Threshold chokehold: Haviv Rettig Gur on why elections are now won by the fringe

Paralyzed Nation

Welcome to the third episode of Paralyzed Nation, a podcast drilling down into the hard questions facing Israeli voters ahead of the looming November 1 elections.

In our limited series podcast, Amanda Borschel-Dan speaks with Times of Israel political analysts and learns about the forces that have brought us to this political deadlock.

In this third episode of Paralyzed Nation, senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur explains how the Israeli electoral threshold has a stranglehold on coalition building.

He dives into the history of the incrementally rising percentage -- from 1% to today's 3.25% -- and the ripple effects caused by each lift. We speak about other attempts at electoral reform and their disastrous results.

In future episodes, we'll hear more from Rettig Gur, as well as from the rest of our expert ToI political team, who will answer voicemail questions from listeners. Please send questions to [e-mail]

IMAGE: Workers prepare ballot boxes for the upcoming Israeli elections at the central elections committee warehouse in Shoham before they are shipped to polling stations, October 12, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Transcript of Episode 3:

Amanda Borschel-Dan: I'm here today with our senior analyst, Haviv Rettig Gur to continue our conversations. Previously, we've spoken about three ways out of the deadlock Israel's "simple" electoral system, and today we're going to discuss the dreaded threshold.

We've had five elections in 43 months, which seems to indicate that the system isn't working all that well. Could it be because of the threshold?

So, Haviv, just to begin with, how has the threshold changed over the years?

Haviv Rettig Gur: The Israeli electoral threshold is, of course, the percent number of votes that you have to actually win in order to get into the Knesset in the first place. So it's not enough to win .9% of the vote, which is roughly the value of a Knesset seat. You actually have to pass the threshold, which used to be 1%, and then was raised to 2%, and then in 2014 was raised to three and a quarter percent. What that means is that you need to win the value of votes of almost four seats, three nine seats, just to seat your very first MK. So that's what the threshold is.

Now, as you said, arguably after five elections in 43 months, the electoral system isn't doing such a great job. It doesn't deliver decisive victories, it doesn't protect minorities while ensuring that majorities get to set the agenda. As we discussed in the last podcast, it gives enormous power to some minorities, but then doesn't protect other minorities, and it doesn't keep extremists at bay while ensuring the public debate is focused on substance and focused on the mainstream. And so it's an electoral system that a lot of people, political scientists, pundits, observers, Israeli voters are absolutely convinced isn't working.

Borschel-Dan: Now, I have a question for you before we dive in. We have a system in which even to be on the electoral slate, you need several tens of thousands of votes to be considered as a party willing to or worthy of running. So why do we actually need this threshold?

Right. Well, one of the theories that a great answer comes from the debate in 2014 around the latest increase from 2% to 3.25%. And essentially the argument was and it was made by the left, and it was made by the right, it was made by many, many supporters of the threshold increase. And the argument was the Israeli parliament usually has a dozen factions, sometimes it has 13 or 14, sometimes it drops to ten, but it usually has about a dozen factions. That's an enormous number of parties for anyone to have to negotiate with to pass legislation within a coalition, within a government. A prime minister, just to get a government policy on something, usually has to deal with five, six in the last government, eight parties, all of them pulling in different directions with different agendas. And so the theory was and there was a theory explained to politicians a great length by political scientists and very eminent and serious people. The theory was that there are just too many parties to govern the country, to run a government, to negotiate legislation. We need to get rid of that mess that, you know, dozen different factions pulling in a dozen different directions and force them to unite into larger parties, into larger frameworks.

Now, the concept was, the argument was that if you force small, minority, usually radical fringe parties to unite with larger, more moderate midsized parties, that will force them to moderate, otherwise the midsize party will jettison them, right? They're the ones who need to pass the threshold, the little marginal, radical ones. And so they would unite moderate. It would be a moderating influence and it would be a simplifying influence. The prime minister would have to close deals with four factions, three factions in the broader Knesset, maybe seven. That's a very different game from twelve. And so that was the concept that you would simplify this incredible mess.

Borschel-Dan: But in practice, we're seeing something perhaps slightly different, especially in these elections. I know you spoke recently with Dr. Shani Mor of Reichmann University. So what did Mor have to say about this?

