Ask Haviv Anything - 146: Israel's political system worked. Then we tried to fix it. With Dr. Shany Mor.

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com/), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur).And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur/) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur).--Israel’s democracy wasn't designed in a grand constitutional convention. It was patched together quickly in the middle of a war in 1949. Yet, for nearly 80 years, this chaotic system miraculously prevented civil war and built a powerhouse state. Dr. Shany Mor, lecturer in political thought at Reichman University, joins the podcast ahead of the October elections to explain the hidden brilliance of the Israeli electoral system and how well-intentioned reforms like raising the electoral threshold spectacularly backfired to empower the extremes.If you’ve ever wondered why Israeli politics looks insane and still somehow works -- or whether it still will as the country’s crises seem to accumulate -- this is the episode for you.--This episode was sponsored by Congregation Adath Jeshurun of Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. “Congregation Adath Jeshurun was founded in 1858 and later became one of the original synagogues of the Conservative Movement. We at AJ, as it is widely known, are deeply appreciative of the historical perspective, political analyses, and theological contexts that Haviv provides. May we go from strength to strength.”--If you like what we do here, please consider joining our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything or our Substack at https://havivgur.substack.com/. You can also Buy Me a Coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur. It helps us keep the lights on. Patreon and Substack are also the platforms where you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Aschaviv Anything. It is a real pleasure to invite Shani Moll, Dr. Shani Moll, one of the great experts on the Israeli political system in my experience. I mean, there's so many political scientists and people commenting. Whenever Shani writes something, I listen, I read it. Shani is a lecturer in political thought at Reikman University. He's a senior researcher at Bicom. He's an important thinker on Israeli political theory,

and he's going to help us with getting that, basic understanding of the Israeli system. And for those of you who already have that understanding, we're going to really dive a little deeper into its strengths, its flaws, why it can seem so chaotic to outsiders. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that we have a sponsor for this episode. This episode was sponsored by Congregation Adat Yishurun in Hebrew, Adith Jashurin of Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. Congregation Adeth Yashurin was founded in 1858 and later became one of the original synagogues of the conservative movement in the United States. We at A.J., as it is widely known, are deeply appreciative of the historical perspective, political analyses, and

theological contexts that Chaviv provides. May we go from strength to strength. Thank you so much to that wonderful congregation. I visited them last year. It was a wonderful visit. Had a great time, great conversations. I also would like to invite all of you to join our Patreon, subscribe to our Substack, if you want to ask the questions that guide the topics we talk about, you do that over there. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. You can join us at www. patreon.com slash ask Javiv-anything or Javivgur.com. Those links are all in the show notes. Shani, how are you?

Yeah, I'm okay. Okay. Well, that's cut to the chase. Let's start at the beginning. Let me just, let me be as generic as possible and let you start to describe what's going on. How would you describe the Israeli system of government? How does it, you know, differ from the kind of presidential system that are American viewers and listeners might be familiar with or French viewers and listeners. Those themselves are different systems.

It is a parliamentary system, but it has its own quirks. Can you lay out for us sort of from simple to complex, anywhere you want to take it. How does the Israeli electoral system, political system, actually work? Well, first I wouldn't describe the United States as just a purely presidential system because we do have more presidential systems, particularly in Latin America, that evince many of the strengths and, in my opinion, mostly weaknesses of presidentialism. United States is such a more complicated version of that, France to an extent as well. Israel is obviously a radically different one. Israeli democratic institutions, for the most part, do not come from any Philadelphia-style

event. There's no Israeli constitutional convention. There's no records of great Israeli thinkers, as there would be in France of the 1790s or the United States of the 1780s or elsewhere making big principal debates about what a democratic constitution should look like or what a Jewish democracy should look like specifically in that sense. There was a lot of improvisation, a lot of procrastination, and a lot that emerged from habits, particularly those of the decades prior to statehood in circumstances that were very different from what statehood actually is, that then cast a long shadow over institutional practice post-1948.

All this is to say or all this says, sounds like I'm making a criticism, and here's where I maybe want to surprise you or maybe not you because you know me, but surprise your listeners in that this has actually worked. In fact, it's worked remarkably well in circumstances... Wait, wait, hold on, hold on. How it works remarkably well is so critical to our conversation. But you said a couple of big things that some of our listeners are like, yep, yeah, that's great.

And some of our listeners are like, we're already speaking Chinese. what pre-state institutions became the Israeli democracy after the founding of the country? What are you talking about in terms of institutions that are not formally designed? They had a Philadelphia convention in the United States. They sat down. They thought about it. They had a confederacy and then a confederation and then a constitution and created a federal system. And it was this whole big complex, you know, you have to learn the federalist papers in high school and all of that.

what do we have and why is it sort of inertia and not something that was ever carefully put together? I think there are some carefully crafted institutions, but they come over time. And like I said, the ones that are inherited from the mandatory period are institutions that existed in a really unique kind of political structure where there is a British sovereign that has a mandatory power. In other words, it's power, even though the British obviously conquered the land of Israel before there was a leader. of Nations mandate, but it's sort of official claim to control this country from about 1920 until 1948 when they leave is in a mandate of the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations. And these quasi-sovereign institutions that are essentially communal bodies emerge during that 28-year period, some of them domestically here inside mandatory

Palestine, and some of them are actually carryover institutions from Zionist organizations that existed before the British come to this country. And each of them has a different kind of function, but because they are essentially voluntary corporate bodies and not state institutions, there's a lot of difficult questions that state institutions have to ask themselves, that they don't have to ask themselves

because they are, despite their expansive political nature, they're essentially voluntary bodies. So, I mean, public education in Israel emerges from networks of what are quasi-public schools, but essentially before 48, kind of private associations. And the same thing is true, actually, for the national health care system, which eventually, quite unlike some of the other examples you and I will discuss, the national health care system is formalized and reformed in a landmark legislation of the 1990s. That doesn't radically alter, by the way, the institutions that are established pre-1948 by various competing in this case, Zionist organizations, but does turn them into a formal state welfare organization rather than these voluntary regulated independent bodies. And the same is true for the thing that seems to

preoccupy so much of the attention of would-be reformers, most of whom have good intentions, but terrible ideas for how to fix Israel's parliamentary system, that a lot of this was improvised. I mean, elections were being carried out during the mandate for the Jewish agency, but again, as a kind of voluntary association that people paid a voluntary donation to and got to vote in. I'll dive into that. What do you mean elections were carried out? So you have Herzl and 1897 founds the Zionist organization. And from their flow— The Zionist organization has an executive office. Right.

Yeah. In the mandate that the League of Nations gives Great Britain, it holds that Britain should allow for the formation of the formation of, a Jewish agency and an Arab agency in Palestine. The Arabs refuse to form an Arab agency. The Zionist organization takes its executive office, calls it the Jewish agency for Palestine, and that essentially functions as a kind of non-sovereign governing body for the Jewish community in the British mandate. And then, and that becomes the government.

When the state is declared. David Vingurian, right? Yeah, after the declaration in May 1948, he was the head of the executive of the Jewish agency. And the next second, the next moment with the official existence of a state, he is the prime minister of that state. That executive simply became the transitional government. He is the prime minister of the provisional government of that state.

So the executive office becomes the provisional government. The provisional government, according to the declaration, if it's supposed to be in power to the first of October, that doesn't really, you know, it doesn't pan out quite as intended. The one kind of thing I would notice about that is that when elections are held, first elections held by sovereign Israel on the 25th of January, 1949, the elections are not for the first Knesset, right? When the first Knesset is dissolved, elections are held in 1951 for the second Knesset. But there's no election in Israel for the first Knesset.

