One Ballot, All or Nothing
Israel is in the midst of a turbulent election season – the race is underway and party lists are set to close soon. This is, without doubt, one of the most fateful election campaigns in Israel's history. At this moment we must ask: why is politics here so volatile and extreme?
In recent years we have experienced severe crises. The frequency of elections in Israel is among the highest in the Western world, and between 2019 and 2022 alone we held five election campaigns – including two sessions of the Knesset in which no government was even formed. Since then, Israeli society has been grappling with the establishment of lawless outposts in the West Bank, loss of control over the budget, and extreme confrontation on core issues: between supporters of the judicial overhaul and its opponents, between the Haredi public and the Zionist public over the question of conscription, and over the inclusion of the Ra'am party in a future coalition. All this on top of the regional war forced upon us since the October 7th massacre.
Equality March – Bnei Brak, August 24, 2023. Photo: Lizi Shanan, via Wikipedia.
Israel's electoral system – a single ballot for all issues at once – is a central part of the answer to our instability. In the United States, for example, people vote separately for the federal government, for state governments, for local districts, and so on, so that different value-based questions are decided in separate arenas. In Israel there is only one ballot, for one parliament, which decides everything at once. Combined with the built-in need to form a coalition, this creates an "all or nothing" mechanism: even when two parties agree on a particular value, that isn't enough – to form a coalition they must simultaneously agree on every other dispute between them as well. This is how the crisis of five election campaigns between 2019 and 2022 unfolded: the Yisrael Beiteinu party demanded the conscription of Haredi yeshiva students, and its clearly right-wing positions on security were no longer sufficient to form a right-wing government. That is how the longstanding cooperation between it and the right-wing bloc collapsed, and Israel was swept into five election campaigns.
The direct result of this mechanism is the phenomenon we all know as political extortion – small, extreme groups ruling over the majority. Naftali Bennett's tenure as prime minister (2021–2022), even though his party won only seven seats in the election; the ability of the Haredi parties to dictate terms on conscription and budget issues; and the ability of the staunchest supporters of Greater Israel to force most Israelis to establish more settlements and more outposts, even though most of the religious-Zionist public itself does not hold this position – all these are examples of this extortion phenomenon.
Many believe that the extortion phenomenon in the political system stems from the size of the ruling parties, on the assumption that a large ruling party will not be dependent on tiny partners. But the historical comparison refutes this: Mapai under Ben-Gurion held an average of about 45 seats and still yielded to the dictates of the small Mafdal party, while Netanyahu's second government (2009–2013), with only 27 seats, displayed relative stability. The second common explanation – politicians' egos – is equally weak, since it exists in every democracy. What is unique to Israel is being a deeply divided society confined to a tiny territory, governed by centralized rules of the game.
Israeli society is a society saturated with disputes, operating within centralized rules of the game that amplify its rifts. The four central rifts – the relationship between religion and state, the formulation of a constitution, the borders of the state, and the status of Arab society – are not ordinary disagreements that can be bridged by simplistic compromise, but genuine contradictions between values and identities. But instead of resolving these contradictions through the agreement of the majority of Israeli society, the state's founders chose to push the problems further down the road. In each of these four areas they adopted a policy of vague concealment – an attempt to paper over the problem through unclear policy, or policy carrying an internal contradiction.
The country's leadership understood that it faced conflicting social pressures with no immediate solution, and concluded that the best way to deal with them was to concentrate more and more power in its own hands in order to cover over the tensions. This centralizing principle seeped into central institutions – the IDF, the state education system, the land regime, and so on. But this cover could hold only as long as the rifts themselves remained relatively moderate. Since the 1980s, Israeli society has undergone profound demographic and ideological changes that widened them: Mizrahi Jewry openly rejected the discrimination against it, religious Zionism embraced the vision of Greater Israel, a large group on the Israeli left adopted liberal positions emphasizing equality and human rights, wide segments of Arab society openly embraced a Palestinian identity, and the Haredi public grew in its political scope. The contradictions that emerged were too broad for a policy of ambiguity to contain. And so, in the 1990s – with the Oslo process, the constitutional revolution, and above all the assassination of Rabin – the old cover was finally torn apart and has not been reassembled since.
Thus Israel's centralized rules of the game turned from a form of partial solution into part of the problem itself. Instead of covering over the rifts, they amplify them.
Opening of the winter session of the Knesset, October 28, 2024. Photo: Kobi Gideon, Spokesperson of the President's Residence, via Wikipedia.
The clearest example of this centralizing problem is the electoral system itself, which turns every choice into a single, indivisible package. Here is how it works in practice: for any given party, a single position is enough to mobilize a significant bloc of voters. But because there is only one ballot, those same voters are forced to "buy," together with that position, all the party's other positions as well – including ones they strongly oppose. This creates a situation in which voters effectively vote against their own interest on one issue in order to protect their interest on another. The most striking contemporary example of this is the link between the conscription of Haredi yeshiva students and the settlement enterprise: settlers accept the exemption from conscription, and the Haredi accept the continuation of settlement construction – not out of shared values, but out of the necessity to survive together on that same single ballot. A 2024 survey by the Israel Democracy Institute exposed the gap: 68% of religious voters support various models for drafting the Haredi, yet only 36% of them are willing to support the breakup of the right-wing coalition in order to actually advance it.
The inevitable conclusion is that Israeli society needs a solution for the contradictions within it, and new democratic rules of the game – and that is the real discussion we need to have, not the sterile argument of "pro-Bibi" versus "anti-Bibi." We must adopt a new vision that confronts the contradictions themselves and unites the majority of Israeli society, from right and left alike. Anything less than that will not get us out of this crisis in the long run.
The solution must begin with flexibility: we need to create a new electoral system with multiple ballots, as is common in many democracies around the world. This would allow the democratic decision to be divided into several separate tracks, so that each issue is examined on its own. In our movement we have formulated a concrete proposal along these lines, based on two elected parliamentary chambers. The next article will lay out this proposal in full.
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