So I had a good conversation with him after a piece he published in Liberal magazine. It was an interview and that'll be published as an article on The Times of Israel. He said some fascinating things that I thought have to be brought into the conversation. He also said things that suggest that my own analysis back in 2014 of the electoral threshold increase was wrong.

Borschel-Dan: I think we should pause and really acknowledge this moment in which Haviv was saying that perhaps he was wrong.

I don't want to take credit for being an amazing kind of person just because I'll admit that maybe I was mistaken. But it is actually important. I was wrong in an important way that's very clarifying because back when the increase was suggested. It was a proposal that came out of academia and it came out of the left. The current president, Isaac Herzog, back when he was the head of the Labor Party, actually recommended raising the threshold to 5%. And so he very much backed the 3.25% and saw it as a compromise.

Borschel-Dan: And ironically, his own party would not make it through this.

And now his own party is threatened by that threshold. And that's very interesting. And what he would have said is the threshold would have wiped it out. He brought the party in the Zionist Union framework to, I think, 25 seats. So he was maybe justified in suggesting that number. But at the time, the suggestion came in for a huge amount of criticism from two sections of Israeli politics. One was the Arab majority parties where Arab politicians said this is engineered by the Israeli right and the far right, or Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beteinu Party, which cosponsored the bill along with a few other parties. But to drive us [Arab parties] out of politics.

Borschel-Dan: Ie, racism.

Racism, exactly. To literally drive Arab representation out of parliament. And the reason was that the three or four Arab factions, depending on how they run and when they run in different elections, but roughly three or four Arab factions always get between two and 4%. And so to increase from two to three and a quarter puts all of them at risk, pushes the Balad faction, which classically got around 2% below the threshold and actually will force Arabs out of parliament. And the Israeli far right -- and the Israeli far right has a whole lot of small factions competing amongst themselves that each are convinced that the other -- it's one of these Judean People's Front kind of things where the other one is far right, but not the correct far right. It was the wrong one. Not far right enough. I'm the real thing, right? And so they don't unite. They're very disunited and also they're very small. And so they were sure that this is about keeping them out and they were screaming that it's all about keeping them out. And I wrote about that debate, especially to the Arab parties who at the time were a much, much larger part of Israeli parliament than the far-right parties.

And I wrote that we actually know from many, many elections that the Arab political parties are not popular in the Arab street among the Arab electorate. They fail to turn out the vote. They fail to convince Arab voters to vote for them. I think the election, the 2013 election don't catch me on this. It's on Wikipedia. I should have checked ahead of time. I didn't quite know exactly where we're going to go. But I think it was around 46% of the eligible Arab vote was drawn to the Arab parties in the 2013 election. And that's dismal. I mean, that's 20 points lower than the lowest Jewish vote. And so and there's many other Arabs who vote for other parties, not the Arab parties. And so the Arab parties are divided amongst themselves along these very narrow ideological lines. The secular nationalists and the Islamists and the progressives and the more nationalist progressives and the less nationalist progressives and all these little details that the Arab street, it turns out, I suggested, and there's good reasons to think doesn't care about Israeli Arabs are roughly divided into more integrationist into Israel. Less integrationist into Israel. And people straddle these lines. So I don't want to take a complex thing and simplify, but roughly these are their feelings and a unified Arab list would reflect the priority of the Arab voter right now.

I wrote this thing and Jamal Zahalke, the head of Balad at the time, told me that it's a terribly patronizing view. What do you mean? Arabs are incredibly diverse in their views, exactly as diverse as Jews. I wouldn't come to Shas and say, oh, you Sephardi ultra-Orthodox party have to sit with Meretz. You're all Jews, what do you want? You're Jews, right? I would never dare to say that. And so how dare I do that to the Arabs? That was his argument, which of course I published as his response. And my argument and the argument of many others to him was that that's a perfectly valid argument. He has a right to run on his own ballot even if he never makes it into the Knesset or makes it to the commission. But it's such a tiny faction that he can't actually do anything, and he's so busy fighting with the Arab factions that he can't deliver for the Arab community. He has that right. But the Arab voters can actually ultimately decide whether that's a patronizing view or not, what they themselves prioritize. And the Arab voters been voting with their feet rather significantly again. Now, we've had a natural experiment since then, right?