The election of 1949 is for a constituent assembly. Constituent assembly, in other words, a body that is supposed to formulate a constitution. The constitutionally assemblies assembly votes to call itself the first Knesset retroactively because it doesn't work. right of constitution. And when it dissolves itself for the second election, the body that's being elected is now the second Knesset of the state of Israel. But nobody ever elects a first Knesset. I want to say a few interesting things about the constituent assembly that maybe will give us some perspective on why we have the electoral system we do in Israel that seems to get so much criticism.

Just one second, just to clarify for everybody, it moves from a Zionist movement where the Zionist organization has all kinds of factions within it that meet in these Congress. that essentially becomes the factions that then run for that first constituent assembly that then makes itself the Knesset, and the executive of that Zionist movement becomes the first provisional government. Now this all, as you said, becomes in 1951, a real election for a real parliament and a real government produced from that parliament, and the system, as we know today, is basically in place in 1951.

But that first transition really is from that informal institution, and that shapes early Israel and early Israel's governance structure, how? Something that's happening in 1951 that really shows the tension between pre-statehood voluntary associations that don't have to worry about all sorts of questions on the margins and what it's like when suddenly you have a state and it needs to cover everyone that's in it,

is that in 1951, you have lists running for the Second Knesset who are explicitly not Zionist. You have ultra-Orthodox parties that are not part of the Zionist movement. In 49, in the Constituent Assembly, ultra-Orthodox members entered the Knesset on a kind of joint religious list with existing national religious movement. But that's not the case in 51, and you also have Arab parties in 51. Suddenly the state has to take into account all sorts of things that the pre-statehood Zionist organizations didn't need to worry about, because even though they functioned in many ways like a government, particularly for the, obviously for the,

the Jewish community that was living in British Palestine, they didn't have a responsibility for everything and everyone the way the genuinely sovereign British mandatory power did. And this tension between how easy things were to run when you were effectively a voluntary organization in someone else's country, despite widespread powers and responsibilities that look like a state, and actually being a state, is a problem that comes up in so many contexts, whether it's the draft, whether it's the evergreen issue of Israeli political debate, what to do about the Sabbath and the whole host of other ones. Let's go back to 49, though, that you were saying.

And I want to bring up a few things that are important because, as I said, we are talking about the election of a constituent assembly. And about an election that's occurring in really, really unique circumstances for a democratic election. Constituent assemblies in general, yeah, have, for the most, part a much broader basis of representation than parliaments do. For very obvious reasons, if you're making really big decisions, really enormous decisions about the fundamental terms of association, you need to have a broad consensus, so you involve a lot of people, where most parliaments have ways of electing them that keep all sorts of

problematic aspects out, whether it's with threshold rules, whether it's with all sorts of boundaries and what constitutes a party, whether it's using different tools and levers of federalism. First past the post. Yeah, all sorts of stuff, right? Electoral colleges. Right. Exactly.

But constituent assemblies historically, the ones that succeed in writing good constitutions that don't just fall apart within five or ten years, have usually brought in as many people as possible. So the proportional system that is the hallmark of Israeli parliamentary democracy made sense for 49. There's something else that's interesting about 49. which is that the election on January 25th is happening during a war. It's near the end of the war, but Israel is still fighting a war.

It hasn't yet reached the armist disagreements that it would with all four of its neighboring countries. It doesn't yet even have an informal boundary. There's no boundary referenced in its Declaration of Penance. It's not clear where the boundary is. Big changes are still underfoot, actually, after January 25th, both on the southern front and the eastern front. And so in many ways there was no alternative to the proportional system because to have any kind of regional system or district-based system, you needed to have a map for it, which you couldn't produce in a state that didn't yet have even temporary boundaries at that point. There's something else really interesting that's happening, which it's kind of happening on the margins of Israeli democracy, but it's actually really telling, which is at the time. By January north to 1949, in the areas that are under Israeli control, you have about only 10% of the population, which is Arab, and about 90%, which is Jewish.

For comparison today, that's something like about just under 80% is Jewish and about 21% is Arab. But at the time, it's roughly 90 to 10. And it's at the end of what has been a very, very difficult and violent and deadly war, including between the two communities, not just between the newly formed IDF and invading Arab armies. In most countries, citizenship creates the right to vote. And what uniquely happens in Israel, which doesn't yet have a boundary, where populations are moving all over the place, because of the combat situation where people are displaced on both sides of the conflict,

although much more dramatically on the Arab side than the Jewish side because they lost the war and people are sometimes moving, coming back, the participation in the election for the Arab minority becomes constitutive

of citizenship. In other words, voting, the election is an election that is held wherever, the IDF is still is holding on its territory, right? Then there's a place to vote. The election, being on an election role,

getting an ID number and casting a vote, really, I'm talking for their minority, makes whoever did that a citizen. And if you were in Lebanon then, because you fled the combat, and tried to cross back into the border in Israel afterward, it was much more difficult. So the act of participating in the election

actually creates the citizenship for their minority. This is not a particularly complicated thing for Jews, of course, because wherever you were, you were in areas under Israeli control because no Jews were just living as a president of battle. Yeah, as an embattled minority behind enemy lines. And if you weren't there and you made Aliyah, you were instantly a citizen anyway. But I don't know of too many countries where the voting creates the citizenship rather than the other way around. So it's one way or another, though. Yeah.

Sorry, but one way or another, the really unique circumstances of the election that's held on January 25, 1949 create the only workable system you can imagine. And then the question becomes, well, okay, by 1951, none of that is true anymore, right? 1951 Israel has borders. They're not borders that are recognized in international treaties because none of our neighbors would sign treaties with us at that point. although the Israeli-Lebanese one is an international border that's because of the British and the French, not because the Israelis and Lebanese. But there's no border between, Israel doesn't have a recognized international border with Syria, Jordan, or Egypt, but it has armistice lines. It has a clear area where Israeli sovereignty begins and ends. It's not in war anymore, and it's no longer electing a constituent assembly.

It could conceivably have devised a much clever electoral system, but, it's always difficult within a system to create an alternative one because the incentive structure is completely wrong for it, and there has to be a very good reason to do it. Normally when that's done, it's because something with the existing system has failed very dramatically. But nothing with the existing system seemed to have failed very dramatically, certainly not enough for anybody in 1951 or in a subsequent election, to decide that it was worth changing. And so the basic contours of the electoral system, as they were improvised in 1949, really quickly, become the way we still elect our parliament right now in 2026, down to the closeless proportional system, even the number of members in the House, which is stood still at 120, despite the population having grown 15fold. that's how we do things here. We don't do it because we have, you know, a Madison or a Hamilton or a Condorcet or a Ciesz who made a terrific point in a constitutional debate.

We do it because we had to improvise that very quickly in January of 49, and that's what we're stuck with. We are extremely good at improvising. But arguably, there could be a possibility that this country has become too big. too complex, too densely populated, and has the kinds of challenges that that kind of system maybe doesn't meet as well anymore. Let's get into that. But first, just to summarize the system then,

so in order to give, you know, minorities who had not been part of the Zionist movement, whether it's Jewish ones or Arab ones, part of a voice in that new electoral system, the electoral system went with this, you know, the entire country is a single constituent. also because the geography wasn't, you know, nailed down in 1949, as you said. So the whole country is one constituency.

There are no districts. And you elect a list that represents a community, essentially. Well, that's how it's seen. It doesn't necessarily have to represent a community. It can represent an ideological line, and you can vote for it for that reason. But de facto, it began as representing communities, and it is still probably mostly seen by the Israeli voter as representing them as a cultural or ethnic or religious community. What are the weaknesses? Why do you think it's actually done incredibly well for us?

