The Israeli government of national unity, unprecedented in the country’s history, unfortunately fell last week. Why should you care? In many ways, what ails Israel’s politics today is nothing more than the off-Broadway version of the acute partisan polarization that has infected US politics.
Donald Trump’s extreme direct mentality, characterized by the pursuit of victory at any cost, was vividly described in Washington on Tuesday (28), in Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before the January 6 committee, and is part of a broader trend of deeply undemocratic values ​​that run counter to the aspirations of many Americans and Israelis.
If this trend prevails, it will tear both these societies in half, which is why the soul of Israeli democracy and that of American democracy are at stake in the upcoming elections.
It is not inevitable that this will happen. Contrary to all recent political trends – and in the wake of three inconclusive elections in two years – one year ago Israel did something truly remarkable: it assembled a national coalition of government that, for the first time, included not only right-wing and left, but also an Israeli-Israeli Arab party that had won four seats in Parliament in the March 1921 election.
The core of this coalition was the right-wing Yamina party of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett; the centre-left Yesh Atid party of Chancellor Yair Lapid and the Israeli Arab Muslim religious party of Mansour Abbas, known as Raam.
Imagine Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Larry Hogan, Lisa Murkowski, Charlie Baker, Reserve Admiral Bill McRaven, Joe Manchin, Amy Klobuchar, Mike Bloomberg, Jim Clyburn, and Michelle Lujan Grisham all serving in the same office, and you would have roughly the American equivalent of the Israeli government of national unity that has just died.
I believe that these kinds of coalitions of left, right and center – making pragmatic decisions and making trade-offs that transcend the usual ideological poles – are the only way to govern democracies effectively in this age of accelerating technological, demographic and climate change.
Unless left and right move closer to the center to find a way to govern together in Israel and the US, the two nations will stagnate, with their citizens and leaders unable to do the important and difficult things – from education to immigration. to industrial policy—necessary for them to thrive in the 21st century.
Today your major parties invest great energy in simply doing and undoing each other’s work (search: Roe v. Wade, gun control, immigration, American energy policy).
Despite having only lasted a year, the Israeli unity coalition managed to approve a national budget in November that covered a broad spectrum of interests. This may not seem like a huge accomplishment, but it was the first Israeli national budget based on national priorities to be passed in more than three years.
More than anything else, possibly, the coalition has succeeded in demonstrating that Israeli Jews and Arabs can rule calmly together. It was a historic breakthrough. I spoke with Bennett just before his government fell. He had shown political courage in opposing the position of many in his base by forming an alliance with Abbas, and I was struck by the respect and kindness Bennett showed for his Israeli Arab coalition partner, who had challenged many of his own base to align up with Abbas and Lapid. This is called leadership.
Their government has also given Israelis a brief respite from the divisiveness promoted by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultranationalist racist allies. Netanyahu manifests another kind of leadership. It’s exactly like Trump’s. Netanyahu and Trump are really political brothers, children of different mothers.
Netanyahu and his followers mounted a relentless attack on members of Bennett’s party who participated in the national unity coalition. They ended up getting some of them to leave the coalition, in order to overthrow the government. But to cap off his cynicism, Netanyahu toppled the government by leading a vote against renewing a two-tier legal system that allows Israeli settlers to live in the West Bank under Israeli civil law, rather than being governed by the military law with which Israel rules the Palestinians.
This two-tiered system has been regularly renewed, and Netanyahu’s base of settlers cannot survive without it. But to deny the unity government the ability to deny it, Netanyahu mobilized a vote against the system. Bennett’s unspoken slogan was “we have a country to run.” Netanyahu’s was “we have a government to overthrow”.
Although their rule lasted only a year, Bennett, Lapid and Abbas proved that the seemingly impossible is possible, and many Israelis appreciate it. This reality, combined with the new mathematics of Israeli politics, leads me to believe that the coalition may one day return.
What math is this? Israel’s centre-left and centre-right parties, combined, do not have enough votes to easily form a majority to govern. But neither do the right-wing parties. In the past, religious parties auctioned each other to form left or right coalitions, giving their votes to the coalition that offered them the most funding for orthodox religious schools.
But thanks to Netanyahu and his friends, Israeli religious parties were radicalized and refused to form governments with the centre-left. The latter, in turn, increasingly rejects the obligation of having to buy the support of orthodox parties.
So guess who came to take the place of Jewish religious parties? An Israeli Arab Muslim party led by Abbas.
Most Israeli Arabs generally avoided participating in Israeli politics; they created their own far-left, pro-Palestinian and largely irrelevant parties, which were generally rejected by Jewish parties as partners.
But Israeli Arabs make up roughly 21% of Israel’s population. With Jews split fifty-fifty, Israeli Arabs have the potential to become the new deciding vote and use that power to get more money for their schools, cities and police. That was Mansour Abbas’ great insight.
With that goal in mind, he basically ordered the other Israeli Arab parties to retreat, because he would seek to move closer to the center of Israeli politics. Although some of his rank and file resisted, Abbas has received support from many Israeli Arabs who are fed up with the corruption and uncertainty in the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the brutality and incompetence of Hamas in Gaza. They wanted, instead, to focus on their life in Israel.
Bibi saw this threat immediately. At first, he tried to lure Abbas into his own coalition. When that didn’t work, he, in typical Bibi fashion, tried to make Abbas radioactive so that no one else could align with him. As The Times of Israel reported, Netanyahu falsely claimed that Abbas’ party “is an anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist party that supports terrorism and represents the Muslim Brotherhood, which wants to destroy Israel.” Bibi also accused Bennett of ruling “with supporters of terrorism”.
Not surprisingly: Netanyahu cannot allow Israeli Arabs to become the deciding vote in Israeli politics, especially not an Israeli Arab leader like Abbas, who does not challenge Israel’s legitimacy and explicitly acknowledges the pain of the Holocaust. In a speech he gave to the Knesset two years ago, Abbas declared: “I bow before the heroism of the women and men who started the Warsaw ghetto uprising.”
Religious philosopher Moshe Halbertal of the Hebrew University summed it all up for me: the Israeli coalition “has been a very promising advance of shared Arab-Jewish governance in Israel; no one will be able to erase it, even with all the ultranationalist pressures that portray the Israeli Arabs as a fifth column. So now Israeli voters will have to decide: do they want a country that is inclusive and able to offer respect and dignity to all its citizens or a country based on the denial of the other?”
For that reason, Halbertal said, “Israel’s soul will be up for grabs in our next election.”
And that’s the case in America, too. Hutchinson, who was a senior White House adviser under the Trump administration, made that painfully clear on Capitol Hill Tuesday when she spoke eloquently of how her own sense of patriotism and duty as an American was violated by the actions of Trump and his allies.
Hutchinson didn’t talk about electoral politics, but she did something much more important: with her testimony, she forced us to ask ourselves what kind of country we want to be, what kind of leaders we want to have, what kind of soul lives inside America.
