Tribal politics: Haviv Rettig Gur on Israel's 'simple' electoral system

Paralyzed Nation

Welcome to the second episode of Paralyzed Nation, a podcast drilling down into the hard questions facing Israeli voters ahead of the looming November 1 elections.

In our limited series podcast, Amanda Borschel-Dan speaks with Times of Israel political analysts and learns about the forces that have brought us to this political deadlock.

In this second episode of Paralyzed Nation, senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur explains how the Israeli electoral system encourages tribal politics, but not all segments of society can enter the arena on an equal footing.

He delves into the up- and down-sides of a system in which minority populations may receive an outsized piece of the budget pie -- or may opt out of the game entirely. Hear what happened when one Arab party, Ra'am, recently decided to take a seat at the table.

In future episodes, we'll hear more from Rettig Gur, as well as from the rest of our expert ToI political team, who will answer voicemail questions from listeners. Please send questions to [e-mail]

Transcript of Episode 2:

Borschel-Dan: Welcome to Paralyzed Nation. I am here with our senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur for a series of conversations about core issues, among them electoral reform and how to decisively win an Israeli election. We'll speak today about electoral reform. Haviv thanks so much for joining me on this journey into Paralyzed Nation. To begin with, what makes the Israeli electoral system unique?

Rettig Gur: Hi, Amanda. Thanks for having me. It's so exciting to be doing this, even if it's our 5th, 5th round in three years. Our electoral system is in some ways the simplest in the free world, or among the simplest and maybe among the simplest possible electoral systems you can have.

An Israeli voter has a very simple role in the Israeli election: You vote for a party list, you walk into the voting booth and you put the name of a party into an envelope, and that's it, your job is done. Any party that clears three and a quarter percent of the total votes or the total valid votes gets seated in parliament pretty much by the exact proportion of its total vote count.

So what all of that means is and that's by the way, that's it. We have a unicameral parliament. There's no two houses of parliament that can offset each other or veto each other. There's no regional representation. The entire country is a single voting district. It's almost as though there's one referendum, one poll, and that poll just becomes parliament. And there's literally nothing else on the ballot for the voter to pick.

But that very simplicity hides in an unbelievable complexity. And the reason is that Israeli society itself is this very complicated creature. It's a deeply divided society. It looks you know, there are many different religious, ethnic and cultural groups. That's obviously something you could say about many societies, especially immigrant societies. But Israel combines that with a very, I would say frankly, Middle Eastern way of looking at religious, ethnic and cultural divides. Many, many minorities, the Arab and Islamic minorities, ultra-Orthodox, religious Zionists want separate education systems for their kids. They live separately from each other.

And so Israeli society is very divided, very stratified. And that social reality means that when voters come to the voting booth to vote for that one thing they get to choose, which is the party list that they're selecting, they tend to think of that act as a way to express their cultural or tribal identity. And the result is that Israelis sent to the Knesset political parties that represent their cultural tribe, so to speak. So parties tend to represent these very clearly identifiable religious groups, ethnic groups, cultural subgroups, and they form coalition based on those groupings.

You take a party like Shas, like Hadash, like United Torah, Judaism, like Religious Zionism, you know, listeners who are unfamiliar with these parties, look them up on Google, on Wikipedia even, they're fascinating. They all represent constituencies whose members tend to live together, they tend to pray together, they tend to see the other groups as vaguely in competition with them. And that's also true of the larger parties. Likud Yesh Atid, there are stereotypical images of who votes for these parties.

Yesh Atid's stereotype is that they're very Ashkenazi, they're very Jews from the European, so to speak, "whiter Jews," to put it in American terms. And Likud voter stereotypically is Mizrahi and comes from or are Jews from the Arab world and comes from development towns in the southern Negev Desert and places like that.

Now, the stereotype doesn't hold true in all cases. There's a lot of diversity in all of these constituencies. Yesh Atid I think numbers two, three, four and five on their Knesset list are actually Mizrahi, even though the party has a very Ashkenazi reputation. But the stereotype is sufficiently true to hold water and to drive a lot of the election.