Borschel-Dan: Before you talk about the natural experiment, if I remember correctly, several elections ago, the Joint Arab List was the number three largest party in the Knesset. It headed the opposition at that time.

Exactly. So between 2014 and 2022, Haviv was proven right and Jamal Zahalke was proven wrong. And the Arab voter, every single time the Arab parties united, came out in overpowering numbers, just incredible numbers. I am a lover of high turnout. I think that's a wonderful thing. Likud was very upset about it. It helped prevent Netanyahu from winning a couple of those times. By the way, I'm an extremely avid supporter of Likud having a high turnout as well. Just to clarify, people should vote. You should vote listener, even if you're not in Israel. You should vote wherever you live. Always vote. Having a protest vote is more important than not voting. Politicians won't respond to a nonvote, but they will respond much more powerfully to protest votes.

In 2015, the Arab parties united and grew enormously. In 2019 April, they divided again. Shrank. In 2019 September, they united again, grew in 2020. In that election, they grew even more to 15 seats. And then in 2021, they separated again and shrank again. Now they separated even more. That political elite with their ideological differences could not they could not live together in that joint list, even if it means doubling and even tripling their ultimate vote win. They simply could not live together and they divided again. And this time that divide means that even Balad is running on its own and Balad is polling at half the turnout. It's not even close. And so we're now going to see they're the more divided than they've ever been. And internal Arab Party polls suggest that Arab turnout is going to be the lowest it has been in years in many, many years.

And so the natural experiment has proven the point. The more Arab parties unite, the more Arab voters turn out to vote for them. And the more they disunite along these completely legitimate ideological lines and divides, the less Arab voters are interested. Okay, so until now Haviv's right, just to clarify. And the Arab political elite is, in theory, wrong.

And then along comes Dr. Mor and Dr. Mor has this argument that says, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. Watch what actually happened inside the Arab Joint List and on the Israeli Jewish far right and with Labor and Meretz and in fact to the broader politics of the different camps. And you will realize that actually they are some of the things that worry us the most, the radicalization in many of these areas of Israeli politics.

So what did the threshold do? The threshold was increased to three and a quarter percent. And suddenly all these parties had to scramble to figure out who they can unite with to have any chance of making it in. And as they began to unite, certain things started happening to Israeli politics. For one thing, elections began to depend on the threshold.

Before the 2014 reform, no election was decided at the threshold. It was never about which small party passed or failed to pass the threshold. Since 2014, every election depended on the action at the threshold, as Dr. Mor calls it. Which parties passed the threshold and which didn't. And so instead of giving us stability, we actually became, by reducing the number of parts, we actually became more dependent on the fate of tiny parties to decide elections. And so we became a much less stable political system.

Borschel-Dan: Before we jump into the new extremism that we're seeing in the right parties, even not yet far right, but right. Let's talk a little bit about something that is always puzzling for me how the threshold in the Arab parties actually determines the election for the Zionist parties because these Arab parties don't join the coalitions. And so it's always confusing to understand how they determine actually the fate of the government.

That's a very good question. It's a very good point to understand just the way the Israeli system works is that we take the votes. We count the votes per party. Right? You only vote for a party in Israel, not for a politician, not for a prime minister. You vote for a party and we take those votes per party. And all the valid votes for valid parties that were actually running, some people put in votes for some invalid ones. They put two notes in their envelope or whatever. You take all the valid votes and you subdivide them by the percentage of votes and hand the Knesset seats to the parties.

Now, there's a little bit more complexity around how you divide a half of a seat among different parties and things like that. And what that means is that if a five-seat party disappears, let's say, that doesn't mean that from the left, that doesn't mean that those five seeds go to the right. What that means is we now have a new cake and we subdivide it by the percentages of each party. And so half of those seats go to the other side and half remain on this side because the side still has by the percentage of parties, right?

