Many of Israel's troubles stem from its political system. But can politicians fix it?
How long has Olmert got?THE new wing of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, is an impressive attempt to project the authority of the state together with the openness of democracy. Outside the committee rooms, brushed steel and blond wood grace wide, curving public foyers that look out on the gardens through a three-storey wall of floor-to-ceiling glass. Here, Menahem Ben-Sasson and his colleagues on the constitution, law and justice committee are trying to weld all of Israeli society into a seamless whole.
The idea is to write, for the first time in Israeli history, a constitution. Mr Ben-Sasson believes that setting down, in plain Hebrew, a consensus on what sort of country Israel is meant to be, on the boundaries between religious and secular authority, on the status of minorities and on a raft of other basic issues could help Israel leave behind old disputes and get on with living.
It isn't going well. Arabs are boycotting the discussions because they reject the starting assumption of Israel as a Jewish state, but are not numerous enough to challenge it. Ultra-Orthodox Jews want more power for rabbinical courts. The “Russians”, as post-Soviet immigrants are known, want it to include the right to civil marriage, to cater for the 300,000-odd non-Jews among them, which would break the rabbis' monopoly.
Moreover, not everyone agrees that the time is ripe. “It's no accident that we haven't had a constitution for 60 years. It's not that we forgot,” remarks Ami Ayalon, the ex-head of the Shin Bet, now a Labour minister without portfolio. “A constitution is an expression of agreements that don't exist yet.” He argues that if written in a rush, it risks either being vacuous or imposing the will of majorities on minorities. And once it is passed, crucial flexibility will be lost.
Indeed, after six decades of dithering, why the hurry? One reason is that some feel the flexibility has gone too far. The absence of a constitution, combined with Israel's fractious politics, left a vacuum of authority that Israel's Supreme Court, under its activist former chief justice, Aharon Barak, filled by interpreting certain “basic laws” as quasi-constitutional.
Unusually, Israel's Supreme Court is also a court of first instance for claims against the state. This has turned it into a guardian of civil liberties. But it has clashed more and more with the other branches of government. Rightists and religious Jews too are critical of its secular and liberal views. “A group that represents 3% of the voters sets the tone for the judicial system,” complains Rabbi Eichler, the haredi ex-legislator.
Both its critics and its cheerleaders tend to overstate the court's influence. In the 13 years since Mr Barak became its president, it has overturned laws as “unconstitutional” only a handful of times. It has done a lot for human rights in Israel, but when it comes to Palestinians it rarely rejects the state's security arguments. And though it has been openly at war with Daniel Friedmann, the justice minister appointed after Mr Barak stepped down, much of the hostility was the result of personal animus.
The court still enjoys the highest public approval rating of any Israeli institution, but its popularity, too, is dropping—a symptom of the general decline in public faith in the state. Politics has been beset by corruption scandals. Ehud Olmert's term as prime minister has seen criminal probes into various officials, two ministers, Mr Olmert himself and the then president of the state, Moshe Katsav. Growing accountability, with unusually energetic (some say publicity-seeking) officials in the comptroller-general's and accountant-general's offices, have also brought more dirt out into the open.
At a deeper level, however, it is the political system itself that is chronically dysfunctional. When Israel was a newborn country fighting for survival, it had no time to devise an appropriate political model, so it went for pure proportional representation, practised almost nowhere else in the world. In a recent edition of Azure, a liberal-right Israeli journal, Amotz Asa-El, a former editor of the Jerusalem Post, summed up the results:
There are 12 parties in the current Knesset, and over 140 have sat in its plenum in the past six decades, many of them one-hit wonders formed for bargaining purposes. To gain a majority a coalition must typically include four or five parties, spanning a wide ideological spectrum. Usually at least one is a religious or populist party that makes its support conditional on expensive budget handouts.
At its mildest, this means that ministers in the same cabinet publicly squabble all the time. More seriously, politicians are accountable to their party but not their voters. Parties that are brought in to make up the coalition numbers wield disproportionate clout, so extremists set the agenda. Pork-barrelling is rife. And important reforms are distorted by political haggling.
At its worst, the system threatens national security. The ability of a few tens of thousands of settlers to set Israeli policy in the occupied territories for four decades is the most glaring example. A more recent one was the 2006 Lebanon war. When Mr Olmert became prime minister as head of the centrist Kadima party, he brought Labour into the coalition by appointing its leader, Amir Peretz, a former trade-union boss, as defence minister. Mr Peretz would have preferred the finance portfolio, but Mr Olmert did not want a political rival holding the purse-strings, and defence was the only other job senior enough for the second-largest party. It was the first time the top two posts had been filled by people with no real experience in security matters. Four months later the war broke out. Its failures, found the Winograd commission that investigated it, were in large part due to the combination of an ill-prepared army and the politicians' inexperience.
Gidi Grinstein, the head of the Re'ut Institute, a policy think-tank, suggests that political volatility may even be responsible for preventing Israel's economy from catching up with other countries. Until 1977 a coalition headed by one party had more or less continuous control. Since then the average government has lasted around two years, the average minister 18 months. At about the same time Israel's GDP per head relative to America's stopped climbing; it has stayed at roughly the same level ever since.
