I have been looking for some good things to recommend reading after this week's election in Israel. There is not a whole lot yet, but I put in a couple of links below.
For background: Israel is a pure parliamentary system, with a single house called the Knesset with 120 seats. Each Israeli votes in national elections for a political party, and seats in the Knesset are allocated proportionally based on the national vote. There are many political parties, and in Israel's history no party has ever won an absolute majority. So governments are always coalitions of parties. The head of the largest party in the coalition becomes the prime minister.
A simple breakdown of the election results:
- 43 seats for the parties of the Right, which are either skeptical of or opposed to peace talks with the Palestinians — this is Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's bloc
- 18 seats for the parties that represent charedi or "ultra-Orthodox" Jews, which tend to be interested in securing economic benefits and other privileges for the most religious Israelis, as well as the application of their interpretation of Jewish law in Israel
- 48 seats for the parties of the Left, which are anywhere from interested in to actively advocating intensified peace negotiations with the Palestinians, but which generally emphasized social and economic reforms in this campaign — this includes Yair Lapid of "Yesh Atid" (There Is a Future), a new party with 19 seats (see below)
- 11 seats for Israeli Arab political parties, which traditionally do not become part of governing coalitions but often support governments of the Left
Superficially, if you count the religious parties as "conservative" you would think that the split was 61 seats for the Right and 59 for the Left. But Israeli politics is not built on the same binary system as the U.S., where (to simplify) Left=economic equality, civil rights, progressive social policy and dovish foreign policy and Right=pro-business, individual freedoms, traditional religion and hawkish foreign policy. Sometimes the ultrareligious parties support the foreign policy of the Israeli Left in exchange for specific benefits, for instance.
It does not look like Netanyahu wants a 61-vote government of the "Right" and the religious. Instead, there might be a "center-right" government led by Netanyahu, which could lead to economic reforms within a pro-business framework, a cautious but skeptical approach to the Palestinian peace talks, an assertive posture toward the threat of nuclear Iran, and a change to include more ultra-Orthodox Jews in the military or national service in some form.
On the whole, the Israeli papers suggest that voters were more focused on internal economic issues than the foreign policy questions that we think about most. In some ways the election was a stalemate, to the surprise of many.
Here is a New York Times profile on Yair Lapid, the surprising new leader of the Israeli political center.
Alan Dershowitz has had communications with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and thinks there is opening for new negotiations between Netanyahu and Abbas
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