And so it's a proportional representation system that's called. And what it means is that as long as the Arab parties pull votes and won't sit with Netanyahu, even if they don't actively support Lapid, they can deny Netanyahu the vote. And we saw that happen. We saw that happen in elections two and three, as we call them, September 2019 and March 2020, where a massive turnout in the Arab street denied Netanyahu victory, even though Netanyahu managed to up turnout from his camp, from his side. And that didn't give the victory to Gantz or Lapid, but it did deny Netanyahu the victory. And so those votes on the Arab side, the very fact that we're talking about a very low turnout expected on the Arab street suggest that it's saying Netanyahu might have this election in the bag. The real question is, as with election four, where he lost 20% of his own vote, Likud. Will he have his turnout? Will his turnout also fall or will his turnout come out, you know, rise? He's managing an entire campaign, as we discussed, on getting that turnout back. And so the Arab vote is absolutely fundamental to figuring out who is going to win this thing.

Borschel-Dan: OK, fantastic. Now let's talk a little bit about how the threshold and the scrambling to have parties merged together really forced these right parties to turn more extreme. And of course, the "star" of these elections has definitely been, I would say, MK Itamar Ben Gvir and he perhaps represents one of the most far right parties ever, and he will likely become a minister. How did this happen?

Yeah, I'm a little less excited about the prospect. I mean, not just excited, support. I don't think he's significant. He certainly plays on the heartstrings and about the anxieties of the left and of liberals and of the media and of me. I mean, I know the man is -- his politics are very extreme. He spent many, many years as a Kahanist. He now claims to love Rabbi Kahana, but not be a supporter of Rabbi Kahana's every suggestion. But of course, Rabbi Kahana's suggestions included literally tabling legislation for making inter-ethnic sex a felony. Right. So Kahana was this unbelievable extremist racist. And Ben Gvir had a photograph of Baruch Goldstein, the murderer of Muslims in the massacre in Hebron, in 1995, on his living room wall for years and years and years and only took down that picture of this mass murderer when it became politically uncomfortable and people noticed and reporters reported it. And so Ben Gvir is very much that problematic figure. But Ben Gvir is also a symptom. And the tendency we have to circle around Ben Gvir I'm going to argue also the tendency we have to focus all our anxieties on Netanyahu.

I have criticized Netanyahu significantly for refusing to pass the 2020 state budget as a political gambit against Gantz. That's the first time in the history of Israel that a government has been irresponsible enough to not pass a state budget for a year. And it was just for Netanyahu's own political machinations. There's plenty to criticize in any politician, certainly one that's around that long and that is desperately maneuvering it in that way. But the problem we have here is systemic. If Netanyahu leaves politics, and if Ben Gvir leaves politics, we haven't solved the problem. And that's an important point. Basically, what did the threshold do? The threshold will go to the trauma of April 2019. I mean, for Netanyahu, there was a party called the New Right Party led by Naftali Bennett, who would become prime minister after the fourth election. But he wasn't even dreaming of prime ministership in the first election.

Borschel-Dan: I think he probably was dreaming.

Of course he has been, probably since he was a teenager, but not in any real way. He did not expect it to become a possibility. And in April 2019, he ran in this party called the New Right, farther right from the Likud party with Ayelet Shaked And they managed to win 3.22% of the vote.

Borschel-Dan: And let's remind our listeners that we need 3.25 percent to get into the Knesset.

They missed the Knesset by 0.03% of the vote. Now, that would have given Netanyahu that win on election one. There wouldn't have been these 43 months of five elections.

Borschel-Dan: No prime minister Naftali Bennett. No Prime Minister Yair Lapid.

Right. And so for Netanyahu, that's an enormous trauma. When you raise the threshold, those parties you lost below 1% or below 2% represented so little of the electorate that you didn't lose a lot. They didn't come to more than a couple Knesset seats, all told. And elections very rarely were that, right? But once you can start losing three and a quarter percent of the electorate in a single party not making it, and that costs you the election as a whole. It becomes a genuine trauma, and your strategy becomes focused laser-like on getting small parties in. And so the fact that the action moved to the threshold, as Mull says, before 2014, no election was decided at the threshold. After 2014, every election is decided at who passes and who fails to pass the threshold, basically. And once that happens, those small parties, instead of being marginalized by increasing the threshold, they get to run the show. Netanyahu starts working for them. And since April 2019, Netanyahu has gone to every radical party -- the Noam Party, which is never mind that it's a party that defines itself by its homophobia, it has no other real agenda. It says that -- its own public declaration of its agenda is that the gays are destroying civilization. This is a party that couldn't get anything, not tenths of a percent of the vote. And it's a party that Netanyahu decided he cannot afford not to have in the Knesset. And so he forced and wrangled and promised and did whatever he needed to do to get the mainstream of religious Zionism to somehow incorporate this Noam faction into their faction so that they would get in. Avi Maoz is the MK who set the Knesset. This time, Noam actually had a falling out with Religious Zionism -- the faction -- and Netanyahu couldn't get them to get back together, even though Netanyahu during this time -- everyone complains that Netanyahu "laundered" Ben Gvir, this very racist faction. Ben Gvir insists he's not a racist and keeps suing people who say he's a racist --