Open that up for us. What does this all mean, this strange Israeli electoral system? I don't think the electoral system was done as a concession to minorities or out of any due concern to minorities of any kind in Israel. I think it was the proportional system was just an exigency of the situation. It wasn't done as an act of charity or grace for anyone. It was the only thing that you could pull off in the circumstances at the time. Right. You mentioned that as one of the problems that this was a solution to, not more than that.

Yeah. Okay. Right. And in terms of the issue of the, I also, I think that the party lists that enter the Knesset in the various formations that we've seen Israeli politics as they've evolved over the decades have consistently represented genuine political cleavages. I wouldn't see that as just a kind of ethnic or communal representation. I don't think that that's what, whenever people adopt that language in describing our internal politics Israel, I always get the feeling that they're adopting that language to describe everybody else. And often not, you know, it's like I have politics, you have tribes.

and there are a lot of very overlapping identities that people have in Israel, as they do in any modern liberal democracy. But at the end of the day, they vote on very clear political lines. There are a lot of parties in Israel. There's always been consistently around 12. They've been a different 12 from election to election. But 12 represents roughly the relevant political Cleveland is in Israel, believe it or not.

These are real differences and the proof that they are real differences is that the numbers move from election election. Things happen from the outside that move people, change their minds on certain things. And when they get the chance to express that every three or four years, they do so. They do so pretty well, actually, in the Israeli context. When really bad things happen, the public has tended to rather responsibly. show up on Election Day and kick out whoever was responsible for that, which is not an idealized version of democracy.

An idealized version would have the public picking out the best, you know, ideas and people each time. And I don't think that publics anywhere in the world are able to actually do that. But the one thing you can realistically ask of a public is if something bad has happened, at least get rid of those guys. And, yeah, in most democratic countries, we've seen that. That minimal aptitude actually manifests itself. Now, why has this system worked so well in Israel?

The first question that one might want to ask here is, what does it mean to say that a system hasn't worked? What's the opposite of a functioning democracy? It's something that we don't actually pause to think about a lot, and it has a really simple answer. The opposite of a functioning democracy is a civil war. The opposite of people disagreeing deeply about what to do is and and disagreeing in a in a ritualized formalized nonviolent way is people disagreeing and shooting

each other and disagreeing and disagreeing deeply and then wanting to hurt or kill people you disagree with is the normal human condition it is how we as a species have done politics and religion and tribe for most of our history it's how we still do politics in most of the world. There is a tiny corner of the world in a few kind of North Atlantic states that have, through, you know, fits and starts over the last couple of hundred years found a barely workable exception to that longstanding human practice, often with big interruptions along the way. And that's it. And mostly after murdering tens of millions in World Wars. And it wasn't an easy path to get to that either. That's right. And, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but the most part, with, with a few eruptions along the way. The situation that we found ourselves here in in 1948 with deep ideological divisions, deep religious divisions, without even a common language for, uh, the waves of, of, of, uh, Olim, who were coming here. Um, in a situation of war and war and terror and threat and, and, and, and, and everything.

have all the ingredients for a democratic meltdown for a civil war to break out. And I remind you, the access to weapons was quite widespread. The question we need to be asking ourselves about Israeli democracy as it approaches its 80th year is why wasn't there civil war? That should be the really interesting research question here. I have four hypotheses for this, right? I rather have one hypothesis based on four reasons for this, right? The weakest, you know, the weakest time for a civil war in a new state's history is pretty soon after independence. Ireland is a wonderful example for Israel because what was the issue that the Irish were killing each other over after they had independence?

was whether or not to accept partition. The exact same issue that was the main divide in Israel post-48 effectively. And in a certain sense, the same issue that's still been the main divide in this country to this day. Yeah. And so why did the Irish have a bloodiest of war and the Israelis not have one? Some of it is entirely coincidental. So I think the first difference with us in 48 and in the immediate aftermath was that the actual balance of power between the two factions on this disagreement was vastly imbalanced. Right.

So the opponents of partition didn't actually have the numbers or the weapons to mount a serious fight to the Zionist establishment that had accepted partition. if they did, they would have been defeated rather handily right away. And when you, when both sides know how to... Just for people unfamiliar with the history, tell us who that is. Well, that would be, let's say, the Urgun and the various factions that are formally or informally associated with revisionist Zionism. And the Zionist establishment at the time is the socialist and Hungarian. And what would become in the future the Israeli left, which really ran the place and was that vastly more powerful than the factions of the Israeli right at the time.

And so the acceptance of partition was something Bingrian could enforce. Right. So you don't have a war where both sides know ahead of time who's going to win and who's going to lose. There's no point. And so that's the first reason. That's a major difference between Israel and Ireland and between Israel and other countries that descendants of war. The second major difference that's important for 48 is that many newly independent countries, especially in the post-1545 reality, emerge into independence at the end of a violent struggle, which is certainly true of us as well. But what was different about about Israeli independence is that our independence, our moment of liberation, wasn't just the culmination,

the end of a violent struggle. It was the opening shot in a new, even more violent struggle because we didn't just have to fight a war to get to statehood in 48. But the day after statehood, we were invaded on multiple fronts and had to fight another year of war. So if we had wanted to have a civil war in 48, we were actually quite busy. There wasn't space for it. That's very different from the Irish example where they fight a very bloody war to get the British out, resulting in the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, and then actually have all the free time in the world to start killing each other for four years. from 22 to 26.

So those things are, have nothing to do with, I keep saying over, we had no Philadelphia, yeah, that has nothing to do with the wisdom of Israel's founders. It has nothing to do with anything that's special about us. Those are fortunate accidents of history, right? The third, and they're both related to that early statehood moment. The third and fourth reasons that we didn't have a civil war are more general and not just relevant for those early years.

The third one is the electoral system. Everybody hates it. I'm sure that after this episode, you will get lots of comments, especially from English-speaking viewers and listeners about how stupid the Israeli electoral system is, how bad proportional representation is, how bad lots of all these small parties are,

whatever, and often a very idealized notion that it not sure is entirely accurate of how things work in Great Britain or the United States as a preferred alternative. But the fact that in a country with lots of weapons and lots of deep, ethnic, ideological, and religious

disagreements, everybody had an incentive to play inside by the rules of the game. The fact that everybody was brought in with all the noise that creates, with all of the back dealing that that forces you to have, with all the instability,

everybody had an incentive to stay inside rather than go out into the streets and start shooting and I think that's very... Let me drill into this because I want... You know, the Haredi Israeli is culturally profoundly different from the socialist Mapai Israeli of the 50s and 60s, just culturally, utterly different and really set against in terms of their, you know,

what they imagine a healthy body. politics should be and a healthy society should be. And the Arab Jewish divide is profound and deeply meaningful for all the sides. Half of Israelis, after about 51, come from the Arab world. And they, by the way, tend to vote much more hawkish toward the Arab world, much more ring than the European heritage Jews, the Ashkenazi Jews, who tend to be overrepresented on the left, whereas the Mizrahi Jews tend to be overrepresented on the right. And these are divides that today it's hard for me to imagine. I do not have an Israeli friend who isn't an intermarriage of several different Jewish communities. But back then, it was profound the gap, the

difference. It was almost impossible to talk to each other in any real way. And the culture and the political parties also braced not to let the other one in. The Mapai-Echkenazi establishment made it very difficult for the new Mizrahi immigrants to actually enter the political system. at the political party right through the parties that ran the country for the first 29 years, which was this socialist left. So you have these deep, deep divides. And it strikes me that the proportional representation list system means that you can vote for a representative of your tribe,

whatever that means in different contexts, ethnic religious, stay fairly apart while still playing. And that's different. In other words, a Haredi voter in America has to vote based on a district. They share with other populations. And so you end up electing somebody who you're one of their four major constituencies in their district. And in Israel, because you have a nationwide list that can represent Shas, right, is the Mizrahing Sephardi ultra-Orthodox. That is the party.

