Israel’s unprecedented national unity government unfortunately collapsed last week. Why should you care? Because in so many ways what bothers Israeli politics today is just the Off Broadway version of the hyperpartism that has infected American politics.
The victory-at-all-cost mentality of the Trump far-right – which was clearly described in Washington on Tuesday during Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony to the January 6 committee – is part of a broader trend of deeply anti-democratic values that are in conflict with which many Americans and Israelis still strive. If this trend prevails, it will tear both societies apart, and therefore the soul of Israeli democracy and the soul of American democracy are on the ballot in their next elections.
This is not inevitable. By resisting all recent political tendencies – and in the aftermath of three indecisive elections in two years – Israel did something very remarkable a year ago: it formed a ruling national unity coalition that, for the first time, not just right-wing and left-wing Israeli Jews, but also an Israeli Arab Islamic party that won four seats in Parliament in the March 2021 election.
At the heart of this coalition was Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s right-wing Yamina party; Foreign Minister Yair Lapid’s center-left Yesh Atid party; and Mansour Abbas’ Israeli Arab Muslim Religious Party, known as Raam.
Imagine that Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Larry Hogan, Lisa Murkowski, Charlie Baker, retired Admiral Bill McRaven, Joe Manchin, Amy Klobuchar, Mike Bloomberg, Jim Clyburn and Michelle Lujan Grisham all served in the same cabinet and you ‘d has the rough US equivalent of the Israeli National Unity Government that has just died.
I believe that this kind of left-right-center coalition – which makes pragmatic decisions and deliberations that transcends the usual ideological poles – is the only way to govern democracies effectively in this era of rapid technological, demographic and climate change.
Unless left and right come to the center to find a way to govern together in Israel and America, both nations will stagnate as their citizens and leaders are unable to do the big and difficult things – from education to immigration to industrial policy – which is not necessary. to thrive in the 21st century. Today so much energy just goes into their big parties doing each other’s work and undoing it. (See dictionary for: Roe v. Wade, arms control, immigration, US energy policy.…)
Although it only lasted a year, Israel’s unity coalition was able to approve a national budget in November that balanced a wide range of interests. It may seem vague, but it was Israel’s first national budget based on national priorities in more than three years.
Perhaps more than anything else, the unity coalition was able to demonstrate that Israeli Jews and Arabs can rule peacefully together – a historic breakthrough. I spoke to Bennett just before his government fell. Bennett displayed political courage to go against many in his base through an alliance with Abbas, and I was struck by the respect and kindness shown by Bennett for his Israeli Arab Muslim Government partner, who is very much in his own base. challenged to align with Abbas and Lapid. This is called leadership.
Their government also gave Israelis a short break from the divisions promoted by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultranationalist racist allies. Netanyahu reveals a different kind of leadership. It’s just like Donald Trump’s. Indeed, Netanyahu and Trump are political brothers of different mothers.
They share a scorched-earth approach to politics that says the way you may gain and hold is not by building a broad coalition from the center to the outside. Instead, it is by mobilizing and radicalizing your base against “the other” – and then using all that negative energy to attack the institutional, media and judicial constraints to divert the public’s attention from your concerns and stomach abuses.
Bibi is facing charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust and hopes his re-election will save him from a possible jail sentence. Trump hopes his actions around Jan. 6 will not lead to him being charged with conspiracy to overthrow our last election. Bibi and Trump were each called by an attorney general for anti-democratic behavior they appointed.
Netanyahu and his followers launched a relentless attack on the members of Bennett’s party that participated in the National Unity Coalition, eventually breaking down a few to overthrow the government. But just to complete his cynicism, Netanyahu let the government down by leading a vote against a renewal of the two-tiered legal system that allows Israeli settlers in the West Bank to live under Israeli civil law, instead of under the military law under which Israel rules the Palestinians.
This two-tier system has been regularly renewed, and Netanyahu’s settler constitution cannot exist without it. But to deny the unity government the ability to govern, Netanyahu rallied to vote against it.
Bennett’s tacit motto was, “We have a country to run,” while Netanyahu’s said, “We have a government to overthrow.”
Even though their government lasted only a year, Bennett, Lapid and Abbas showed that the seemingly impossible was possible, and many Israelis quietly appreciated it. That reality – and the new mathematics of Israeli politics – suggests to me that it may one day make a comeback.
What math? The Israeli center-left and center-right parties do not have enough votes together to easily form a ruling majority. But neither do the right-wing parties. In the past, the Israeli religious parties have auctioned themselves off to the left and right coalitions – casting their votes behind whichever coalition offered the most funding for Orthodox religious schools.
But thanks to Netanyahu and his pals, the religious parties in Israel have been radicalized and will no longer form governments with the center-left, which is also increasingly offensive to buy off the Orthodox parties.
So, guess who came after dinner to replace the Jewish religious parties?
An Israeli Arab Muslim party led by Abbas.
Most Israeli Arabs avoided playing within Israeli politics; they created their own, largely irrelevant, far-left pro-Palestinian parties that were usually avoided by Jewish parties as partners. But Israeli Arabs make up about 21 percent of Israel. With the Jews evenly distributed, the Israeli Arabs have the potential to become the new swing voice and use that power to get more funding for their schools, towns and police. That was Mansour Abbas’ great insight.
For that purpose, Abbas basically told the other Israeli Arab parties to take a hike. He would play in the middle of Israeli politics. Although some members of its base resisted, Abbas drew support from many Israeli Arabs who were fed up with the corruption and drive within the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the brutality and incompetence of Hamas in Gaza. They wanted to focus on they lives in Israel.
Bibi saw this threat immediately. So he first tried to sue Abbas for his own coalition, and when that failed, in true Bibi fashion, he tried to make Abbas radioactive so that no one else could join him. As The Times of Israel reported, Netanyahu “falsely” claimed that Abbas’ party was “an anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist party that supports terrorism and represents the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to destroy Israel.” Bibi also accused Bennett of ruling with “supporters of terrorism”.
No surprise here: Netanyahu cannot allow Israeli Arabs to become the swinging voice in Israeli politics, especially one like Abbas, who does not challenge Israel’s legitimacy and who explicitly acknowledges the pain of the Holocaust. He declared in a speech in the Knesset two years ago: “I bow my head to the heroism of women and men who started the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.”
Hebrew University’s religious philosopher Moshe Halbertal summed it all up for me: Israel’s national unity coalition “was a very promising breakthrough of shared government by Arabs and Jews in Israel. No one can erase it, even with all the ultranationalist pressure that the Israeli Arabs portray as a fifth column. So now Israeli voters will have to decide: Do they want a country that is inclusive and capable of offering respect and dignity to all its citizens or a country based on the denial of the other?
For that reason, Halbertal added, “The soul of Israel is on the ballot in our next election.”
And so is America’s. Hutchinson, who was a top aide to the White House in the Trump administration, made it painfully clear on Capitol Hill on Tuesday when she spoke eloquently about how her own sense of patriotism and duty as an American through the actions of Trump and his allies have been violated. . Hutchinson did not dwell on election politics, but she did something much more important – she forced us to ask ourselves with her testimony what kind of country we want to be, what kind of leaders we want, what kind of country we want to be . soul is at the heart of America.