Borschel-Dan: He is a lawyer, by the way.

And he is a lawyer, and he's a big believer in democracy and courts, of course. But too many signs point in the same direction. It walks like a duck and it talks like a duck and insists it's a goose -- maybe it's a goose. Voters are smarter than pundits, I'll let our listeners decide. I suspect it's a duck. Ben Gvir was laundered by Netanyahu. Netanyahu used to promise that Ben Gvir would definitely not be a minister in his government. He made that promise a year and a half ago. Now he is promising publicly to Ben Gvir's voters that he will be a minister, don't worry. And he managed to force Smotrich of Religious Zionism and Ben Gvir to unite into a party to make sure they all get in, and wanted no one to get in. In Religious Zionism they couldn't agree on where Noam's candidate would be. And so Noam fell out and was going to run on its own, and then Netanyahu had a special conversation with Noam, with this unbelievably fringe radical -- they're not even the far right, they're just a little bit weird and outside, it's Rav Tau, the Yeshiva of Rav Tau, and it's a very specific group within religious Zionism, very small, very radical. And that little group, Netanyahu managed to give them promises, we don't know what they are, but convinced them somehow to drop out of the race. And so Netanyahu works now obsessively with every one of the tiniest, most fringe, most radical factions, openly bigoted factions, factions that take pride in their prejudices and don't represent any mainstream, not even a far mainstream, not even the mainstream of the far right, Netanyahu focuses laser-like on every one of them to guarantee those votes.

Borschel-Dan: See, that's the big question, though, isn't it, Haviv? What is the mainstream at this point? I've been driving through the country a bit over these many, many holidays, and in Beit Shemesh I see lots of signs for Itamar Ben Gvir. It could be also in the north someplace, I'm seeing signs for people that I thought were beyond the pale in these certain areas of the country, and now they're being publicly touted. So what is the mainstream? Could it be possible that the mainstream has shifted that much farther to the right?

Right, I don't know. We need really good polling and we need them not during an election campaign. It's hard to tell during an election campaign where the public is shifting and just who's campaigning better. And the reason I say that is that right now we are seeing an enormously successful campaign by Smotrich and Ben Gvir, and a much less successful campaign -- a much more lagging and halting campaign, a lot of campaign staffers being fired or switching out, a lot of confusion on the strategy -- in Likud. Likud won't let its MKs speak. When was the last time you heard a Likud MK say anything on national television or on the radio or put out a video, right? It's only Netanyahu, and everything is very controlled and very, very limited. Netanyahu is afraid to drive away the moderates by being seen as advancing the far-rightists, and those moderates cost him election number four. So there's a very powerful focus with Likud and a confusion about how you both shore up the right while appealing to the moderates, and try and string together that coalition. Because a narrow right-wing campaign failed four times in a row. So Likud's not out there all that much.

Lapid has a huge problem. If Lapid's campaign is too successful -- we discussed this in the first podcast -- if Lapid's campaign is too successful, he starts eating votes from Labor and Meretz. And Labor and Meretz are hovering just above the threshold.

Borschel-Dan: OK, so let's talk about that right now.

Lapid's missing, essentially, from the campaign.

Borschel-Dan: For sure, though I have seen many signs for him in my many travels throughout the country. I have seen a lot of postering for him. But Labor, Meretz, I'm not seeing what's happening there because, as you said, they don't want to team up. What's going on?