So Israeli political reality is of a society divided into tribes that elects to the Knesset representatives of those tribes, and once they get to the Knesset, they start to cobble together coalitions.

It's a very simple electoral system, but it's built to favor this tribal way of looking at politics. And that means that every election, every coalition that comes out of every election is essentially the many tribes of Israeli society coming together in the Knesset and reordering Israeli society, agreeing to work together or to not work together, to either gain access to decision-making to budgeting, to influence, or to have to sit out the next government and hope for better terms in the next round.

And so it's a very simple system that is also very complex and tells you a great deal about what's actually happening on the ground in Israeli society each time, each election.

Borschel-Dan: Okay, so let's talk about some of the pros and cons for this electoral system. To begin with, doesn't this system, as you said, basically allow for minorities to have more of a voice than, shall we say, the American two-party system? And isn't allowing minorities to have more of a voice a net "good thing"?

It's funny that question of the role of minorities in the system is actually something that is usually level, that the Israeli system as a critique. It's not just that the Israeli system allows minorities to have a much louder voice and to represent themselves rather than have to work through larger parties. Minorities tend to rule, tend to have outsized influence because of how the system works. You have large parties that represent not majorities, but certainly pluralities in the Israeli body politic -- Likud representing the major bulk of the Israeli right, Yesh Atid representing this essentially this secularist center, Tel Aviv-based secularist center. You have these large parties and then classically, the way it always worked in Israel is that you would have smaller fringe parties representing smaller communities who would cleave to these larger parties and form a coalition.

The problem comes when those small parties, and this is an accusation often leveled at the ultra-Orthodox parties, then say if you don't do what I want or you don't supply the funding to my institutions, my yeshivas, my charities, my whatever, then I leave this coalition and I maybe even move over to the other guy.

And so the ultra_Orthodox and they're not the only one -- Religious Zionist, this has been leveled at the settlement movement of West Bank settlers -- have been able, in the interest of stability, to, critics would say extort, supporters would say win for their legitimate cause and needs, resources and government attention. But there's no question that on matters of policy that matter to the ultra-Orthodox or matter to other different communities, this is a system that gives them a tremendous amount of influence and to change Israeli government policy for everybody, even if they represent a minority position in the Israeli body politic generally.

Borschel-Dan: Okay, I can understand the need to check minorities' power proportionately. But they still get a voice which is so critical in a working democracy, as long as they get the votes, right? So why is it really such a bad thing to have these different identities be able to express themselves?

Rettig Gur: So I want to try and convey sort of one of the main reasons why people think it's a bad thing and also I personally think it's secretly it's a good thing. But we'll get to that in a minute.

First of all, you look at specific policies, right? Most Israelis would like much more liberal policies. For example, a majority of Israeli support civil marriage. There is no civil marriage. Why is there no civil marriage? Because it was never a government that wasn't beholden for its literal, simple survival as a majority in the Knesset to one religious party or another that refused to allow the institution of any kind of civil marriage in Israel. And so I think we're the only democracy, or even the only western country without civil marriage. And we're probably one of the few countries on Earth without civil marriage. Even the non-democracies. We have a common law marriage people fly to Cyprus, so 45 minutes flight, get married and come back. And that's recognized. It's not that Israelis don't have options. They have options. But the technical point of not having civil marriage is exactly a function of that.

There's a kashrut monopoly of the government, the ultra-Orthodox education system, much of it doesn't teach math or English past 8th grade, some of it doesn't teach math or English past fourth grade.

There are a lot of people on the left and on the right who think that that is a strategic problem for the future of the state of Israel. The ultra-Orthodox kindergarteners are something like a fifth of all kindergarteners in this country, a little bit more even. And so they need to be getting a better education going forward. Right, but the ultra-Orthodox parties refuse to allow that to happen because they have this outsized influence.