Sometimes they'll get other Sephardi Jews who are not quite as a religious news, but that's the party. which means that you can be very closed in in your tribe and also have that voice. And so that strange way in which it allows deep participation alongside the tribal divide, maybe is the secret sauce, maybe is how that kind of a society that looks more like a Lebanon with deeply divided tribes can nevertheless have a functioning, stable democratic system. Except that the Shoss's return from election to election varies very dramatically. It's not, you know, the UTJ, which really is, in a certain sense, a purely demographic list, ironically, actually of two very distinct political parties with very distinct, certainly very distinct theological commitments, but I think distinct ideological commitments. But it has a very closed community backing it up.

And the only change in its representation in the election returns is as its population has grown slightly. Shas has been in its history a political party that has returned as few as four. as many as 17 members into the Knesset from election to election and everything in between. It has varied widely depending on its platform, the political environment it's in, who its leadership was. It is a political party par excellence. It's a political organization with a political mandate and it does well sometimes with its politics and does poorly sometimes with its politics. the highly variegated returns of Shas from election to election stand, I think, as a counterargument to the notion that it is representing a tribe of one sort or another. It's certainly radically different from the other major ultra-Orthodox party, the ultra-Orthodox list, I should say, because it's two parties, the UTJ, which is essentially a demographic representation.

What about Arab politics? Arab parties represent a deep ideological division. I mean, you've had pretty consistently now for decades. Arab parties that are quite openly, either communist or post-communist, quite openly, very nationalist, or quite Islamist. And their fortunes, by the way, rise and fall depending on political events that happen. Every single time in the last 20 years that they have united to run together, voter turnout on the Arab Street rose by between 15 and and 30 percent. And that's like twice.

I mean, every single time it's a really small end. Okay. There was an enthusiasm for, but it came at a high cost, by the way. I suggested that most Arabs in Israel wanted Arab party that represents them as a minority facing the Jews, that the ethnic divide is what matters to the voters. And I was accused by an Arab MK, very reasonably, that I was shrinking them down to Arab nis because I'm a Jew looking in from the outside. But there's a deep difference between the Islamist, you know, Bedouin of the South and

the progressive elites of Haifa. And I completely agree that there's a huge difference. In voting behavior, it seems as though, you're right, we have seven elections to go on in which they united two or three times. They sometimes half unite. So maybe two and a half times they unite, but it's completely consistent. I agree with you. You can overstate it. I probably am guilty overstating the tribal aspect. But it's not that the voters don't think that way. The push to unite though, a lot of, I mean, the push to unite is, is because, look, one thing that's going to happen this October is that the electoral outcome, whatever it is, is going to reflect deep shifts in public opinion that have happened in the last four years. That used to be normal in Israeli election cycles. In fact, if you look at every election for 1973 up until 2009, each one represented a dramatic shift of something like five to 10 percent of the, voting public in one direction or another. That was normal. And since 2009 was the last election that represented a great shift. It was a shift away from the center and the left to the

right in the opposite direction of what happened in 2006, which itself was in the opposite direction of what happened in 2003, which was the opposite of 99, 96, and so on. 2009 was the last time. And since 2009, public opinion has been static. And what has been decisive in the outcome of parliamentary elections has not been the shift. in public opinion, but has been the various coordination failures, almost all of them around the threshold, especially since 2015. Public opinion in Israel, if you took a snapshot of where it was in 2009 and in 2022 and in each election between, had basically the same distribution.

The changes in the electoral outcome, like I said, were technical changes, even if they were often very fateful. Nothing in public opinion had moved. That, by the way, I should say as an asterisk, is an important thing because it was a it shows that the supposed demographic advantage of the right was that the right was consistently underperforming

the supposed demographic advantage that it had because the reasons why the right and the religious parties are supposed incorrectly, I should say, according to me, but I'm like the only person who says that, so I don't know. Maybe I'm probably wrong, anybody else's right, but fine, I'm sticking to my guns. The supposed

electoral advantage, a demographic advantage rather that the right and the religious have should have been expressed in increasing right wing and religious majorities through all those elections from 2009 and 2020, and never was, which I think indicates the supposed demographic advantage is actually kind of bullshit. And but what's interesting and what's interesting I know to you because you and I have spoken about this so much

is that the result was often dramatically different entirely because of things that are around parties that are at 3%, which is the stupidest way. I'm a big defender of the Israeli electoral system. But the drama should be about where these shifts in public opinion are, as we're about to have one right now, and as we did in 2009, and not about who didn't optimize for their tiny 3% here or 2% there in a clever enough way in terms of deciding when to unify lists and when to not unify lists, right? Okay. Let's get into that. Let's get into that.

One of the features of the Israeli system is that there is a minimum. threshold you need to get into the Knesset. Now there are 120 seats, so 0.9, give or take, percent of the vote would be worth a Knesset seat. And in fact, you used to be able to have a single member get in. You used to have Mayor Kana, the most, you know, extreme right. He got into the Knesset in 1984? Or maybe the one before. No, no, 84. And Shavion in 81, although yet two people with Tellem, Plato Schoan in 77, had quite a few. But he gets in his one, a one member party. because he literally just got enough votes for a single seat.

And you could get in. And the goal became, as the right and left became these blocks that were more and more similar in size, there was this middle ground that became, essentially, they became beholden to small parties that held the deciding vote. And to weaken those small parties, Israeli reformers across 30, 40 years, began to do this thing where they lifted the threshold. And they thought that raising that threshold would force these small factions into the larger parties to work through the larger parties and you'd have more decisive and clearer elections. And you have criticized. And so they raised it to 1% and then 1.5 and then 2 and then 2 and then 3 and a quarter. You have argued that this has been, I might have gotten

one of those. It doesn't matter. Yeah. You have argued that this has been the most foolish, ridiculous and completely backfiring kind of reform, electoral reform, that could possibly have been. And so walk us through that because you just said that the elections are decided often on, and Likud is now absolutely agitated about this Ophil-Vinta right-wing ex-general running a party that they think might not make the threshold and cost the right, the 3% votes over there that it will then lose the election because, and that whole. discourse, the strategy around the threshold has become what an election is about instead of real debates about real issues and which camp actually should win. So walk us through. What is

your criticism of the threshold? What did Israel get wrong? What is that whole story? First, let's say that thresholds exist in lots of parliamentary democracies. We're not the only ones to have it. And thresholds are often higher in other countries, although they have very different circumstances, right? I mean, in Germany, there's a 5% threshold, although you can get around it by winning 5% is for what they call the Proportional Mandata. If you get three direct mandata because they have a mixed number system, then the threshold doesn't apply to. Thresholds often have, in some countries, with national minorities,

thresholds are lower if it's for minority parties and things like that. There are many countries, by the way, that raise the threshold for what's called like technical joint lists, right? So if two parties combine into one list but haven't actually unified into one party, then the threshold is higher. And also, so playing with the threshold is not just an Israeli thing. It exists, as the German model suggests to us for a pretty obvious reason, which is a way to not just keep. I mean, an election doesn't just tell you who's governing and whose opposition. It also tells you who is even legitimate.

in the conversation to begin with. And so the German method, you know, from the Grun Gazette's was how do we not only decide who's won the election and who's, who's the loyal opposition, but how do we decide who's outside of the legitimate discourse? And what concerned the Germans in 49 and onwards was basically how do you not repeat a situation as you had in the 1920s and early 1930s where the Communist Party and the Nazi party were able to cause an enormous instability and essentially affect a veto over what any government did, even when it had a more broad basis of support.