All this has helped to spread the belief that a proper constitution and a new electoral system could solve Israel's woes. In an attempt to speed things along, the Knesset constitution committee is also holding separate talks on electoral reform.
They are not going well either. Several previous attempts have been blocked, usually by religious parties that feared losing the influence of their swing vote. The one reform that was passed, in 1996, proved a disaster. It aimed to increase stability by separating the ballots for prime minister and Knesset, but lots of people split their vote, causing even more fragmentation than before. It was reversed five years later.
The animals building the zoo
Even those who favour change hotly debate what kind would work best. Besides a presidential or semi-presidential system, proposals include increasing the threshold to exclude all the small parties; expanding the Knesset, which is not big enough to be an effective check on the executive; and electing some or all of the Knesset members directly by constituency instead of by party list, to make them more answerable to their voters. A simple and useful change, says Mr Grinstein, would be for the biggest elected party always to be asked to form a government, rather than having to cobble together a coalition with a majority first. This would encourage parties to try to attract voters rather than other parties.
One of the parties' best arguments against change is that a country with so many distinct minorities cannot afford to have a political system that disenfranchises any of them. That is true, but also misleading. Mr Asa-El argues that since most minority groups live clumped together, electing at least some of the Knesset by constituency would force the mainstream parties to choose representatives who would actually serve those groups.
Nor is it necessarily true that minority parties are the best representatives of minority interests. Some ultra-Orthodox rabbis have long argued that the haredi parties alienate secular Jews from the religion. “If the Jews set up a party in Britain,” says Rabbi Eichler, “the resulting anti-Semitism would catalyse all the other parties to run against it.” Moreover, the mainstream parties ignore the haredim's needs except to buy coalition votes. “If they got rid of the religious parties it would improve the state of both the haredi sector and of the Jewish population as a whole,” he concludes. The problem is that the haredim have to feel more secure before they are willing to risk losing their collective bargaining power.
There is no doubt that the current electoral system fails accurately to represent the forces that make up Israeli society. Changing it could be a far more effective way of easing domestic tensions than trying to legislate them away via a constitution. Still, it is politicians, not their voters, who will have to approve a change in the system. The risk is that whatever they agree on will continue to serve their own interests better than the country's.
If things stay roughly as they are, where is Israeli politics heading? Over the past 20 years the public at large has successively believed that Israel should hold on to the occupied territories, give them up in a peace deal and give them up unilaterally. But when the pull-outs from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005 failed to create calm, unilateralism too became discredited. Mr Olmert's solution was to revive the peace process, but few Israelis believed in that from the start.
One step to the right, three steps back
As a result, the public is moving right, sparking intense competition among Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu (a party for Russians and secular rightists) and the centre-right Likud for the growing segment of Israelis who are angry at the Palestinians for the violence, but also at their own government for an economic boom that has left them behind. Even Ehud Barak, the leader of the centre-left Labour Party and now the defence minister, has tried to present himself as more hawkish than Mr Olmert to build support. Further right still, an extremist camp in the Likud led by Moshe Feiglin, a prominent settler, is competing with the traditional religious-Zionist parties for the voters who, in the words of Mr Etkes, the anti-settlement activist, “identify the contradictions between democracy and settlements and opt for settlements.”
With Mr Olmert's government approaching the two-year average lifespan, the Likud has had a comfortable lead in the polls for some time. A few months ago pundits were predicting that its support would collapse come the election, because most voters would still reluctantly prefer to give the peace process a chance. Now that seems less certain. These days its leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, argues that Israel needs to revive the West Bank's economy and improve life for the Palestinians, but not talk peace just yet. Unless there is a genuine breakthrough in the coming months, more Israelis will be inclined to agree. Mr Netanyahu's main handicap is that as finance minister in 2003 he designed the reforms that impoverished so many of them. But it's nothing that a little coalition-building can't fix.
Paradoxically, it was right-wing governments that made the big territorial withdrawals, Sinai in 1982 and Gaza in 2005, because they were able to convince right-wing voters that this was the right thing to do. Yet as long as the Palestinian leadership remains split between the West Bank and Gaza, it will be impossible to reach a deal in which Israel's security comes before Palestinian independence. At some point, and perhaps quite soon, the political cost of being exposed to daily rocket fire from Gaza may outweigh that of losing dozens of troops in a massive operation to destroy Hamas's power there. That, in turn, could be the death knell of Mahmoud Abbas's leadership in the West Bank and possibly of the Palestinian Authority itself. In extremis, Israel could find itself back in charge of the occupied territories, with nobody to give the keys to, and the wheel will have come full circle.
It may be idle to imagine that something as prosaic as a new electoral system could prevent this. The breakdown of the Palestinian polity may have gone too far already. But if a moderate Israeli leader could take on the settlers without fear of the government collapsing, perhaps he could start a process of gradual disconnection from the West Bank to convince Palestinians that most Israelis really do want to let them build a state of their own.
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