On Party Weakness, the "Government of Change," and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Israeli Knesset, Israel Preker via the PikiWiki - Israel free image collection project. CC by 2.5.
By Gal Komem
The main obstacle for achieving a sustainable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the weakness of the Israeli Party system. The "Government of Change'' provides a few promising opportunities to reform it.
Party Regulation and Conflict Resolution
Why hasn’t a sustainable arrangement for peaceful Israeli-Palestinian coexistance been implemented yet? Israeli politicians repeatedly emphasize that there is no partner for peace talks on the Palestinian side, but that it is Israel that must take the lead toward any future arrangement. Israel is strong, prosperous, and the only fully sovereign entity from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The many international and domestic critics of the Israeli government's ineptness in resolving the conflict have long embraced this view. However, very few of them truly engage with the political barriers that prevent the promotion of any solution to it.
Public opinion surveys from the last five to ten years indicate that while most Israelis are concerned with and skeptical of finding a practical solution to the conflict, the majority of them are interested in achieving peace and are willing to make concessions to achieve it.[1] This is not surprising, considering the very high prices that Israelis pay for their government's failure to achieve peace. The frequent rounds of war in Gaza and the waves of terror attacks from the West Bank result in casualties, painful periods of economic distress, and persistent social anxiety. Israel engages daily in human right violations, leading human rights organizations to begin classifying it as an apartheid state. No citizen wants to live in a country with such a problematic reputation. In addition, it is clear that the current governance arrangement of direct control of the Palestinians is not only morally problematic but also unsustainable. As settlements grow, and the two populations become more entangled in one another economically and spatially, the chances that any future arrangement will reflect the best interests of both the Israeli and Palestinian populations gradually decrease.
If most Israelis and Palestinians want peace and pay high prices for not achieving it, and if the probability of success diminishes with time, why can’t Israeli politicians simply provide their constituents what they want? Trying to dismiss international critics, Israelis often emphasize the complicated nature of the conflict. The sad truth is that indeed, a sustainable solution to the conflict—whether it will conclude in one, two, or more states—can be achieved only through a comprehensive process that considers history, human rights, security, and many other key factors. This is a long-term process that will require politicians to devote time, attention, and reputational capital for an agreement whose fruits will be reaped only years ahead. Moreover, crafting a successful solution to the conflict would require politicians to carefully weigh conflicting interests of different groups within the Israeli and Palestinian societies against one another and to endure pressures from these groups.
All politicians deal with interest groups and reputational pressures focused on the near term. Israel's party system is, however, uniquely ill-equipped to help its politicians overcome these pressures and commit to long-term, broad public interest oriented investments. It is almost designed to cultivate disagreement, prohibit compromise, and encourage political action on the basis of short-sighted, narrow partisan interests.
A few points of reference might help illustrate how the Israeli parliamentary system functions. Since Israel gained independence in 1948, 71 percent of its elected parliaments were dismissed prior to their original end date ;only one out of thirty-four governments have completed a full four-year term.[2] A 2018 survey from the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) examining the life expectancy of governments in twenty-one Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) democracies ranks Israel in second-to-last place, as the average life expectancy of Israeli governments between 1995-2018 was only thirty-four months.[3] Governments in the United Kingdom (UK), Germany, Sweden, Italy and the United States spend about a year more in office compared to their Israeli counterparts.
Between 1992-2021, thirty new parties were established and had candidates who ran for the parliament in Israel.[4] The average life expectancy of new parties is short– many of them do not survive more than a couple of national elections. Out of thirty new parties established, only twelve were still active in 2021. Despite their short life span, new parties yield significant political power–the average share of seats of new parties in parliament between 2006-2021 was 42percent.
Israeli politicians switch parties rapidly. The leaders of the eight party stakeholders in Israel's current governing coalition have switched parties on average two and a half times each over the last five elections alone. Party fragmentation and switching are ubiquitous across the political spectrum. Naftali Bennet (Israel's current Prime Minister), Nitsan Horowitz (the leader of Meretz, Israel's left-Zionist party), and Mahmud Abbas (the leader of the Arab Islamist Party) each switched parties three times during the last five elections.