So they had that complicated mathematical formula, which people like to quote and just say, it's just a 5% threshold. It's actually a little bit more complicated than a 5% threshold. But the idea there is kind of the normative basis of this. In Israel, you have a much more complicated situation precisely because you, You don't have any other levels of government. So it's not that there's a threshold on the parliament and you still have so many, you know, subnational units, subnational units in a federal system or local elections or things like that.

You just have the Knesset and that's it in terms of national politics and in terms of national party organizations. And so the threshold is everything. The idea of raising it was that one of the criticisms that people have, in the era that you alluded to, the 1980s and the 1990s, maybe a bit before, one of the criticisms was that big parties were beholden to all sorts of small special interests and things like that. I'm not sure empirically that those criticisms hold up, by the way. It's one of those things that a lot of American political scientists, and Israeli political science, for that matter, love to say about the Israeli electoral system and about the problems

of Israeli politics. Not sure was actually true. We're often diagnosing big general problems based on things that frustrate us a lot in specific points. There's a big trend now among Israeli intellectuals of politics to talk about the need for term limits. I promise you that when Bibi leaves the stage,

that will disappear. There was a big talk about a supposed instability and whatever, and now we went from worrying about the rapid turnover of prime ministers before 2009 to the things. need for term limits. And I'm not sure either of those represented a structural problem. We quietly changed the entire way that governments are dependent on parliamentary confidence.

Because we decided in the early 1990s that we had a massive instability, that prime ministers are unable to govern because of their always had fragile coalitions and losing their majorities in parliament. And then when you calm down for second. catch your breath and you say, well, what actually happened? And you discover that in all of Israel's history, one government fell in no confidence vote in 1990. I would think that if you had a democratic parliamentary system and in its entire history you had zero governments fall from losing the majority in parliament, that that would be actually a sign of an unhealthy parliamentary democracy. So we had one government fall in 1990 and from 1992 onwards we went on this mad dash of essentially

presidentializing our political system through the back door. Wait, give us that story very briefly. So, first we instituted the direct election of the prime minister.

And then when we canceled... In 1992. Yeah, and it went into effect in 1996. And when the political establishment was shocked by the undetended consequences of that little experiment,

which were, which were... That was fun. Yeah, I mean, there were a couple consequences. One apparent consequence, although I think there were longer term, and I hope we get a chance to talk about this because you touched on it or you hinted to it before, and we didn't get that, which is the decline of political parties. But major parties saw their vote share fall apart. And the Knesset, as it was imagined before the 1990s of being, you know, one or two large parties and several satellites became a Knesset of a large number of medium parties, which was which was a bit more complicated to do.

deal with. That's happened in lots of countries. Yeah, forgive me for all the interruptions. What I'm trying to do is navigate many different kinds of listeners who will be at many different levels. One of the things that happened was instead of Israelis just voting for a party and then a coalition coalescing with a majority in parliament and choosing its government, we suddenly had a system where an Israeli could vote for a prime minister from the two people running and a party.

And then against him. And then against it. And so to vote for the prime minister. Right, but the same person would vote for, so you would vote for Barack. I had a friend who voted in 1999 for Barack, but because he came from a Moroccan family, he wasn't right wing, he believed in the Labor Party and Barack was a former chief of staff of the army, security-minded labor. But he was, he comes from a Moroccan family, and he really kind of wanted to vote Shas.

And Shas was, went with Oslo in the early years. And so he voted Barack's coalition. And Shas was in Barack's coalition. So he voted Shas and Barack. and he described it to me. This is 1999. We're both soldiers. And he describes it to me as,

I voted Barack, but then I choked Barack to make sure he can't move too much. And so people would set, so Rabin in 92, before this reform, you could directly elect a prime minister, gets 44 seats for labor. And Barack, by 1999,

gets 26 seats for labor and wins the election with those 26 seats. And that's what you mean where you have this reform that's intended to free the prime minister from all the insestine,

cocessant wheeling and dealing an alleged instability of the Knesset, what it ends up doing is free the voter to give a Knesset that is much more unwieldy and more difficult for a prime minister to work with. And a prime minister has a much fewer actual control of actual seats in the Knesset. And so that was a reform that just backfired spectacularly. Right. But notice what replaced it, which was the constructive no confidence, which again was addressing a problem that I'm not sure existed. Well, in 2001, we got rid of the direct election and replaced it with a new, with a new old system that brought us back the single ticket. You vote now for a list, as you did, just, you know, without voting separately for prime minister, as you did before 1996. But now, and a government still had to have effectively a majority for its investiture to get into power after an election. but once a government was in power, it was really difficult to bring a government down from inside Parliament because the constructive no confidence, which we copied from the Germans, Germans have brilliant ideas for some methods of, you know, conducting elections.

We actually haven't copied some of their better ideas, especially mixed number systems, which works really well in Germany. But we copied this. Germany has a unique parliamentary history. and there's a really good reason why the Germans wanted to have a constructive no confidence. They really wanted to avoid a situation where radical factions that have nothing in common with each other could bring down center-left or center-right governments. If you want to know why the Germans are so interested in that, read up on your 1920s and 19-30s history.

They have a very good reason for that. Yes, but what is constructive no confidence? It's a very simple thing. The constructive no confidence means you can't bring a government down without having a replacement, but has a majority. So you can't just vote a government out of power like you did a night, like it happened again once in all of Israel's history in 1990. You actually have to have an alternative government waiting in the wings that has 61, half plus one of the members of the House in favor of it. That is a constructive no confidence.

It's a very high hurdle to pass. Right, because there's no intervie in the election, right? So you currently have a government born of a Knesset that looks the way it looks and Netanyahu heads it. You would need a new prime minister who could wield 61 votes in this. the same parliament in order to have a no-confidence vote that brings Netanyahu down. And you need those 61 ahead of time, right? I mean, so it's not like it was, not like it is in a normal parliament where if you have a majority that doesn't want this government, they don't have to say what they do want.

They just have to vote them down. And then it's up to somebody to build a new coalition. Here, the only way to bring a government down was to already have an agreed government in the wings ready to go with a majority that just. hasn't happened. Nobody has even attempted to try. In fact, you mentioned earlier, Neil Barcath being pushed down on the liquid list. We know that in the days after October 7th, he was actually looking for a way to bring down the governing coalition that was less than a year in power at that point when the massacre happened with a constructive confidence, no confidence vote. In an ordinary

circumstance, if we didn't have the constructive no confidence rule, it's very likely that after October 7th, the government would have lost the confidence in Parliament. And then either a new government would have been formed or an election would have been called. I suspect an election wouldn't have been called. But with the constructive no confidence, you had a government after this rather colossal failure that couldn't be pushed aside and has sustained its parliamentary majority to the last legal day that it could. So that was a wonderful idea that was supposed to help bring stability. I'm not sure it's panned out as people wanted.