They don't want to team up, right. Let me answer by getting back to the question of the threshold. That clarifies the costs, right? On the Arab side, what the threshold ended up doing, as we saw with Ben Gvir on the Jewish right wing, on the Jewish far right, what it ended up doing is, Arab politics generally divide into more integrationist and less integrationist. And the factions don't always match exactly that, but that's how our voters generally tend to think of the broadest, sort of cartoonishly broad, sketching out of the priorities of Arab voters. There's the more integrationist and the less integrationist. Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint List, the head of Hadash, when he first came into office, I sat down with him for an interview, he actually came to The Times of Israel --

Borschel-Dan: I remember.

And he gave us all a very long history in which we sat and we asked him a lot of pointed questions. He talked a lot about Martin Luther King, and he was trying to be and trying to position Hadash as a party of reconciliation. He's not questioning the validity of Zionism -- I don't think he's a Zionist but he certainly doesn't question its validity. But what he does say is, there's two peoples here, we can't get away from the Palestinian question. We're Palestinians. Also, the Jews are here and if we're going to have two states, let's have those two states. But if we're not going to have two states, let's figure out how we live together without two states. Right? Just forcing us to talk about it.

Borschel-Dan: Now, it should be noted that Hadash is not an "Arab party." It is a mixed Jewish and Arab socialist-communist party?

It has always had Jews in it. It defines itself as a mixed party, and was communist and is now socialist because the word "communist" has bad connotations. But the huge majority of its voters are Arab and so it's counted as an Arab party, and I think sociologically it's an Arab party even if it has some very significant Jewish voices. Dov Khenin, for example, was a very influential member of Knesset, a Jewish professor from Hadash in the Knesset -- and one of the more effective critics of the threshold increase, by the way. We can get back to that. He probably was the most right about what the threshold increase would do. He pointed out in 2014 in the Knesset committee debates what Shany Mor says now, which is that the elections were never decided at the threshold -- our problem is that we have a lot of midsized parties forcing all these little parties to unite. The little parties give us flexibility around midsize parties that won't cooperate. You're going to actually reduce flexibility and you're going to actually increase the problem. And that was more right than wrong. He probably called what actually ended up happening.

But what did the threshold do to the Arab parties? When the Arab parties united -- and they were forced to unite -- it increased the turnout. It did do that, and that was something that people like me predicted and I'm very happy that it happened. But it also forced Odeh out of being a unique voice that tries to push the integrationist model, and into somebody who has to keep Balad happy and within the fold -- because otherwise, who knows how the party would divide up and it might completely fall, which is probably going to happen in this election. And so he became someone much more anti-integrationist or much more in the direction of the Balad, of the Palestinian nationalists, because he simply couldn't hold together a coalition without doing that. And so forcing these two big trends of the Arab community to unite gave power, gave influence, and essentially gave control over the broader agenda, to the radicals. And what we're seeing on the Israeli Religious Zionist right, which is a complicated, big place, but what we're seeing is that it's being taken over by the Ben Gvir style -- Smotrich used to be the radical right edge of that, and he's now the mainstream trying to keep Ben Gvir from taking over.

And the reason is that they can't run apart. It's too dangerous. And so they run together. But the one who is most willing to leave is usually the most ideologically radical one. And so that's the one who ends up having all the power to extort and all the power to demand. And so we're seeing there and we're seeing on the Arab political side and on the far-right Jewish side, a radicalization because of that unification. So the unification is having effects that we didn't expect. And with Labor and Meretz you see the costs. I mean, we're talking about politically existential costs. They refuse to unite despite enormous pressure from both the Lapid sort of political area, "Unite so neither of you falls under and Netanyahu wins." But they themselves are very different parties and they're afraid that if they unite, they'll never break apart again and they'll lose their distinct identity and brand, and therefore eventually that will actually exterminate them because they'll lose that basic identity. They're afraid of those things. But now they're running apart, and the threshold endangers them and therefore reshapes Lapid's own campaign, makes it a much more halting and limping campaign, because that failure to unite might give the other -- and so everything now depends on the threshold, and that radicalizes and makes everything much less stable instead of doing what the political scientists thought it would do and told us it would do, which is that it would make things more stable and reduce the number of factions and make the Knesset and the government more manageable.

Borschel-Dan: The threshold is definitely one, and maybe the most, driving factor in these current elections. I just wanted to touch on one thing. In previous elections there have been separate ballots for the prime minister and for the leading party. Do you see that if we were to return to that, that it would change the layout that you're describing at all?