These anecdotal data points serve as a window to the challenges of parties to formulate a vision to solve the conflict. In order to resist short-term, reputational and interest group pressures, parties must cultivate resilient institutional infrastructure. Parties that are expected to spend a short time in office, split, unite with other parties, or have frequent, unexpected, changes in leadership struggle to invest in such infrastructure.
The sources of the weakness in Israel's party system can be explained by three main characteristics. First, Israel has a proportional representation (PR) system, in which parties are allocated seats in the parliament proportional to the share of the votes that they receive in federal elections, with coalitions formed through post-election bargaining. PR systems inherently produce short-sighted coalitions.[5] As parties do not know who their partners in future post-election coalitions will be, they are incentivized to maximize near-term benefits at the cost of long-term vision. Parties in a PR system are also less accountable. Whereas in the single-member district systems of the United States or the UK where the party in rule is held accountable for the consequences of their actions, parties in PR systems can blame each other for coalitions' failures.[6]
Second, the Israeli parliamentary regulation induces weak parties whose members fail to cooperate on major issues, set a coherent vision, and translate it into feasible policies. Several factors contribute to this systemic weakness. Electoral legislation requires a party to secure only 3.25 percent of the votes to be awarded a seat in the parliament. Though there are debates regarding the adequacy of Israel’s threshold, it is lower than the international average of PR democracies.[7] Within this political system, there is minimal sanctioning on party switching or party splitting. In practice, that means that in the case of a disagreement within a certain party, politicians benefit from leaving their party in order to join other parties or from forming new parties altogether. This further reduces the accountability of party members to party leaders, and it hurts a party's ability to cultivate the institutional capacity needed to formulate and implement long-term, feasible policy.
Third, party weakness also stems from parties’ internal institutional designs. New parties are inherently weak, as they usually coalesce around a single leader, lack the institutional capacity that mature parties build for years, and seldom invest in cultivating such infrastructure overtime. Many old parties, on the other hand, gradually introduce open list primaries that increase politicians’ loyalty to their sectoral constituencies over party leadership–which is responsible for setting a coherent policy agenda and balancing the interests of different constituencies with conflicting interests and needs. That, in turn, weakens tham, as it makes it impossible to promote a coherent party-level agenda, and it makes politicians more susceptible to pressures from sectoral interest groups.[8] For example, Israel's settlers community, which is the biggest opponent to a peace agreement, becomes more potent by effectively using the primaries system to increase its proportional representation in the Likkud party.[9] As a result, using Bizzaro e al’s ranking method, Israeli parties' strength is ranked thirty-first among thirty-seven OECD countries.[10]
Israel's weak party system is, perhaps, the largest impediment to any long-term horizon policies. As parties in Israel struggle to coalesce and establish a feasible agenda in any policy domain, it is no wonder that they fail to do so when it comes to the most strategic, long-term issue they are asked to engage with–the Israeli-Palestine conflict. This failure is characteristic of Israeli-Arab parties, too. In 2015, following an increase in the entry threshold to the parliament, the four parties that represent the Israeli-Arab population united to a larger joint list, to ensure that neither of them will be left outside the parliament. Many hopes were pinned to this experiment—a unified, large joint list of Arab parties could have been more effective in developing inclusive policy solutions to improve the livelihoods of the Arab population, which has suffered years of severe underinvestment, discrimination, and neglect, and in pressuring the government to adopt them, compared to four, small, separate parties.
Though the increase of the electoral threshold encouraged the Arab parties to engage in such an endeavor, this project has failed. Even after the increase, a party is required to win no more than four seats to enter the parliament. Moreover, Israeli party regulation allows joint-lists, which are formed by a few parties. to split right after the elections. These electoral incentives, set by the parliamentary regulation, reward division. And indeed, in the face of disagreements about ideology and policy, the Arab parties decided to give up on the joint list project, run separately, and remain divided, instead of solving these disputes internally. The ideologic, religious and socio-economic divides are not unique to the Israeli-Arab population - they exist in every community. However, the parliamentary regulation has major influence on the extent that these divides influence collective action. A higher entry threshold to the parliament and stricter regulation on party splitting, for example, could have put more pressure on these parties to stay united and reduce party fragmentation. To be clear, this phenomenon is not unique to Arab parties. Parties all across the political spectrum remain small and weak, fail to solve disputes in-house, and are led by short-sightedness and narrow interests.
