Electoral Reform for Israel
Daniel J. Elazar
The urgent need for electoral reform of Israel's parliamentary
system is widely, if not universally, recognized. But electoral
reform can be enacted only by a Knesset made up of parties and
individuals whose political life may be threatened by that
reform. Political suicide has never been popular -- certainly
not in Israel.
There is only one way to bring about electoral reform in
Israel -- by a democratic "citizens revolt" in the form of a
massive campaign of public mobilization.
What is needed is a half million to a million signatures on a
petition that would demand a change in the electoral system. This
should be presented to the Knesset by 50,000 citizens marching in
Jerusalem. That is the only way to effect a break-down of the
present resistance to electoral reform on the part of the powers
that be.
The process of obtaining that number of signatures would in
itself involve a major public effort, with all that this entails
in the way of public education accompanying it. But if such an
effort can be mounted, it would have an excellent chance of
success. Although the Israeli establishment appears to be very
conservative, in every case where there has been a massive
public outpouring, the establishment and the government have
responded rapidly to the pressure. Look at the response in the
aftermath of the Yom Kippur War or the aftermath of the massacres
in Beirut, not to speak of a number of less prominent situations.
After the Yom Kippur War one lone man, Moti Ashkenazi, a
major in the reserves who had been caught with the rest of his
Jerusalem brigade in the bunkers along the Canal and who fought
in the only bunker to avoid capture by the Egyptians, mounted a
one-man protest calling for Golda Meir's government to resign by
standing in front of the Knesset with a placard. Within no time
he was joined by others until a major sit-in was underway,
leading to the appointment of the Agranat Commission to
investigate why Israel had been surprised and, following the
Commission's report, the resignation of the Meir government.
In September, 1982, after the Lebanese Christian militia
massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps
outside Beirut, when Prime Minister Menachem Begin refused to
appoint an external committee of inquiry to determine whether the
Israel Defense Forces had enabled the massacre to take place, the
Israeli public protested massively, culminating in a
demonstration of several hundred thousand people in Tel Aviv.
Within a week, Begin reversed himself, the Kahan Commission was
appointed and its report, issued five months later, while
exonerating Israel of any direct responsibility led to serious
punishments for those whose negligence had allowed the Lebanese
Christians to do their deed.
What is needed to start and to spark the effort is a public
figure who could take the lead and an organization to provide him
with proper support and funding.
Both are now available.
Previous efforts at electoral reform have been essentially
stalemated because the proposed reforms conflict with basically
immovable interests of long standing. The small parties in the
Knesset are properly afraid that any serious electoral reform
will prevent them from obtaining Knesset seats in future
elections. The two large parties, Labor and the Likud, do not
want to antagonize the small parties who are their potential
coalition partners by advocating electoral reform. Even more
important, they recognize that serious electoral reform will lead
to changes within the party structure, thereby weakening the
present party establishments and their ability to control
nominations to the Knesset and the party machinery.
The Israeli public overwhelmingly supports electoral reform
in the polls, but until now the issue has not been sufficiently
important to them to make a real effort to bring about change.
Under the present electoral system, voters cast their ballots
for specific political parties rather than for individual
candidates. Each party submits a list of its candidates for the
Knesset in rank order. After the votes are counted, each party
received the number of seats to which its percentage of the vote
entitles it. Thus if a part wins 20 percent of the votes, it
will get 24 seats out of the 120 in the Knesset, and the first 24
names on its list will become Knesset members. If its gets 40
percent of the votes, it will receive 48 seats in the same
manner.
The only departures from this pure proportional
representation system are that a party must receive a minimum of
slightly over 1 percent of the votes to qualify for a seat and it
is possible for parties to enter into agreements to pool extra
fractions of percentages for the advantage of one or the other.
If a vacancy occurs during the life of a sitting Knesset, then
the next person on the list of the party involved automatically
takes his or her seat in Israel's parliament. This means that
party leadership has great power in its ability to determine who
is included on its list and in what place.
Among the debilitating consequences of this system of
proportional representation are the extreme multiplicity of
parties; the strengthening of the party bureaucracy at the
expense of the government and the voters; the unhealthy deepening
of political divisions in the country as a whole; and the
increasing sense of political alienation that envelops many
Israelis.
