Jewish Diversity, Israeli Politics, and the Rules of the Game

The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote about Jews, that “No small people is more diverse, ethnically, culturally, attitudinally and religiously.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the political turmoil that has engulfed Israel in recent weeks, a turmoil that is in large part a result of the system of proportional representation that the Israeli democratic process is based on.

The roots of the system go back to 1920, when the first of four pre-state elections was held to elect a body to represent the Jewish community (the yishuv), in dealings with the Mandatory Government of Palestine (the details of all pre- and post-state elections, up to 2006, are provided by Susan Hattis Rolef in “Encyclopedia Judaica,” Second Edition.) A little more than 30,000 votes were cast in that election, out of a Jewish population of about 80,000. The election was contested by 31 parties, 20 of which managed to garner enough votes (80) to merit a seat in a representative assembly.

David Ben-Gurion was the leader of the largest party, Ahdut HaAvoda (United Labor), with 70 out of 314 seats, while the religious parties were had 64 seats. Much like today, the various factions could be characterized as right, left or center. Women voted in this election (the 19th amendment granting US women the right to vote was passed in August 1920), although Orthodox women only voted in later elections.

The first election after statehood was carried out in January 1949. More than 85 percent of the half million eligible voters elected 120 members to a Constituent Assembly, almost immediately renamed the Knesset. Twelve parties crossed the minimum threshold of the one percent of the vote needed to earn a seat. The left wing parties, led by Mapai and Mapam, were the dominant governing parties, a situation that continued for almost 30 years, until 1977, when Likud became the dominant political party under Menachem Begin.

The rightward shift in Israeli politics over the years has attracted a lot of commentary, particularly the inclusion of representatives of the far-right in the current government. But the other shift that has taken place has been the gradual change in the minimum threshold required to be represented in the Knesset, from one percent to 3.25 percent.

The intention of the change was to reduce the number of small parties in the Knesset, in order to make it easier to cobble together a governing coalition. But in effect, it has led to a situation reminiscent of the constituency-based “first past the post” system that exists in countries such as Canada, in which a substantial number of those who vote for smaller parties can end up with no parliamentary representation at all.

When the electoral threshold was raised to 3.25 % in 2014, the several small Israeli-Arab parties buried their ideological differences to create a single party, the Joint List, so that Israeli Arabs were still represented in the Knesset.

In 2021, two Israeli parties with widely differing views, led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, formed a governing coalition that included the United Arab List. This government lasted about a year before unraveling.

The last Israeli election, the fifth in three years, was held in November 2022. Of the 40 parties contesting the election, 10 crossed the vote threshold required to win seats in the Knesset. As already noted, Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of party with the largest number of seats, was able to put together a governing coalition by including far-right parties.

Nancy F. Kaplan points out in the The Jerusalem Report that 300,000 of the 4.8 million votes cast in the last election were for parties that did not pass the threshold, and were therefore pointless votes. She targets Youth on Fire, a new party created to highlight the effect of the Israel’s high cost of living on the country’s youth. The party received a small number of votes, far fewer than the number needed to cross the threshold. However, if even a portion of these votes had gone to Meretz, one of two left wing parties (the other being Labor, which did cross the threshold), the party would have four seats in the Knesset and Netanyahu would have been denied a majority.

Or, as Haviv Rettig Gur puts it, had the leadership of Meretz and Labor been able to put their narrow ideological differences aside and run as a bloc, Netanyahu would not have succeeded.

As Senator Dianne Feinstein is reputed to have said, “You have to learn the rules of the game and then you have to play better than anyone else.”

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.

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