- Israel's democratic government can look messy at times.
Exhibit A.
(Members of Knesset yelling in Hebrew)
That kind of lively debate, should we call it,
on the floor of Israel's parliament is common.
But the chaos extends to the election cycle as well.
Israel recently underwent four elections in just two years.
- Almost 24 hours after polls closed in Israel,
there is still no clear winner
in that country's general election.
- But all this chaos isn't a bug of the political system.
It's actually a feature,
one that reflects the great Zionist debate
that made Israel into what it is today.
Israel's parliament, called the Knesset, has 120 seats.
If you want to be Prime Minister
with the authority to govern,
you need a majority, or 61 seats.
But no party has ever won that many seats,
so Israel has always been governed
by coalitions of multiple parties instead.
To those familiar with a two-party system,
the coalition seems odd and even unworkable.
But one advantage of having multiple smaller parties
is having different groups,
with very different agendas,
feel that they have a voice in government.
Historically, this was very important
in building a consensus
in a small and newly emerging country.
Zionism always had many clashing factions,
each with a strong group identity,
and each unwilling to be squished into one big party.
Holding onto their particular identities
kept all kinds of ideas flowing into the Knesset.
This kind of diversity
has also led to some interesting governing bedfellows.
For instance, a coalition emerged in June 2021
that included a religious conservative party,
two parties on the left, and even a non-Zionist Arab party!
But this system empowering many smaller parties
isn't a recent phenomenon, it has deep roots.
It reflects the great 19th-century Zionist debate
about what a democratic-Jewish state should mean.
Going back 125 years, Political Zionists like Theodor Herzl,
seeking refuge for the oppressed Jew,
focused on securing a liberal-democratic state
in the Jews' ancestral homeland,
to be like every other nation.
They shouted, "We are a people,
we need a Jewish state, now!"
By the early 1900s, Socialist Zionists like A.D. Gordon,
David Ben-Gurion, and then Golda Meir,
wanted to make a Jewish democratic state
a liberal-egalitarian communal paradise, not just a refuge.
They shouted, "Let's make our state one big kibbutz!"
At the same time,
Religious Zionists like Rav Abraham Isaac Kook
sought a spiritual renaissance
along with a national renewal.
They prayed, "Remember our roots! Remember the Bible!"
By the 1920s and 1930s,
Revisionist Zionists like Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky
and Menachem Begin were warning
that European Jewry was doomed.
Fighting the Socialists tooth and nail,
Revisionists dreamed of creating a liberal
and capitalist state.
But ultimately, they shouted most loudly,
"Europe's burning.
Beware the Jew-haters."
And, throughout this period,
Cultural Zionists like Achad Ha'am
and Henrietta Szold focused on all the ideas and values
that would revive the Jewish people
when they finally could replant themselves
and flourish in their natural habitat.
They sang Ki Mitzion Teitzei Torah
"From Mount Zion in Jerusalem will come forth new teachings,
new songs, new pride."
These distinct threads of Zionism
not only enriched the Zionist past.
They currently inform the Zionist present.
These voices are alive and well
in the halls of Israel's government today.
Take, for example, the 2021 coalition mentioned earlier.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett,
whose conservative Yamina party only won seven seats,
was a product of both Revisionist and Religious Zionism.
As both an elite commando officer
and a high-tech entrepreneur,
Bennett represented the New Jew
of the modern Zionist revolution.
But, as a Religious Zionist,
he also became Israel's first kippah-wearing prime minister!
Fun fact, Bennett keeps his super-small skullcap
affixed to his head with a special reusable
hypoallergenic double-sided medical tape.
The deputy prime minister and foreign minister, Yair Lapid,
along with his centrist 17-seat Yesh Atid party,
descended from Theodor Herzl's Political Zionism.
Herzl was both an idealist and a pragmatist.
That's what Lapid modeled with his 70/30 approach.
Instead of arguing all the time about the 30%
which divided them and their parties,
Lapid and Bennet emphasized the 70% that united them all.
That reframing created a common conversation,
and a path to their coalition.
The Kachol-Lavan party, with eight seats,
was also Herzlian, centrist and pragmatic.
Nevertheless, its leader, Defense Minister Benny Gantz,
grew up as a religious kid on a partly-collective,
partly-private, agricultural settlement, called a Moshav.
That background rooted Gantz
in both Religious Zionism and Labor or Socialist Zionism.
The most surprising coalition member was not even Zionist.
Mansour Abbas of the Ra'am party
appeared very rigid in his Islamist ideology.
But ultimately he chose a more pragmatic approach,
working with the Zionist parties and giving the coalition
a bare Knesset majority of 61 out of 120 seats.
Incorporating the non-Zionist Ra'am Party
in an odd way fulfilled the Zionist dream too.
For all its faults and blindspots,
Zionism was always a democratic movement.
Israel's Declaration of Independence
promised equality to all the land's inhabitants,
acknowledging from the start that the Jewish State
would have an Arab minority with voting rights.
The Zionists who built
and represented the state of Israel
were dreamers and ideologues,
but they were also architects and builders.
Returning home after millennia of homelessness,
they were ready to take responsibility for their destiny.
Finally, the Jews would stop being the world's victims.
They didn't always agree
what the democratic Jewish state would become,
but they knew it had to be.
That same can-do spirit inspired
the eight-headed coalition in 2021.
And 2021 wasn't a fluke.
Israelis have often united politically when stuck.
Various national unity governments
have come up over the years.
One famous example was in 1967.
That year, long-time opposition leader Menachem Begin
joined the government to help Israel
withstand a joint attack by Egyptian,
Syrian, and Jordanian forces.
So it's true that Israel's electoral system
sometimes looks chaotic.
While clashing loudly, it works soundly.
It not only shoves fewer voices to the margins,
it also forces the kind of practical, eye-on-the-prize,
quintessentially Zionist government
you need to get the job done.