Thus in the elections for the present Knesset, 15 parties or
party blocs qualified for seats. In the case of most of them,
their Knesset lists were chosen by a narrow group of party
leaders. The two major parties, even balanced as they were in
the number of seats each obtained, had to compete for the support
of the minuscule parties with one to six seats to try to form a
governing coalition, and in the end failed to do so, leading to
the establishment of the present national unity government in
which both major parties plus many of the smaller parties are
represented, leaving in opposition only the extreme left and
extreme right in the Israeli spectrum.
Perhaps most devastating is that central control over the
nominations process has led to an increasing mediocritization of
Israeli politics. Party business is conducted so that, with rare
exceptions, only professional politicians -- people who are
prepared to spend all their time in partisan political activity
-- can gain enough seniority and recognition to be nominated to
high office. Citizen involvement in politics is minimal under
such a system, while the number of good people willing to kowtow
to the party leadership for a sufficiently lengthy period of time
to rise in the ranks is quite limited.
The results nationally stand in stark contrast to what
happens in local politics where the direct election of mayors,
introduced in 1978, has led to a flowering of political talent as
interested people find it easier to run for office on the basis
of their personal talents.
Take, for example, Moshe Katzav, who came into public view as
the very successful mayor of Kiryat Malachi, a stagnant
development town in the south until he became mayor and led its
revitalization, and who is today Minister of Social Welfare, or
Meir Shitrit, who transformed another development town, Yavne,
into a garden suburb, was subsequently elected to the Knesset and
is now chairman of the Prime Minister's Council for Social
Planning. Both Katzav and Shitrit are members of Herut and
leading lights in the Likud. Mayors like Katzav and Shitrit, of
the Labor Party's Jacques Amir from Dimona, have made their way
into the Knesset without waiting in line because of their
reputations they have gained as a result of their local
successes.
Eli Dayan, the highly visible mayor of Ashkelon, who
satisfies not only a Sephardic constituency but the highly
demanding South African Jewish community in that city, is a
member of the Labor Party. In the north, Yigal Bibi of the
National Religious Party, who was elected mayor of Tiberias, a
town that has traditionally voted Labor and would never have
elected an NRP majority to the town council, on the basis of his
personal dynamism. In middle class suburbs such as Ramat
Hasharon and Kfar Shmaryahu, on the other hand, independent local
candidates, not affiliated with any of the national parties, have
achieved similar results to bring a kind of non-partisan "good
government approach to municipal affairs that has also attracted
countrywide attention.
The present party system actually antedates the state. It
was developed to meet the needs of those pioneering the
resettlement of the land, as those needs were perceived by the
settlers from Eastern and Central Europe. As vehicles for
pioneering before the existence of a Jewish government, the
individual parties -- particularly the labor and religious
parties which embraced strong doctrinal positions -- developed
educational, welfare, and social service institutions of their
own that went far beyond the normal political purposes of party
organizations in other countries.
After the establishment of the state in 1948, the new
government gave active assistance to these party institutions in
order to facilitate the development of the country and the
absorption of the mass of new immigrants.
Thus the parties consolidated their position in Israel's
political system in ways that transcend the usual political
concerns of access and representation. They became virtually
self-contained provinces within the state. This, in turn,
strengthened the vested interests opposed to electoral reform,
since any threat to the existence of a particular party could
undercut the life structure of many people.
It is hard for outsiders to visualize the degree to which the
parties or ideological camps (groups of parties sharing an
overall ideology such as Labor's socialism, Likud's populist
nationalism, or the religious parties traditional religion)
dominated the lives of ordinary Israelis, something which
Israelis took for granted. In their heyday before the state,
everything from sports clubs to paramilitary forces, from schools
to banks, was organized by party or camp. While many of these
camps were subsequently nationalized when the state was
established, many others still remain in party hands. For
example...
All this helped create a very centralized party system with
considerable power in the hands of the party leadership and
bureaucracies through their control not only of normal electoral
politics, but also of economic opportunity for party members.
Even as the parties were being consolidated within the
framework of the state, however, the change in Israel's
population introduced large numbers of people -- either
immigrants or members of a new native-born generation -- who had
no ideological stake in any particular party and did not
particularly care to be independent upon the parties for services
they consider to be rightfully the province of government. Almost
everyone born since the establishment of the state falls into
this category. They have grown up with the state as a reality
and forty years after the state's founding they represent a
decisive majority of the population. It is they who can provide a
base of support for electoral reform. At the present moment,
this provides only limited support because it is unorganized and
must face the united opposition of those who actually hold
political power in the country. But the democratic "citizen
revolt" I envisage can change all this.