And so there is this enormous criticism, and there's one other really important criticism of this tribal party list system, which is that it reinforces the tribe. In other words, if you take a party like Shas, I apologize for picking on the ultra Orthodox. It's equally true of the religious Zionism. It's equally true especially nowadays, of the progressive party like Meretz, which represents people from very specific geographic locales, not just for particular political opinions, and also from very specific income deciles. But I'm going to pick on Shas just for fun.

The Shas party is the Sephardi ultraorthodox party. Now, what does that mean? That means that it is a party that defines itself as distinct from the other ultra-Orthodox party united Judaism for being Sephardi, for being from a particular religious tradition, a particular geographic and cultural tradition. And it has to constantly campaign on this sense of marginalization, of Sephardi Jews, on the sense of prejudice against Sephardi Jews and uniquely Sephardi Jews to justify its existence.

And so every single election campaign since the founding of Shas in the 80s, there is this voice in Israeli politics shouting about how the Ashkenazi elite is still oppressing and suppressing the Mizrahim marginalized. Now, Mizrahim have been the majority voters of the ruling coalition of this country for the majority of the last 40 years, but they're still marginalized and they're still oppressed, and there's still this sense of grievance. And these are the politics of identity and of grievance are reinforced by the fact that these parties have to function as essentially tribal parties to survive. So there are many serious criticisms of this system, and I think we've laid out a lot of them.

Borschel-Dan: At least the system is open for everyone to participate in, right? I mean, every little minority can participate in the system.

Rettig Gur: There's no question that, in principle, on paper, the system is wide open for everyone to participate in. And yet there are minorities, communities that consistently have been unable to participate, unwilling, unable. The line is often blurred because the reasons they are unwilling has a lot to do with also reasons that they're unable. I'll give specific examples to not leave that up in the air.

There are minorities in Israel who are simply too small to be able to sustain a Knesset representation that will have the power to negotiate for them. Ethiopian Jews. Ethiopian Jews have specific needs and those specific needs are not being met by the country. In my opinion, and I think in the opinion of all those who study the problem and look into them, whether academics or activists or the community itself certainly believes that and says that all the time. But there aren't enough Ethiopian Jews, Jews of Ethiopian extraction to be a constituency that has to be "bought off" in the best sense of the term. The way the other minorities that are in play, that are larger, that are in the Knesset wrangling and getting their resources, are able to do.

The Druze. The Druze are a very interesting minority. They serve in the army in huge numbers. They were very hurt by the nation state law that they felt marginalized them. Sort of in principle, many of them would vote right wing and have now not voted right wing since the passage of that law. On those grounds, they're a minority whose voice and what was fascinating was when the nation state law passed a few years ago, the Druze launched these massive nationwide protests against it. And the Israeli right, the Likud and other right wing parties were surprised. They were just literally startled by that fact. They had no idea that any of this was worrying them.

There isn't a serious Druze representation. There are some Druze members of Knesset from various parties but there isn't a concerted Druze representation because there's maybe 120,000, it might even be less than that in the entire country. And so not enough.

And then there's the big minority. That isn't part of this game that I described, this game where minorities come to the table and win for themselves resources and attention. And that's the Israeli Arab voting electorate. It's roughly 20% of the population. It's very diverse. Israel's Arab community. About half of them say that their top major identity is Palestinian. About half of them feel much more attached to Israel and talk about themselves as Israeli Arabs.

It's a very complex community with layered identities. There's a very secular part of it and a very religious part of it. There are Muslims and Christians, but if you approach them as a community as a whole, as a minority Arab community in a Jewish state, their political parties, a significant portion of them feel alienated from the politics of Israel because it's a Jewish state. Some of those because they oppose Israel's existence in principle, they're Palestinian nationalists. They believe Zionism is a bad thing. And some of them just because they don't think Israeli politics have ever really worked in their favor and so don't expect it to. And so they basically sit out elections.

Arab political parties in Israel never, almost, rarely draw more than half of the potential Arab vote. And that says something. That says something important about faith in the Israeli political system and in those political parties.

I want to dwell on this point for one second.