Then we added to that several other reforms that were also supposed to bring stability. I think a lot of these reforms are because Israelis watched too many episodes of the West Wing and thought that they could recreate something like that here without realizing that below this presidential, you know, power structure that you have, in the United States, you actually have a really frustrating for this powerful president, a division of separation of powers at the federal level, and you have an actual federal government where 50 states have an enormous prerogative on what they do. And nothing like that, nothing like that exists in this. So this was done with the will and test. The problem of, I wrote an

an article in 2011 about all of the proposals for electoral reform. And I said, everybody talks about the threshold being so low. And I always thought that raising the threshold was a bad idea, but I never actually questioned the facts behind the claim that I was disagreeing with. But when I wrote the article, I had to go and look it up. So I went and looked at election returns after election returns, expecting to see a lot of action just above or just below the threshold that would show that it's been a problem. And I found none.

It just wasn't relevant to the outcome of any election. You know, I expected to see a lot of things kind of at the line that would explain why this thing was annoying so many political scientists. And I found none. And I said that in the article. And guess what's happened since we raised the 3.25? All the action has been there. We have decided governing majorities in this country based on somebody either under or overperforming the 3.25. We've actually had a party by a man who, two cycles later, became prime minister that had the, I grant you, I mean, I love a sense of humor, the genuinely comic electoral result of 3.24.

What happened when you raised it to 3.25 is you suddenly changed a lot of the incentives. So one thing is you created the phenomenon of the joint Arab list, which I don't think was a good thing for Israeli. politics, I don't actually think it was a good thing for the Arab public, and I don't think it was a good thing for the Israeli political left. The trend line we were on in the 20 years leading up to this reform, we had reached a point, and at that point the right was in power and had been since 2009, we had reached a point by the 2010s where the only way that the left was ever going to assemble a coalition again, like it did in 92 or in 99 or. or arguably in 2006, the only way that was by peeling off some kind of a more moderate Arab party.

That was the only realistic scenario. The emergence of the joint list, the advent of the joint list basically blocked that path completely for the medium term by taking various Arab political parties and pushing them into a much more radical direction because that was the only way to survive.

It's not just that you don't know It's not just that you can't get to 3.25, it's that you run the risk of not optimizing your vote because if you have four factions and you actually have, you know, 15% of the vote, but two of them or even three of them are just skating around the threshold, you're actually losing a lot for nothing. Something else happened, by the way, that's not just there if it's really interesting, is the phenomenon of Benfield. in the old threshold, the threshold of 2% and 2.5. Benfield never got into Parliament. That threshold was effectively keeping him out.

He would run with Marzell and what's his name, Benarie, and a few other radicals, and they couldn't make it in. And occasionally on the right, there were people who were frustrated with this because there was half a percent here or a percent there that was being thrown away,

but it never ended up making. the difference. The first time, by the way, that the right felt that it had lost its majority through a failure to optimize around the threshold was actually when Bennett, at the time considered far right, got to 3.24, right? But that ended up giving everybody a very different lesson. It now meant it's one thing to throw away half a percent or a percent. When you're throwing away three percent or two of your parties are throwing away three percent. So, you're now throwing away 6% of the vote. You are possibly losing an election that you might have won.

Right? You are actually taking, you're legitimately giving yourself a situation where your block might have 51% of the votes, but gets only 46% of the MPs. And that's why we sound like a minor difference. That's when we son Netanyahu jump in and force coalitions of far right parties.

And then we're at the head of, at the head of a pretty significant fact. a far-rightist, massively pressured by Netanyahu to unify, Smotrich, etc. ran in this block with Ben-Vir. Suddenly do have a way in and become a real force to be reckoned with. Yeah, let's look back at what happened. The 2% threshold kept Benvill out of Parliament. The 3.25% threshold brought him in. And once in, he's been able to do a lot more damage than he ever did outside.

the higher threshold failed at doing the very thing that it is professed to be doing. He's been able to be a right-wing anchor that Likud has to respond to, because now he can compete for Likud's own right-wing flank. But that's because of something else that happened here and of something else that we can't talk about Israeli democracy without actually acknowledging it too. I'll get to that. The one small thing that's happened is Nizheniau's legal trouble.

Now, the problem with what the intersection between politics and the legal case is that the feeling that there is an improper interface between politics and the criminal justice situation is genuinely felt by both sides of this issue with a decent case to be made. In other words, the opponents of Netanyahu strongly and genuinely, not cynically, absolutely believe with good reason that he is using democratic politics to help himself out of his own legal troubles. the supporters of Netanyahu genuinely believe that his prosecution is an attempt by certain legal forces to oust him to fight to essentially affect a political result that they couldn't get by votes. The reality of that has meant that until 2015, if you were a prime minister from the right, let's say, in this example, you would get to a majority by either adding people from the center or adding people from the far right. And to do that, you would give these guys a little bit or those guys a little bit. And the fact that at any point, if the demands of this side or that side got too high,

you could always look to the other way for your own majority, meant that you had a check on how extreme those demands could be. And B.B., by the way, and not just Bibi, but also Sean and... and begging and, you know, managed to, and Shamil, right, the only other right-wing prime minister of managed to do this, by the way. They multiple times looked to the far right to get a majority and then move back to the center to get a majority. And if they got annoyed, they could move back and forth.

And that kept the, that meant that if you were a big party with lots of votes, you had a much bigger say than these tiny parties. The far right in Israel, roughly from parliament to parliament over decades, brings something like 10% of the seats. It hasn't actually improved in any real sense, its performance. And you think that the case blocked off the centrist path? Oh, right. So since 2015, yeah, since 2015, BB can only partner with the far right because

centrists are boycotting him because of his criminal problems. Yeah. And that meant that the far right, which wasn't performing any better in elections, could get whatever it wanted from him and has gotten whatever it wanted from him. Let me just add that Benny Gunz did go with him in my March 2020 to a unity government. And Netanyahu got up on national television and he said, no tricks, no schicks. We're going to have a rotation government.

And they changed our constitutional order in quite a few ways to create parity government where one is a prime minister current and one is the prime minister to be. And each one controlled half the cabinet. And they created all these new constitutional structures as Netanyahu's way of telling the Israeli public, I promise you that this rotation agreement I'm signing now because COVID has come. and there's a national emergency, and an election had been indecisive, and he said, I promise you there will be a rotation with guns.

And then Nizeniao, this is in 2020. Everything you're saying I agree with from 2015 on, except that the one time that the opposition did walk, head held high, you know, into a national unity government with Nizsaintiao to find that kind of compromised middle ground. Nizteniao, of course, had one last constitutional path to not giving Gans his chance

at the prime ministership, his rotation. and that was the separate stipulation of the basic law of Knesset that a Knesset that doesn't pass a state budget for that year dissolves itself automatically. And so 2020 was the first year in the history of Israel where the Knesset never passed a state budget for the year. And Netanyahu managed to get the government to fall, and he never had to give Gans the rotation. And so the one time that everything you're saying I agree with structurally,

there's also Netanyahu himself. Now, his Netanyahu himself has so profoundly and publicly and explicitly and brazenly and everyone was convinced he was lying to such an extent that they made constitutional changes to basic laws as provisions to prevent him from being able to actually back out because everyone understood he was going to try every path available to him and he still managed to find a way to turn it all into a vast lie. That only increases the power of the far right. That itself increases.

No, there's Netanyl chose a far right that also is locked into him. It has no path to a coalition. So he wants to be dependent on them and then to be dependent on him. Right. I want to take what you said in the example you said and take it in a slightly different direction. And I'm really glad you raised Benny Gans in 2020 because I think it highlights a problem that's hovering over this entire discussion, which we haven't touched upon at all so far. One of the really important things that happens, in fact, maybe the most important thing that happens in 2020 with Benny Gantz as Minister of Defense, is that the IDF under his direction, for the first time since 2005, stops really trying to do anything to stop the expansion of outposts and especially the longstanding effort of the cellular movement to reclaim the area of the area.

in the Northern West Bank that were evacuated in the disengagement plan. Gunz puts an end to this. For all sorts of reasons, some of it is just, it was the corona, it was, it was a very complicated time, but mostly I think because he as Minister of Defense desperately wanted to get to the rotation that was promised to him and didn't want to raise the settlers or the right against him. And governments of all political stripes from 2005, from the disengagement onwards, had more or less scrupulously attended to Israel's commitments there. The big green light that was given for some of the real insanity that has happened in the West Bank in the last couple of years begins in 2020 with what seems like a minor move, but ends up being very fateful.

