi­vid­ual.) Sec­ondly, it is hard for vot­ers to keep inep­tor cor­rupt peo­ple out of power as long as the party places them high enough on its list for Par­lia­ment. Thirdly, the entire sys­tem of plac­ing peo­ple on party lists invites cor­rup­tion at every level. The lead­ers of Israel, as rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Israeli peo­ple, need to have the polit­i­cal and moral author­ity to nego­ti­ate peace effectively.

More­over, this polit­i­cal sys­tem harms the peace process in gen­eral. The Mid­dle East, as every­one knows, is full of intense ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences. Israel is no dif­fer­ent. By ask­ing peo­ple to vote for an ide­ol­ogy (as opposed to a per­son) at the bal­lot box, the gov­ern­ment encour­ages par­ti­san­ship and extrem­ism. This leads to polit­i­cal insta­bil­ity in Israel, as well as through­out the region.

On another level, this sys­tem hurts Israel’s day-to-day domes­tic affairs. The exec­u­tive and leg­isla­tive branches are com­bined, and each part of Israel has no mem­ber of Par­lia­ment to rep­re­sent them. One of the pos­i­tive aspects of the Amer­i­can sys­tem is that cit­i­zens can ask their spe­cific elected offi­cials — from city coun­cilors to U.S. sen­a­tors — to help them with var­i­ous needs. The res­i­dents of Netanya, for exam­ple, has no spe­cific mem­ber of Par­lia­ment look­ing out for them because the entire coun­try is con­sid­ered an entire elec­toral dis­trict with pro­por­tional representation.

The frac­tured par­lia­men­tary sys­tem also hurts the peace process directly. Since there are dozens of polit­i­cal par­ties that each have their own view­points, it is next to impos­si­ble to reach a mod­er­ate com­pro­mise. There are two dom­i­nant — and con­tra­dic­tory — views on the Israeli-Palestinian issue: the Left believes that Israel will have secu­rity after they give land; the Right believes that Israel can­not give land until they have secu­rity. There is a mid­dle way (more on that in another post), but it is cur­rently impos­si­ble to get there under the cur­rent system.

In addi­tion, since nei­ther of the two major par­ties — the left-wing Labor and right-wing Likud — ever gain a major­ity, they must part­ner with smaller, extrem­ist par­ties in order to gain a major­ity. (The present gov­ern­ing coali­tion, led by the new, cen­trist Kadima party, is an aber­ra­tion that barely sur­vived Ariel Sharon and will soon col­lapse due to the afore­men­tioned cor­rup­tion.) A smaller party has dis­pro­por­tion­ate power because if the gov­ern­ment ever adopts a pol­icy it dis­likes, the party can with­draw its three seats and force the coali­tion to lose its major­ity. This is the pri­mary rea­son why extrem­ists — from reli­gious ones like the charedim to oth­ers like the set­tlers who live deep inside the West Bank — have a sig­nif­i­cant amount of power. The nature of any new polit­i­cal sys­tem must move peo­ple and gov­ern­ments towards the cen­ter. (This is what occurs in the United States — no mat­ter what lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives claim, this coun­try is nowhere near as polar­ized as the rest of the world. Our lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives are mod­er­ates com­pared to their coun­ter­parts in other countries.)

Some­one like Avig­dor Lieber­man — who has advo­cated for vio­lence against Pales­tini­ans and Israeli Arabs — should not be in gov­ern­ment, but Olmert gave him a min­is­ter­ship to gain his party’s sup­port for the weak­ened gov­ern­ing coalition.

Israel needs to:

• Divide the coun­try into elec­toral dis­tricts that are each rep­re­sented by a mem­ber of Parliament;
• Devise an elec­toral sys­tem so that the receip­i­ent of the most votes in a dis­trict wins the elec­tion (a sec­ondary option is to have run-off elec­tions in a dis­trict until one can­di­date receives a majority);
• Draft a writ­ten con­sti­tu­tion; and
• Place can­di­dates’ names on bal­lots rather than party iden­ti­fi­ca­tion (or both).

The entire series: Part V: The Right of Return; Part IV: The Pales­tini­ans Need a Viable State; Part III: Set­tle­ments and the Sep­a­ra­tion Bar­rier; Part I: Fix the Pales­tin­ian Author­ity