There is intentional discrimination in Israel. In other words, when an Arab citizen of Israel, you know, engages with Israeli society writ large, they encounter discrimination. There is no question of that. We know that because they tell us that. And we know that because there's statistical evidence of it. But there's something else happening that is profoundly important and we have to pay attention to if we want to think about integration in a serious way and how the political system either favors integration or prevents integration. And that's this structural question of whether a community can come to the coalition negotiating table. If buying and selling votes is the key to a seat at the table. Is the key to the government funding police stations in your town. Is the key to your schools having the resources and the attention that they need to flourish if buying votes and that sort of tribal way of thinking that is fundamental to the Israeli electoral system and therefore to the bandwidth and the focus of the Israeli bureaucracy.

What happens when your community either sees no reason to vote or doesn't have enough votes like Ethiopians or Druze to be worth buying off with budgets or with positions of influence? Who looks after you? How do your communities, even if they're very large, not fall through the cracks?

What's fascinating about this question of the Arab community being neglected and marginalized in part because it's literally not coming to the table the way the ultra-Orthodox have, is that that's exactly what Ra'am has been doing over the last year. Right, the Ra'am political party, the Islamist Arab Party, has come to the table, has joined an Israeli coalition.

It began negotiations with right-wing Likud and then it actually entered the coalition of the Lapid-Bennett government of the last year. For the very first time in Israeli history, an Arab majority, Arab-identified party sat in a ruling coalition. And it made the argument explicitly. It said this. It said, it's time to set aside our concerns about Zionism, ideological concerns, and it's time to start putting our electoral heft -- we don't have the problem of the Jews or various other immigrant minorities. We don't have the problem that we're too small. We're enormous. We're 20% of the population -- we can come to the table and make good use of those votes for our communities. It's time to play the game.

And the parties that oppose that, the other Arab parties -- Balad, the Palestinian secularist nationalist party; Hadash, the socialist progressive party -- they didn't oppose it because of some specific distaste for sitting with a particular government. It wasn't that they didn't like Prime Minister Natali Bennett. They talked openly. They said to Ra'am that when one Arab faction enters the game, plays the game, it ends up validating the game.

There is an implicit debate in the Arab community between the Ra'am Party, which says, the main source of discrimination and marginalization that we face is that we're not at the table. The game has its rules. Everyone's playing it. Those who don't play, don't win, and we need to get to playing. And by the way, if we start playing, we'll be pretty strong, we'll be pretty powerful. And the other side that says, no, the main source of discrimination is intentional. The Israeli state doesn't want us, and therefore will never invest in us. And therefore the only thing we do by coming to the table is validate a system that discriminates against us structurally. Those are the two camps. And if you understand how the Israeli system works, that tribal national party list, election system, what a coalition table really is, how those tribes come together, you suddenly understand the implicit debate happening not so implicit, they say it openly happening in the Arab community.

And what Ra'am actually was doing, the scale of the historic scale of the experiment of Ra'am over the last year.

Borschel-Dan: So over this last year, by opting to yes, take a seat at the table, don't you think that as ultra-Orthodox parties have in the past, haven't they changed the country's agenda in some way?

Rettig Gur: I'll say this, I think that something fascinating happened with the ultra-Orthodox parties. And I think that there is the potential to hope that it happens with Arab parties like Ra'am when they engage with a coalition-building system with essentially Israeli electoral governance system.

The ultra-Orthodox parties began as deeply anti-Zionist parties. Zionism was too secular for them, too messianic for them. And there was a huge ideological debate for a century about what Zionism means. And the ultra-Orthodox generally were completely opposed. And those who weren't completely opposed were merely non-Zionists refusing to drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak.

And then they just became Israelis. And over the last 40 years, people who walk around in Mea Shearim, a famous ultra-Orthodox conservative, ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem, like me, going to their bookstores, have noticed that their Hebrew is becoming Israeli slang. And they're just hand movements -- you can tell an Italian by their hand movements, supposedly -- so their hand language, not sign language, hand language has become deeply, deeply Israeli. And their politics have changed profoundly. I don't think twelve years ago, or even maybe nine years ago, you would have been able to see an ultra-Orthodox member of the Knesset sit as a government minister.