And the rest is history. and especially after October 7th, there's been a complete lifting of any restraint there. To discuss the difficulties that we have here as though they're internal to a democratic order is easy to do, and it can fill up an entire hour as you and I have just done. But the real problem,

the dark shadow that has been cast on all this comes from outside. I'm a big defender of the Israeli parliamentary system because looking at the last 80 years, I think it has succeeded in a place with deep, deep, deep divisions and lots of weapons. We have managed to deal with every single problem that has occurred inside the framework of Israeli democracy and inside the boundaries of Israeli democracy more or less effectively. And these were huge problems. What we have not been able to do is deal with the problem that,

comes outside the boundaries of Israeli democracy. This has been really the cancer that has been growing on our body politic, as Rabin described it, I think so accurately in the 1970s. And for something that comes outside the democratic framework, that by definition comes outside the boundaries of democracy because it's physically outside the legal and political boundaries that Israeli democracy sets for itself in territorial terms, the tools for dealing with it can't really emerge from that. If there's one thread behind the missteps that Benny Gantz makes as Minister of Defense

right through the, really what I think was a constitutional crisis in 2022 that brought down the so-called change government. Our collective memory of what brought down the change government is hilarious to me. It's an event that we just lived through four years ago, and yet almost every Israeli I talk to remembers it completely wrong. They'll tell me about Edith Silman and the Hamids in the hospitals. That wasn't what brought the government down. The government fell because of the vote on extending the emergency regulations in the West Bank

for to make it possible to have a legal order for the settlers to live there. And it fell not because of opponents of the settler movement, but because of supporters of it. And I don't think we ever had anything like this in the history of Israeli democracy, where a political bloc basically threatened chaos against its own constituents' interests as a means of pressure on a governing coalition. I don't think that for all the successes of Israeli parliamentary democracy, Israeli parliamentary democracy has managed to invent a solution for the threat that it faces from outside Israeli parliamentary democracy.

And that's why something like what is essentially the institutional capture right now, just of the Israel police, but a... unless it stopped could soon be parts of the IDF, the Shinbet, the Mossad, and various other crucial organizations that, you know, we began the conversation by talking about the transition from voluntary organizations with state-like powers in a mandate versus actual organs of state power. That's why I am so concerned about these things and really deeply worried about what's going on. I think there is something very unhealthy in the feeling that citizens in many democratic countries,

including this one, have often in elections, that the election is not just a competition of elites, but a referendum on the Constitution itself, you know, that if my side loses, everything is over. I think that's really unhealthy. I think it's often really wrong empirically. And I don't think it's something you can sustain for several election cycles in a row. But we see that in country after country, that is what elections have begun to feel like in many mature democracies in the last couple of years, including in this one and including the coming election now. I don't know that our parliamentary system for all its wisdom has the answer to that. This was the great fear that underlay the explosive power of judicial reform. Are you still optimistic?

You're someone who says this has been actually an extraordinary success. The structure is a lot wiser, maybe accidentally wise. But it's nevertheless, generation after generation has done great. Is it still going to be this success story going forward? And if it needs reforms to be able to address the internal questions, the Palestinian question, how does a system that already has all of its interests set, all of its structures in place, even begin to engage seriously in reform? I don't see not that wisdom, not that desire.

I see basically clownishness and populism on the Israeli right. and I don't know where these answers are going to come from. And like you, we will need to be wise or we will collapse. And maybe out of collapse, sometimes this country builds beautiful things. But it has to collapse before it builds success stories, like in 73 or in the 85 fiscal crisis. Are we headed to a collapse or are we going to reform our way out of this? I'm not sure it's just a question of clowns and populists. I don't think clowns and populace were able to mobilize anything in the protests,

especially the counter protests around the judicial reform. In fact, you'll notice that at all of the counter protests in the judicial reform, you saw very few Likudnikim, as we traditionally think of them, and you saw very few her redeem. The only people who were busting people into protests were busting them from the settlers, from the settlements. I don't think that there is no view of what politics should look like from there, and I don't think that there's not an actual rather comprehensive and coherent,

an ideological view of what politics is supposed to look like. The people who are making an impact now on domestic Israeli politics, and especially the man who has recreated the Israel police in his image, doesn't actually have the experience of living in Israeli democracy because he doesn't live here. Some of the really most basic incubators of civic life in Israel aren't relevant to him. He's never had to deal with arguing with a lot. neighbor about property and then seeing what the bylaws are in the city or going before a judge.

He's never had to deal with the draft because he didn't serve in the army. He's never had to deal with having your own opinions maybe on religion or the conflict or whatever, but going to a place where the doctor and the nurse could be Arab or Jewish or religious or secular or whatever. The experiences that create the social reality of what it is to be in Israel and what it is to be an Israeli citizen, in a functioning democracy, in a very, very diverse society, in a place that for all of its flaws, at least in a very formal de Ure sense, practices a kind of civic equality, are far away from anything he's ever known and extremely far from what he desires.

the fantasy of the settler movement in its early days well into at an elite level, at least the 1980s and at a popular level until the 1990s, I would argue, was that we would export Israel into these newly conquered territories. Territories we conquered in a just war, territories that we have a strong historical claim to. We would take this great success that is Israel and bring it there.

that fantasy never came to fruition for all sorts of reasons, not least of which are demographic, also an international political situation, whatever it was, it wasn't possible. The fantasy that replaces that in the last 30 years is not of exporting Israel into the territories. It's of importing the social and political model that has been created theirs through a series of temporary measures here is not to make Hebron into Tel Aviv.

It's to make my life in Yafo look like Hebron or in Aco or in Lod or in Romler or anywhere else or in Haifa. Those are all cities with mixed Arab Jewish populations that you're listening. Cities with mixed Arab Jewish populations where I would be, you know, entirely remiss if I was glorifying the great equality of these places because they're difficult places. But also we're in a very difficult conflict. But at a formal legal level, there is a kind of civic equality, a really meaningful one. And at a social level, there's an interaction of equals. That, again, I don't want to overstate or pridify. But it exists.

That can't be sacrificed for the rather dark alternative model that has been constructed on the other side of the line. That was the vision animating the judicial reform. And the right for all of its ability to assemble an electoral majority, barely. I mean, they won with 30,000 votes. in 2022, couldn't bring out to the streets any of its major constituencies to defend it. The only people in those months of protest and counter-protests, yeah, from about January

till October of 2023, the only people who came out in favor of the judicial reform in their masses, by their bus loads, were coming from the Seller movement. And I think they know why, and I think we need to understand why. There is a definite vision of what Jewish statehood or Jewish democracy should be that is coming from there. And I think we need to understand how dangerous that vision is. It would have no hope of surviving inside the very difficult fuzzy boundaries of Israeli democracy, which have always been difficult. Look, it was difficult to take the institutions that existed as voluntary institutions for Jews and Zionists in British Palestine

and suddenly make them apply to everyone. It was difficult. It involved compromises on the draft. It involved compromises on a public education system. It involved compromises on a lot of things. And in a situation of both mass migration and deep conflict. But it was done. What would it look like for the system to succeed facing these challenges?