While David Ben-Gurion advocated electoral reform back in the
1950s and even tried to build a new party, Rafi, around that
issue, among others, in the 1960s after he left Mapai, efforts to
achieve change until recently were mostly confined to a few
individuals or small groups. Gad Yacobi, a veteran Labor Knesset
member and frequent minister in the governments of Israel, has
been a loyal supporter of electoral reform over the years. In
the 1970s, the Democratic Movement for Change, a portion of which
survives in the Shinui party, made electoral reform a major
issue, but failed to move matters along before the party broke
apart over other issues associated with the first Begin
government. Today Knesset members Professor Amnon Rubinstein and
Mordechai Virschubsky of that party remain advocates of district
elections.
Outside of the Knesset, lobbying for electoral reform has
primarily been the province of olim from the English-speaking
countries whose experience in the lands of their origin has made
them strong supporters of both personal and district elections.
Groups such as the Committee of Concerned Citizens, originally
chaired by Haim Herzog before he became Israel's president, and
the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, have been
active in seeking to mobilize public support for the change. All
of these have been too few and far between to overcome the
resistance of the two major parties who pay lip service to
electoral reform in their platforms, but do nothing to advance
it.
Now, however, a now broad-based coalition of concerned
citizens is in the process of formation, under the umbrella
organization known as Aviv, literally "spring," but also a Hebrew
acronym for Agudah Lebechirot Yeshirot BeYisrael. Aviv's leaders
include public figures like MK Meir Shitrit, whom we met earlier,
leaders of the business community such as Al Schwimmer, one of
the founders of the Israeli Air Force and former head of the
Israel Aircraft Industries, and David Kulitz, one of the
wunderkind Israeli entrepreneurs and first chairman of the
Israeli Forum. They are committed to raising a war chest of $1
million from Israelis and concerned Jews abroad, particularly in
the United States, who want to advance the cause.
There are many kinds of electoral reform that this "citizens'
revolt" could support. But electoral reform that has any chance
of being enacted must take into account the present party system
and the reluctance of any of the present parties to accept any
electoral arrangement that does not give at least those parties
in the coalition some hope of survival. At the same time, any
electoral reform, to be worth the effort, must meet the demands
of the "non-party" population which is increasingly dissatisfied
with the status quo, by providing for close relations between the
voters and their representatives; broader representation of the
different interest, ethnic, and the geographic groups that make
up Israel's society; and greater independence for their party
hierarchies for Knesset members.
Various proposals for change have been advanced, ranging from
continuing the present parliamentary system, with a certain
percentage of the Knesset's 120 seats elected from districts and
the remainder elected at large, to a complete constitutional
change instituting presidential government.
The simplest change in the electoral system would be to
retain proportional representation as at present, but to raise
the minimum percentage needed to win a seat. Today slightly over
one percent of the total vote will gain a seat in the Knesset.
That is how Meir Kahane was elected. Were that threshold to be
raised to a three percent minimum, all the present fly-by-night
splinter parties established to foster the ambitions of some
individual would be eliminated while preserving those parties --
large, medium-sized and small -- that have demonstrated staying
power on the political scene over the years and thus arguably
deserve representation. Such a change would alter the present
system, which rewards splintering by encouraging leaders of
factions within existing parties to set up their own parties
prior to each election and thereby improve their chances of
gaining election to the Knesset.
Another possibility, which I prefer, is what is called a
fixed multi-member district system. Under this system, the
country would be divided into a fixed number of large districts,
say 8 or 12, based on permanent regional divisions, and the 120
Knesset seats would be apportioned among them periodically on the
basis of population. Within each district as many parties as
wished could submit lists, but voters could vote either for party
lists or for individual candidates up to the total number of
seats allotted to that district. This would reduce the number of
parties able to compete in the election, allow voter choice of
individual candidates and not simply party lists, thereby
encouraging the parties to nominate attractive candidates in
every district. At the same time this would allow Israel's
permanent groupings an opportunity to be represented in the
Knesset as at present. By permanent groupings I mean those
parties or combinations of parties whose continued existence from
election to election because of some individual's ambition or in
pursuit of an electoral will-of-the-wisp that never emerges with
even the minimal one percent of the vote needed to obtain a seat.
