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Now the Israeli Election’s Over

How'd my pre-game post-game do?
israelvoting

Let’s take a quick look back at my before-they’re-hatched analysis of the latest Israeli election’s chickens, and see how I did.

1. This election is not about the rise of the left or the fall of the right, but about a reshuffling of the left and right into new configurations.

Likud is now projected to win about 30 seats. Habayit Hayehudi and Yisrael Beiteinu are now projected to win 14 seats, for a national bloc total of 44 seats.

That same bloc has 43 seats in the current Knesset.

2. This election is about the fickle center.

In the prior Knesset, there were two “centrist” parties: Hatenuah and Yesh Atid. They had 25 seats between them, and sat in the government in the last Knesset. This time, Hatenuah ran on a joint list with Labor as the Zionist Union, and Yesh Atid was widely expected to be a partner of the Zionist Union rather than Likud.

Well, Yesh Atid is projected to have lost 8 seats, and we don’t know how many seats the center-left lost, but if you add Meretz, Hatenuah and Labor together, that coalition went from 27 seats to a projected 28 seats.

However, a new center-right party – Kulanu – was born in this election, led by another defector from Likud unhappy with Netanyahu. Kulanu won 10 seats.

So, in broad strokes, the centrist leaders from the last Knesset have decided to switch from center-right t0 center-left. As a consequence, they lost a bunch of seats to a new center-right party.

3. This election is about the rise of the Joint Arab List.

The Joint Arab List did indeed come in third, with a projected 13 seats. What this means for the future depends on what the Arab parties do with their newfound clout.

If I were to advise them, it would undoubtedly come off as trolling. But it seems to me that the only way ultimately to effect change is to make political demands: we will sit in coalition if you agree to such and such. The Arab parties are now a large enough bloc, as a joint force, that they should start saying what that if consists of. Then the left-wing Zionist parties can debate whether it’s worth acceding to those demands or not.

I can guarantee you that the gap will be too large right now. But that doesn’t mean it will be too large forever. It won’t start narrowing, though, until someone lays down a plausible marker for where the negotiation begins.

4. This election proves the Israeli electorate doesn’t really believe Netanyahu’s scare-mongering on Iran.

Correct: but it also proves that the Israeli electorate does believe his scare-mongering on the Israeli Arab vote and on negotiations with the Palestinians. His final pitch was: you have to stop the left from winning because the left is soft on the national question, and the only way to stop the left from winning is to vote Likud, not for any other right-wing party. The pitch worked: the other right-wing parties dropped, in some cases by more than projected, but Likud surged.

5. The election proves that parliamentary systems aren’t all that.

Consider the rise of the Arab bloc. Why isn’t the third-largest party in the Knesset a plausible coalition partner?

Well, perhaps the problem is a structural one. So long as Israel has a proportional-rep system, there’s a natural logic to having Arab parties. So long as there are Arab parties, they will gravitate toward the center of gravity of Arab politics – which is decisively opposed to Zionism as such. So any Zionist party that forms a coalition with them has to navigate, as part of the coalition agreement, the question of the nature of the state.

By contrast, if Israel had a quasi-Presidential system, the President could campaign for Arab votes along with Jewish votes. The Arab vote would naturally gravitate toward the left side of the aggregate Israeli spectrum, Jewish and Arab together. And the Arab vote would, by definition, matter in a way that it still does not today.

On the other hand, it’s possible that under a Presidential system the Jewish vote would simply move more to the right as the left became more associated with Arab votes, so that Arab voters were just as effectively shut out of the system. After all, Mississippi voters divide very neatly on racial lines, resulting in right-wing and white domination at the gubernatorial level (regardless of whether the party expressing that domination is Democratic or Republican).

But that result would just reinforce my point that the decisive questions relate to the underlying structure of a given society, and that good institutions can at best marginally ameliorate deep divisions in that society. Israel’s institutions aren’t doing an obviously better job of that than American institutions.

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