I mean, I share your sense that in a sense October 7 was a catalyst that is pushing us to the decision moment, to the moment where real choice, it's not a moment, it might be a decade, but to where these actual decisions will have to be made. In the end, we're not going to be rid of them and they're not going to be rid of us. And we have good polls that tell us that both populations basically just think the other side will never give them peace. And so they, there's only, both sides of have in that sense really radicalized and deeply distrust each other. But, but, But we have a political system, which is our topic, and it faces this immense challenge.

And can it handle it? Can it solve it? I can't hold Israeli democracy and Israeli liberal first world economic life hostage to the pathologies of Palestinian politics. If the Palestinians are unable to produce a political movement that seeks peace and coexistence with us, and they are not thus far, I can't let that consign us to a life of, like I said, of bringing Hebron into Tel Aviv. Therefore. In other words, we can't pull out of the West Bank because of Hamasel take over. Therefore, if you're looking for, if you're looking for something to solve the crisis of Israeli democracy, it would be nice if we could do it by making peace.

And we should pursue that option in every way possible. but we also need to be realistic that if it's not possible, then our security imperatives have to be weighed carefully, but they should not be allowed whatever they are. And if they are, for example, that we have no choice but for the army to remain present in most of the territories. And that may very well be the case. That doesn't mean that the fundamentals of Israeli life

and Israeli democracy need to be altered in order for that be in order for that to be ideologically possible. Whatever the situation in the conflict might be and the security questions are real and the dilemmas are real. One of the things that really, that ideologues on the debate about the occupied territories sometimes can create the impression that there is no dilemma on any side of that debate. That leaving the territories or staying in the territories is so important that you, you know, no sensible person could possibly see it any other way and there's no price to that.

No, there's a huge price to people. I mean, I obviously have a position on this, but do I know that I'm right? I think I'm like 60% right, maybe 40% wrong. I don't know, but I'm also not prime minister. I won't be blamed if I'm wrong. The dilemma is real in terms of what to do with these territories and what to do in the conflict. Although I think we could be creative. No, but Shane, I want to, we'll end on this.

This is a political system that has survived, that founding moment, that strange, weird, accidental structuring of it based on that moment of conflict and war and divided society and then absorbed into itself a doubling of the Jewish population in three years after founding while the currency is collapsing and children are eating powdered eggs because there's no other protein in the country.

That's the 48 to 51 period. Astonishing things that this system has only survived but created competent statehood, a competent military survival and prosperity and reform, extraordinarily successful country in so, so many metrics.

And this political system brings us to this moment. In some ways, we have demonstrated over the last three years, unbelievable power, unbelievable strength, unbelievable competence in the Middle East, what our Air Force can do in Iran. Is this political system up to the great challenge and task of millions of people who are not citizens, of a military rule? Nobody knows how to and of ideology. The West Bank, to me, is, A, it really is the historical home. I mean, most of the Bible happens there.

It doesn't happen in Yafo. I mean, Jonah, the prophet was in Yafo. Everything else in the Bible happens over there, right? So it's not that it isn't a deep, deep touch son of identity. And by the way, if it is a Palestinian state, they will literally demolish every piece of archaeology, every little Hebrew script found anywhere in it. They will destroy that history. They do it on the temple, not every chance they get.

This is not a, they are not a society organized around preserving any history that doesn't fit that narrative. And so that, you know, that is really important to me. It's not important enough to me to hold millions of people under military rule for generations. But the thing that is important enough to me to say I can't pull out and become nine miles wide at the middle with Hamas and control of the highlands is that they will actually come to try to murder my kids. And the incredibly wonderful Palestinians I know from my professional work, from my personal life, I know a great many of them. They work in the newspapers I work in. They are intellectuals I read.

I have learned so much history from so many of them. None of them run the place. And when a group of Palestinian political factions get into a room, the most extreme one is always the one that wins, always the one that sets the tone, always the one that decides what's going to happen. These things that I know mean that I literally can't pull out. I mean, I just literally can't.

I'm so small, and that is such a threat, and it's 16 times the size of Gaza. And look at it. Can our political system manage this? The success of the Israeli state and the society that was built was built in a condition of a monopoly of arms and of decision-making capacity that was through democratic procedure. What we constructed in the West Bank is a situation where real life and death decisions are made not because an elected government has decided that this is important or not important, but rather because people who don't answer to a direct chain of command but are armed are able to impose something on. both their local environment and the state authorities and the military authorities in question. That's a toxic brew.

That is how states destroy themselves. It's bad enough in how, in the effect, it has had on our already difficult, necessarily difficult, endeavor of running an occupied territory for more than half a century. But when that method has been allowed to seep into here, it is doubly destructive. There is, there's no way we can begin to the process of repairing ourselves without being clear, at least at home, that on the rules of the game. Right. That there are rules of the game that we make decisions through clear chains of command, through democratic procedure, not through private weaponry, not through organized militias. That was a fundamental for all of its problems inside of Israel right up until.

67 and even after 67, that was still a fundamental inside the Green Line. I say that knowing full well all the little scandals that happen on the way and all the exceptions that happened on the way and the way that the political system dealt with it, usually effectively, not always to my full satisfaction, but at some point, particularly in the last few years, that porous boundary has been breached. that's something that we do have an opportunity maybe to set back in the in the upcoming election. I'm not even entirely sure we do. I mean, I'm optimistic about our capacity here for survival and for self-correction because we just don't have another choice.

So I think that talk to me on in November. Yeah. I think that certain ways of things. thinking on the Israeli right have to be allowed to bring themselves to fruition, and things will actually a little bit crash. And when they have crashed, we will rebuild. And that is how generally the Israeli history has always done it. I share your sense that Ben-Vir-Smautrich really are a break.

In other words, they really are an end to the Israeli willingness to seek solutions. And that is a break from the past. And they don't care about any of these institutions. I think if Israel is less democratic, Israel will become less capable to fight, less able to actually. My kids will go to an army that actually has to fight wars, as I said, because other kids are now fighting for them. Because there's this circle of solidarity where we all fight for each other, and that has made Jews safer than they'd ever been in their history. And that circle of solidarity is broken if it isn't a democracy, a real functioning democracy that people feel as a democracy. Nobody will send their kids to the IDF for a Putin

who can just kill hundreds of thousands of the young men of Russia in a crazy war in Ukraine for no reason, not for defensive, not for serious grand strategic, but for his own basically weird worldview and ego. And so Israel's fighting capability, you know, the Air Force, the extraordinarily competent Air Force that we've seen displayed in the Middle East is only a democratic institution.

It cannot be built by a non-democracy. So I share with you this concern of this Israeli political right. And I'm so confident that the Israeli political system can see its way through. By the way, the crisis that will bring things crashing and then we'll have to rebuild, that's fine. That's kind of part of Israeli politics. It's happened so often on so many issues. Maybe. For every democratic country.

Maybe that's maybe right. The Americans had a civil war. And that was part of the advance of their democratic experiment in some strange, strange, horrifying, but nevertheless, true way. So I don't know where this is going. Thank you for taking us to this very dark and sad place. You're going to get emails. I'm going to forward all the emails to you. I don't have to deal with them.

Why do I have to deal with that? But yes, arguably a critical election. Where, by the way, just so people know, we're going to bring on right-wingers, we're going to bring on left-wingers, we're going to have a conversation. But a very, very profoundly important election, and Israelis are dealing with some very important questions and issues. Uh, Cheny, thank you for joining me. This went on about twice as long as I think we agreed, so thank you for your patience as well.