The Opportunities of The Government of Change
Institutional changes that will enable parties to consolidate and implement coherent strategies can greatly help in promoting a solution to the Israeli Palestinian Conflict. Surprisingly, the often criticized "Government of Change" provides a unique opportunity to reform Israel's failing parliamentary system. This government implemented mechanisms that make it more effective when compared to the previous government, and it even implemented reforms that improve the livelihoods of Palestinians. Perhaps these strengths can be built upon to carve out more opportunities to end the conflict.
The "Government of Change" was approved last May, as Israel was licking its wounds from the health and economic crisis of COVID-19, a devastating war in Gaza accompanied by civil clashes between Jews and Arabs in mixed cities, and four consecutive elections within two years. The government’s nickname was coined for lack of a better term that could describe this peculiar electoral creature—a government that covers the entire political spectrum: hard-right religious Zionist, Moderate Center, Social Democrat Left and Arab Islamist parties all have a role.[11]
The glue that stuck these all together was the determination to end the presidency of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister (PM) since 2009. Netanyahu had asked the public to elect him once again for office shortly after the Jerusalem District Court began a three-case trial against him for charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. During his twelve years in office, Netanyahu, a charismatic populist leader, led the Likud party as a one-man-party. He surrounded himself with incompetent ministers, suppressed any electoral opponents, debilitated the government's regulatory capacity, and launched an orchestrated war against the free press and judiciary. It is no wonder that such a right-wing populist leader grew in Israel–this is a typical byproduct of weak, fragmented PR systems.[12]
With years in public office, and the launch of a criminal trial against him, Netanyahu collected several political opponents including Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, who realized that his word simply cannot be trusted. This opposition prevented Netanyahu from forming a coalition during two rounds of elections in 2019, as his major opponent, the centrist "Blue and White" party, insisted that any agreement signed with him is not valid. The Covid-19 crisis, however, put them in a difficult dilemma. Unable to form a coalition that could replace him, Netanyahu, as an interim PM, was navigating Israel's Covid response alone, with escaping prison as his main goal in mind. This time of emergency forced them to sign a deal with the devil, hoping that such a deal could allow for a more sensible management of the pandemic.
Several safeguards were put in place to protect "Blue and White" from potential betrayals on behalf of Netanyahu, three of which warrant focus here. The first is a rotation mechanism in which a few major roles in the government, including the role of PM, will rotate between the two parties halfway through the term. The second includes sanctions on any dissolution of the parliament that discourage and penalize attempts to shorten the government's time in power. The third is an explicitly narrow operational focus to prevent coalitional disputes, with an agreement to concentrate mostly on health and economic reforms that are related to the Covid crisis.
These three mechanisms were directly imported to the coalition agreement between the parties of the "Government of Change," established soon after Netanyahu characteristically betrayed his agreement with "Blue and White." These mechanisms, and the experimental institutional design which inspired their adoption, were seen (and framed in the public debate) as ad hoc measures adopted to mitigate ambiguity and mistrust.
However, putting them in the right context, they also provide some remedies for the ills that are inherent to the weak Israeli party system. They serve at least as a temporary, exogenous regulation that strengthens parties, prevents opportunistic, personally motivated political action, and fosters the creation and adoption of pragmatic, centrist programmatic policies. The “Government of Change” is, indeed, very effective in promoting such reforms. Moreover, even though this coalition is restricted from changing the status-quo in Israeli-Palestinian relations, this structure incentivizes it to promote several ambitious policies in the right direction, and even restrain extremism. All of these strengths are crucial both in the short and long run to generate any solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Rotation agreements are usually seen as an obstacle for effective governance. If a minister is replaced at the middle of the term and serves for two years only, she is significantly less able to promote strategic reforms in her office. But this cost is negligible considering the fact that seventy-five percent of Israeli governments are dissolved within three years.[13] Moreover, rotation agreements can provide effective "carrots" for politicians in influential positions that incentivize them to keep the coalition united. For example, as part of the rotation agreement, Ayelet Shaked, who is ranked second in the right-wing "Yamina" party, will receive her coveted Minister of Justice position only in August 2023. This agreement serves as a major incentive for her party to stick to the current coalition and refrain from dissolving it.