In principle, to sit in the Israeli cabinet, you have to swear an oath to the government to the state, and then you get to sit in the cabinet. Deputy ministers can be appointed much more easily and don't have to swear that oath. And so they would only accept deputy minister positions because in principle, they can't swear an oath to what is essentially Zionism. And then there was a Supreme Court ruling on some kind of technicality of how you appoint what and whether a deputy minister of housing is able to make certain kinds of decisions that that current deputy minister who was really the minister because he was ultra-Orthodox and so wouldn't be minister, was trying to make. And because of that technicality, the rabbis of the United Torah Judaism party allowed Yaakov Litzman to just go ahead and be minister. And it went over with total silence. Nobody cared.

Suddenly it's not a big dramatic principled thing not to swear an oath. I mean, they don't swear anyway, but to give an oath to Zionism. And then suddenly their cabinet minister, Yaakov Litzman, would go on over the last six or seven years to attend military ceremonies on Remembrance Day for soldiers. The ultra-Orthodox have long opposed Israel's memorial day, not because they don't care about dead Israeli soldiers, they do, but they said there is a traditional Jewish way of mourning this sort of military ceremony with wreaths and memorials and stone things and military marches. It's stuff that was invented by the Romans. It's stuff that non-Jews do. This is taking their ways and adopting them for ourselves and on something sacred. And so we don't do it. We do not self-commemorate memorial day. And then they do, and nobody talked about it.

Very conservative societies like the ultra-Orthodox can change. They just can't admit they're changing. And if you don't say you're changing, you can change profoundly.

Over the last decade, this is a community that has gone from ideological anti-Zionism for generations to fairly conservative Zionism instantly, overnight. And if you point it out to them, they're insulted that you think they'd ever been anything else. What drew them in, what forced them to cleave to the Israeli mainstream, was this system.

In other words, everyone used to talk about them as extorting the system because of their outsized power, because of how our electoral and governing system works, because of how the Knesset coalition system works. But in fact, while they were "extorting" the Israeli mainstream, they were being funded by the Israeli mainstream. They were being supported and become dependent and then slowly come to identify with and then slowly become offended that the Israeli mainstream would say to them, you're extorting from us as if they're not part of us.

And that's the discourse today. And so they've been bought by Zionism. Not with money, a lot of money changed hands, but it isn't the money. It's the genuine experience of being part of the country and being dependent on the country, but also feeling like they are also contributing in profound ways to that country. They're, by the way, contributing more and more. They have higher and higher work rates, participation in the workforce, and all the complaints about them are slowly improving. And so there's this process of identification.

If the Arab community of Israel, now the Arab community of Israel, there's a bigger gap between a Jewish mainstream and an Arab minority than there is between an ultra-Orthodox Jewish minority and a less, you know, or a Religious Zionist/ secular Jewish majority. But there is a bigger gap. There is an unresolved Palestinian conflict and question and statehood, question and occupation and equality and discrimination and all the rest of it. And so it's a longer path, and maybe a lot has to be resolved before the integration becomes integration in any meaningful sense.

But if that system can be made to work with the Arab community, the state of Israel can, "buy them off" -- first with actual resources which their citizens, they deserve. I don't begrudge them, I don't begrudge the ultra-Orthodox either. But then belonging after that comes a generation of belonging because they're already part of it, and their Hebrew is already, Israeli Hebrew and all the rest of it.

So I have high hopes for Ra'am. Even if the Arab parties collapse in this election, which some of them look set to, and even if the experiment is deemed a disaster, the very fact that those walls were broken once means that they are breakable. And we've seen this process with other minorities, and it's a process that actually, surprisingly, even though it's like a centrifugal system where every tribe, it reinforces the tribalism of each tribe, in the end, it also brings them together to the table in a way that historically has made an Israeli body politic that is coherent and functional and healthy.

Borschel-Dan: Okay, Haviv. Thank you.

IMAGE: Ministers in the newly sworn in Israeli government pose for a group photo at the president's residence in Jerusalem. June 14, 2021. (Yonatan Sindel/FLASH90)

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