In Israel, the People Speak, But They Are Not Always Heard

Liora Moriel

The last election in Israel resulted in the first solid government in five years. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, right-wing but traditionally secular, aligned itself with several ultra-Orthodox, ultra-nationalist and ultra-extreme parties.

Some of the potential Knesset members were so extreme that the High Court did not allow them to be seated. In addition, the leader of the Shas party, Aryeh Deri, who had been convicted of a financial crime for the second time (he had served time for the previous case), promised not to take on the role of a minister in a new administration in return for no jail time. However, as soon as the government was sworn in, Netanyahu gave Deri a double portfolio.

This was the opening salvo in the formation of a government far different from any in Israel’s past. Even when Menachem Begin came to power, in 1977, the government did not include people who had been jailed for insurrection by the Israeli police. In 2023, Israelis were shocked to discover that the minister of finance and the minister of internal safety would be religious settler rabble-rousers who advocate the death and deportation of Palestinians and even Israeli Arabs.

Yes, the people have spoken. They voted for Netanyahu’s coalition. But let’s not forget that the Israeli election system is not one person, one vote. Instead, parties need to garner 3.5% of the total vote to be represented in the Knesset. Many parties fail and their votes are wasted; others sign mutual agreements for the distribution of such votes. Thus, since the Meretz and Labor parties did not agree to unite or even to use one another’s votes, Meretz just failed to get in and Labor lost two seats. The people speak, but they are not always heard.

This is the background to the surge of protests all over Israel for so many weeks. It is not because, as Jerome Marcus of the shadowy Kohelet group wrote last week (“What’s Really Happening in Israel”), some Israelis are trying to use tainted tactics to overcome the results of a legal election. No, the reason is that instead of working toward the goals on which he campaigned, Netanyahu gave the running of the government over to his minister of justice, Yariv Levin, who tried to ramrod a series of laws that would cripple the judiciary and give the government dictatorial powers to enact and dismantle laws, as well as decide who the judges will be.

Israelis have learned to be apathetic after three years of COVID and endless elections. They want to live where they can afford the rent, the food, the life. They want some calm, a sense of a future for their children. They go to the army and work their way up, making Israel a modern miracle of innovation. But they see that the ultra-Orthodox do not serve but get paid for Torah study, and that while they work hard to pay for child care the ultra-Orthodox have many children at state expense. Ordinary Israelis are fed up with such inequality.

Netanyahu promised free infant care and low mortgages. He promised a better life for everyone. But as prime minister, he let the extremists run the show: The tax on sugary drinks was eliminated, single-use plates and cutlery returned to stores, and everything else either became more expensive or stayed the same. Yeshivah student salaries increased.
There is no left in Israel. There is the extreme right — Netanyahu’s current government — and a few center-right parties, along with the Arab parties that feel increasingly marginalized. The Kohelet group has fixated on the idea that “the left” is trying to undo the people’s will. The truth is that Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption while acting as prime minister of the state, has abdicated his role to the hard right. The nascent intifada is one result. The steady protest of Israel’s citizens is another.

It is not hatred of Netanyahu and his allies that brings hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens to the streets of almost every city and town in Israel every Saturday night after Shabbat; it is a love of country. Many of my family and friends, usually apolitical, go out every week to protest what they see as an assault on democratic values and long-shared understandings of what Israeli democracy means. They are fed up with the inequality of sacrifice for the nation. They are fed up with being called unpatriotic. And they are particularly fed up with being called left-wing terrorists.

What may be the worst ingredient Netanyahu has infused into Israeli society over the past few months is the cultivated division of the people in Israel into us and them, good and evil. Netanyahu, with a straight face, calls those who volunteer for military service a month every year and pay high taxes “unpatriotic” while embracing the poorest echelons, who cling to him as the one who will lead them into prosperity, as “patriotic.”

If Israel is to remain a light unto the nations, it must not become a non-democracy like Hungary, where people vote, but their choices are limited to those in power.

Liora Moriel, a former member of the editorial board of The Jerusalem Post, was a lecturer at the University of Maryland.