The coalition agreement states that each party in the “Government of Change” is "affiliated" with one of the leading parties that led the negotiations, and whose leaders, Bennet and Lapid, share the PM role. Whereas the rotation between Bennet and Lapid is set to take place in 2023, if two legislators that are both affiliated with either Bennet or Lapid vote for dissolution, rotation will take place immediately. Immediate rotation will also happen if the parties fail to pass a bi-annual federal budget. These regulations extend the government's horizon and increase its cohesiveness. Parties that betray the agreement immediately forfeit their positions of power and bear the risk that this power will be directed against them.
By committing to this government, all parties were well aware that major concessions would be necessary for the coalition to work. In an alliance of left, center, and right-leaning parties, no one party could effectively promote its own cohesive agenda. However, by signing on, each party is incentivized to propose feasible policies, acceptable to parties with opposite ideological stances, which target the political middle. Though the government is often criticized for its fragility, this coalition agreement actually makes it strong–suggestions accepted by all parties have a high chance of actually being implemented.
The so-called "narrow" policy focus appears in practice to be quite wide. The government continues to manage the COVID-19 crisis responsibly, and it leads a balanced compensation plan to compensate individuals who were forced to quarantine instead of distributing blanket checks to buy votes. It appointed a record number of female ministers and Heads of ministries. It even engages in reforming some of the most painful institutional failures that matter to the Israeli public: increasing dramatically the investment in public transportation, breaking the monopoly of the Rabbinate in providing Kosher certificates, removing import barriers and increased reliance on EU regulation to increase competition, and increased welfare spending to support senior and poor citizens. Moreover, the government promotes unprecedented investments in integrating the Israeli-Arab population into the Israeli society through reforms to law enforcement, as well as access to social services and infrastructure. Of particular note are the launches of a large-scale program to combat gun violence in Arab villages, and a five-year plan to reduce social gaps between Jews and Arabs.[14] It also passed an historic electricity law, aiming to connect thousands of households in unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev to electricity and water.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the government of change, as a bipartisan coalition, exerts some restrictive power over its members, and predominantly on the extremist factors within it. Last August, Benny Gantz was the first senior israeli government official to meet PLO President Abbas since Netanyahu took office in 2010. What led to this change in approach? The most extreme right-wing figures that were a part of Netanyahu’s coalitions throughout the last decade and opposed communicating with the PLO–Bennet, Shaked, Saar, Lieberman—-all hold even more senior roles in the current government. Political commentators claim that pressure from the United States was the main factor that led to the meeting, but there must be a reason why Natanyahu’s government endured that pressure for years, while the government of change did not. The reason is that the leaders of the Government of Change know that this time, they might not be able to use harsh security measures in response to potential terror attacks coming from either Gaza or the West Bank. While considering the risk of terror attacks, Bennet and Shaked know that they must share the cabinet table with factors who might not approve of these measures. That encourages them to prevent these terror attacks from happenning in the first place–through security and economic cooperation with Abbas. The main beneficiaries of this cooperation are, of course, the Israeli and Palestinian public.
Concluding Thoughts
The acknowledgement of the weakness of the Israeli party system as one of the major structural causes for the stubbornness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can serve as a ground for a less heated, more compassionate debate about future steps and remedies. There are no easy solutions to the conflict. However, identifying the systemic flaws that prohibit the consolidation of the desirable solution, along with the opportunities to fix them, even marginally, is a promising strategy to carve the path towards positive strategic change. Today, the Government of Change provides a few opportunities to do so.