No, that's another example. Israel has a wonderful old history of catastrophic electoral reforms sold to us by brilliant political scientists who in the name of their brilliance, ruined everything. Look, a political system -- I've said this before, I'll presumably have to say it many more times -- a political system is a phenomenally, almost unspeakably complex thing. It is as complex as the society that created it, and it mediates power and interests in ways that are hard to see. They're hard to see from the inside. Not all the politicians -- veteran grizzled, successful politicians -- completely understand everything happening around them. From the outside, scholars think that they've figured it all out because they come with models. But in fact, they know much less than the people on the inside who themselves don't know everything. And so political systems are such complex machines that when you tweak one side, one corner of it, you just have no way of predicting how that will propagate through the system and what the results will be on the other side. The direct election for prime minister, you're asking, "Well, is that a good way to stabilize, to give the prime minister more power and maybe weaken these factions and this radicalization, and make them less dependent on the Knesset?"

The theory in 1992 when they passed the direct election for a prime minister was exactly that. It's exhausting to have to negotiate this unbelievably messy negotiation with 12 factions or eight factions or five factions just in my government. And so instead of a prime minister having to cobble together all these factions and every little faction extorting every prime minister and minorities being massively powerful and majorities not getting what they want out of governments -- instead of that system, let's have a system where the prime minister is elected directly, the prime minister is the prime minister, he doesn't have to beg, he doesn't have to negotiate. That part is solved. And now if you want to be in the government, you come ask. Instead of a seller's market where every little faction is empowered, it's a buyer's market where the prime minister is empowered and the factions have to come begging. That was the theory. What ended up happening is that a voter said, hey, I don't have to vote for a big party because I'm worried about who's going to be prime minister, I can vote for a prime minister directly and a small narrow side party or some other issue I care about.

Borschel-Dan: The Pirate Party!

The Pirate Party. But who grew massively in this new mindset was the Pensioners Party. Seven seats out of nowhere, wasn't even in the polling, right? So in 1992, in the election just before this reform was passed, Yitzhak Rabin wins the election, the Labor Party has 44 seats. Fast forward seven years later, 1999, Ehud Barak leads the Labor Party, and there's now a vote for Ehud Barak and separately, a vote for which party you want. Now, Shas is soaring by then. Shas soars from, I don't remember, I think it was eight seats or seven seats, it soars to 17 seats because there's a lot of Mizrahim that -- at the expense mostly of Likud -- a lot of Mizrahim, a lot of Sephardic Jews, who say, "Hey, Shas represents me as a Sephardi and the Likud represents me as who I want in the prime minister's office, and I can have both. So why wouldn't I have both?" Likud shrinks. The Labor Party that wins the election -- that's the big Labor Party that wins the election -- has dropped from 44 seats in 1992, to 26 seats in 1999. Ehud Barak, the prime minister, sits on a 26-seat party.

Well, that makes the Barak coalition less stable. I mean, there was the Second Intifada and a lot of problems, and Barak himself destabilized his coalition, but that government fell within 18 months, to some significant extent because voters just abandoned the large parties. And I think by 2003, the reform was switched back. In the 2001 election, they actually had an election for prime minister without an election for the Knesset -- Barak fell, and there was a vote between Sharon and Barak. But by 2003, the reform was overturned in desperation.

We had many other such reforms. We had a reform in the '80 that disconnected the national parties from the municipal parties. And the concept was that it would help clean up municipal politics. Instead of municipal politics being a branch of national politics where parties appoint people there and there's a lot of corruption there, each municipality would have its own politics. A city council would be a separate universe. And what it ended up doing was a lot of the most successful and most talented up-and-coming politicians to the national scene rose up through those municipal politics and those party apparatuses at the local level. And that created several generations of Israeli political leadership at the national level who were profoundly aware of the local level and of where the rubber hits the road and where policy is actually implemented. The people who actually clean up the garbage and have to run the school -- schools are run at the municipal level in Israel, not at the national level, but the policy and the funding are set at the national level.

