Israeli Election: The Missing Piece

What will a Netanyahu-led government mean for the peace process? Will Lieberman's participation poison relations with Washington? Following Israel's recent election, these and other hot-button questions are being bandied about in the media, no doubt in Foggy Bottom, and probably around the dinner tables of Israel's supporters in America.

But no one is talking about Israel's hyper-democracy and the increasing dysfunction of Israeli political institutions. Friends of Israel should be alarmed over the worsening atomization of Israeli politics, marked most notably by the diminished power of Israel's two traditional blocs--Labor and Likud--and the vastly increased power of small and medium sized parties.

Are Israeli politics a cacophony of divided voices because the issues on the table (i.e. borders, security, identity, etc.) are so existential? No doubt. But it would be a mistake not to ascribe some of the instability and divisiveness to Israel's weak institutions---institutions that provide far too many incentives for break-away parties and splinter groups, and institutions that tend to exaggerate the political power of small, non-mainstream parties.

Israelis, whether left or right, tend to dismiss any talk of electoral reform. "We tried that already," Israelis are quick to say, "and look how it turned out" --- a reference to the 1990s move to directly elect the prime minister, a reform that was later repealed.

But the truth is that Israel didn't try hard enough. One failed experiment in electoral reform doesn't mean reform cannot work. For too many Israelis (and some of their supporters in the U.S.) electoral reform has become synonymous with giving more power to the prime minister, or with silencing minority voices. That's a mistake.

Given the Jewish experience of marginalization, Israel's founders rightfully sought to build an inclusive political system. But inclusiveness need not doom Israel to become Italy (apologies to my Italian friends). Political institutions have now become as much a cause of cleavage and instability as they are a reflection of differences over national priorities.

Granted, there are no magic formulas or silver bullets when it comes to reform, but one modest step would be to raise the electoral threshold - the minimum number of votes needed for representation in the Knesset. Not only would raising the electoral threshold easily garner widespread support in Israel, it can be done without regard to the security situation. Technical, and even irrelevant as it may seem, Israel's friends can hardly find a better expression of their support than standing up for non-partisan, practical-minded steps to stabilize Israeli politics.

The last time I checked, among functioning democracies Israel had the lowest national threshold (2 %). In other countries, higher electoral thresholds have helped supplant political cleavages, provided incentives to promote broad-based platforms, and even excluded the most extreme, illiberal voices. A higher threshold is not a guarantee of stability, but it can go a long way.

Rather than magnify extremist or fringe agendas, Israeli political parties could become more effective vehicles for synthesizing and refining mainstream opinion - which is what the textbooks tell us political parties are designed to do. A loss of absolute pluralism would be a gain for stable, effective representative government.

Electoral reform may not seem urgent at a time when the threat of Hamas and Hizbullah rockets remains real, and the larger specter of a nuclear-armed Iran looms over the horizon. It also cuts against the grain of an Israeli ethos that is crisis-oriented and prone to quick-fixes. But reform is not only essential to the future stability of political life in Israel, it is essential if there is ever to be a national consensus to confront the grave security challenges that face Israel

Who knows what the next coalition will look like, but I can already see the outlines of a Labor-Likud-Kadima-Yisrael Beiteinu bloc, at least a temporary bloc to raise the electoral threshold to five or maybe even seven percent. Such a move could be a giant leap forward, but sadly it appears relegated to remain an obscure subject for political scientists, far removed from the briefing rooms in Foggy Bottom (not to mention Jerusalem), and off the agenda of pro-Israel and democracy advocacy groups. That's a shame, since all it would take is a few, relatively modest, technical moves like this one to have a lasting and positive impact on a country to which millions of Americans remain deeply attached.

Scott Lasensky is a senior research associate at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, and also teaches about Israeli politics. He is author most recently of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East, co-authored with Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer (2008).