Such a system would assure appropriate regional representation in
the Knesset, something that now is lacking, without
overemphasizing localism. So, for example, the eastern and
Western Galilee, the south and the Negev are badly
underrepreseted in the Knesset, while Tel Aviv and its
surrounding area and the Jezreel Valley kibbutzim are
overrepresented. A permanent distribution of seats among fixed
regions would, on one hand, guarantee those regions
representation, and, on the other, make certain that the
representation did not exceed what they were due, given their
share of the country's population. Voting for those
representatives on a regions basis would strengthen regional
consciousness and foster intra-regional cooperation in other
areas because the Knesset members would have an interest in
working together, while at the same time giving every Knesset
member a broad enough base so that the kind of parochialism
sometimes associated with individual member constituencies would
be prevented.
A ready-made basis for such a division presently exists.
Israel's territory within its pre-1967 borders (plus east
Jerusalem) is presently divided into fourteen administrative
subdistricts which would meet the requirements for permanent
electoral districts.* These subdistricts are now used for the
administration of elections. Since they follow the country's
regional geographic divisions they can properly serve as the
basis for a new electoral system. Since their boundaries are
permanently fixed, they obviate the necessity for politically
painful decisions in drawing district lines.
Each of the electoral districts would be allocated its share
of Knesset seats in proportion to its percentage of the country's
total population. In order to give each district at least four
seats, the fourteen planning subdistricts would be reduced to
twelve by combining the Safed and Kinneret subdistricts and the
Ramle and Rehovot subdistricts. (See map.) Under this
arrangement, each district would be sufficiently large in
population and varied in interests to offer several parties a
fair chance to elect representatives to the Knesset. At the same
time, each district will be sufficiently distinct as a regional
entity to encourage its residents to develop a long range
community of interest internally and even allow the
territorially-based minorities such as the Arabs, the
agricultural settlements, and the religious population to gain
representation in an appropriate way. Each of the three major
cities with its environs would constitute a separate district as
they already do for governmental and planning purposes, which
would tend to concentrate the "independents" in a few centers
where they could compete with the parties on equal terms without
putting the latter at a permanent disadvantage.
The apportionment of seats by district would be done by
determining how many people each Knesset seat represents,
relative to the total population of the country, and comparing
that figure with the total population of each district. After
allocating seats to the districts in this manner, the remaining
seats would be allocated on the basis of major fractions of the
required figure, in descending order. Thus, if the average
population per seat is 27,000, a district with a population of
260,000 would initially be allocated nine seats and would likely
receive a tenth on the basis of the 17/27 of the basic figure
remaining unprovided for. Periodically -- every ten years is the
usual interval -- the seats would automatically be reapportioned
among the districts by a non-partisan commission on the basis of
population changes.
As a general rule, all candidates would be elected at large
within each district. This means that every voter will be able
to vote for as many candidates as the number of seats allocated
to his district. Any party many nominate candidates for any and
all of the seats in each district, as provided by the state
election laws. Candidates would carry party designations on the
ballot and would be listed under party columns. Voters will be
able to vote for individual candidates or for a straight party
ticket. The parties will thus be able to attract the voters as
before but the burden of attracting new votes will be placed on
the candidates they choose rather than on the ideologies they
espouse. the parties will be able to attract voters by
nominating exceptionally good candidates who could pull votes
away from the larger parties in the districts where the
candidate's parties, as such, have little support, or by
convincing the voters in districts where they have abundant
support to vote a straight ticket for them. At the same time it
could be possible for one party to elect a majority and be able
to form a stable government by careful construction of tickets in
the various districts.
There are many other reforms that have been proposed,
including a complete change in the structure of the Israeli
political system from a parliamentary to a presidential one,
whereby a chief executive or president would be directly elected
by the voters independently of the Knesset and would relate to
the Knesset on a separation-of-power basis similar to that in the
United States.
What is necessary at this point is not to decide on the
specific system but to mobilize the public so that change may be
effectuated. It is clear, however, that any proper change would
have to eliminate exclusive reliance on proportional
representation. And, the time for action is now!
While electoral reform is no panacea, it is vitally necessary
for Israel at this time because it would open up the system's
badly needed new blood.
Notes
* While this system is based on the 1967 boundaries and excludes
all the administered territories, it would be easy to make any
electoral adjustments based on territorial changes in the future
on present settlements beyond the green line. The Golan, for
example, would be added to the Naftali district; settlements in
the northern Jordan Valley could be attached to the Yizrael
district. The settlements in the Etzion bloc, Hebron, and the
Dead Sea area could be attached to the Jerusalem or the Beersheba
districts; the Sinai settlements could be attached to the
Ashkelon district.