The “Government of Change” would not be able to consolidate a holistic solution to the conflict, as it was explicitly agreed upon that Israeli-Palestinian relations are beyond its scope of action. However, even within this framework, it manages to carve out areas of common understanding and identify, even among its extremist members, ideologic positions that are malleable and can be softened. These changes in approach are directly related to the government’s structure and to the safeguards it has put in place to prevent betrayal and facilitate cooperation between its members. Strengthened parliamentary measures to further discourage party splitting, the establishment of new parties, and frequent changes in party leadership can greatly increase parties’ and governments’ abilities to engage with strategic planning and come up with creative but feasible solutions to the conflict. The Government of Change’s willingness to experiment with such measures is a major asset in this regard that could break the main gridlock of the Israeli -Palestinian conflict–the weakness of the Israeli party system.
A short thought experiment would help conclude and highlight the main message in practice. Consider a Lapid-like centrist prime minister, who might be willing to return to the negotiation table but is hesitant, knowing that a peace process will require resolving significant disputes within the coalition, which might end in its dissolution. Would a higher entry threshold for the parliament, and parliamentary sticks in place to discourage party splitting and prevent recalcitrant government members from leaving the coalition, persuade him to do so, as the success chances of negotiations under this structure would increase? I believe that they probably would.
About the Author
Gal Komem is an M.A. student at the Jackson Institute from Tel Aviv, Israel. He is a graduate of the PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to Yale, Gal worked as a regulation policy analyst at the Strategy Department of the Israeli Prime Minister's Office.
Endnotes
Zipi Israeli, and P. Pines, "The Israeli Palestinian Conflict," National Security Index: Trends in Public Opnion in Israel, 2020, https://www.inss.org.il/he/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/memo200_e.pdf; "Palestinian-Israeli Pulse: A Joint Poll,"The Israeli Democracy Institute and Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, August 2016, https://en.idi.org.il/media/4219/executivesummary_08182016_final.pdf.
Assaf Nativ, “Government Instability: Only 1 in 34 Governments Has Completed a Full Term. A Special Visual Project,” Shakuf, August 2019, https://shakuf.co.il/9346.
Ofer Kenig, “The Israeli Political System in Comparative Perspective,” The Israel Democracy Institute, December 23, 2018, https://www.idi.org.il/articles/24983.
Ofer Kenig and Gideon Rahat, “The Parties in Israel, 1992-2021,” The Israel Democracy Institute, 2021, https://www.idi.org.il/media/17403/political-parties-in-israel-draft.pdf.
Frances Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro, Responsible parties: Saving Democracy from Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press), 2018.
Kathleen Bawn and Frances Rosenbluth, "Short versus long coalitions: electoral accountability and the size of the public sector," American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 2,2006, pp. 251-265; Torsten Persson, Gerard Roland, and Guido Tabellini, "Electoral rules and government spending in parliamentary democracies," Quarterly Journal of Political Science 2, no. 2,2007, pp. 155-188.
Judah Troen, “The National Electoral Threshold: A Comparative Review across Countries and over Time,” The Knesset: Research and Information Center, January, 1, 2019, https://m.knesset.gov.il/en/activity/mmm/the%20nationalelectoralthreshold.pdf.
Rosenbluth and Shapiro, Responsible parties: Saving Democracy from Itself.
Yakub Halabi, "Is the Israeli Democracy a Hindrance to Peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority?" International Studies 53, no. 2, 2016,pp. 136-152.
Fernando Bizzarro, et al.,. ."Party strength and economic growth," World Politics 70, no. 2,2018, pp. 275-320.
"It would be akin to Mitch McConnell abandoning Donald Trump to work with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Chuck Schumer—and Ocasio-Cortez and Schumer saying yes.” See: David Leonhardt, “Strange Political Bedfellows,” The New York Times, June 3, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/briefing/israel-coalition-netanyahu-bennett.html.
Rosenbluth and Shapiro, Responsible parties: Saving Democracy from Itself, p. 17.
Nativ, “Government Instability.”
Called "Takkaddum."