And so people could rise up, and they knew more and they had more institutional memory, and they were better leaders and better politicians and wrote better laws and better reforms. No more. You now parachute into national politics. The primary system is introduced in that 15-year gap, where suddenly more populist kinds of politicians do better. And so we've had all these reforms with all these fantastic models and analyses by great political scientists about how to make the system better-- and at every turn, at every turn, they have proven disastrous. So the first step on how to fix all this, is do no harm. Actually, Shany Mor has some interesting ideas about primaries, he has some interesting ideas about forcing some of the public's funding that parties get to go to internal research mechanisms so they're not as dependent on external think tanks on the left and the right, which tend to be radicalized, tend to be money from overseas, tend to be very detached kind of people thinking they, you know, can come down from Olympus and teach us all lost benighted Israelis how to run our lives. There's a lot of that in Israel on both sides of the Israeli political spectrum, and it hasn't been healthy. And so forcing parties to have their own internal research mechanism -- which would be utterly partisan and political, but also internal to the parties and creating internal party knowledge and wisdom and thoughts and policy ideas. So there are some different ideas about reforms that instead of changing the system and instead of being smarter than the system, actually favor the system. But two easy solutions that might pull us a little bit out of the tailspin would be -- and again, at the most humble level, be humble. That's really critical. Bring it back down to 2%.

Borschel-Dan: The threshold.

The threshold. Let Hadash run as Hadash. It turns out that when Hadash runs as Joint List, and then Hadash, and then Joint List, and then Hadash, everything gets worse. Everything gets worse at the national level, among the largest parties. Whether Netanyahu survives or collapses politically becomes a question of how Hadash is running with Balad, which is very silly. And the Hadash that you can negotiate with has essentially been lost, and the Religious Zionism you can negotiate with, if you're Lapid, for example, has essentially been lost, because the camps matter more because the radicals are in control. Well, lower that threshold. Let Smotrich be very comfortable running alone. Let Shaked -- Ayelet Shaked right now is running below the threshold -- not below the 2% threshold, just below the three-and-a-quarter percent threshold. Let Shaked be an option. Increase the number of parties so that there's more flexibility. It turns out, we are learning now, that fewer parties created less flexibility. The scholars were offended at the messiness of it all, and so they suggested that we get rid of the messiness by making everything simple and making as few parties as possible. It turns out the messiness was fundamental. Israeli society is deeply divided -- into roughly 12 factions. Those 12 factions were represented.

Borschel-Dan: Wow, 12. That's such a number that we've never heard before in relation to Israel, right? The 12 what, tribes?

Listen, if it works, if it works, you do it.

Borschel-Dan: Okay, so that's one idea.

Lower the threshold back down. And the second is, increase the size of the Knesset. In other words, lean into the messiness. Create more . More factions, more people. We have one of the smallest Knessets -- I've written about this, a lot of people have written about this -- we have one of the smallest Knessets in the free world per capita, and it's a Knesset that's too small to get anything done. When a member of Knesset is a member of five committees and over three days has to be in 25 committee meetings, each one on different subjects, that member of Knesset is not voting on anything they have read or understand even remotely. And that's the current way the Knesset functions. The Knesset is an incredibly weak institution that isn't able meaningfully to oversee the government, to rein in the power of the executive, or even just to think carefully about policy.

Even this reform that we're talking about, the threshold increase, there were a lot of debates in the Knesset -- but not nearly as many debates as there should have been, not as many voices. And most of the debates are pro forma because just from sheer lack of MKs, you have to sort everything out in a back room before you even come into the committee. There aren't enough people to seriously read all the material. MKs voted for whatever their party leader told them, there literally wasn't enough time. Double the size of the Knesset and we will reach roughly the per capita number of a European country our size, and we will allow, when a party gets into the Knesset, it gets in with more actual workers to get the legislative work done, budgets, et cetera. Or when a government needs to pull people out of the Knesset to serve as ministers, that doesn't empty the Knesset and the work can get done. So that's a reform that also leans into more representation.

We talked last episode about minorities too small to be represented in a specific and serious and consistent way, like the Druze, like the Ethiopian Jews, and there are others. Twice as large of a Knesset raises the likelihood that their voices will be at the table. And so there are all these things that lean into the messiness and the complexity.

Let me finish with something Dr. Mor said. Parliamentarism -- I'm botching it up, I apologize to Dr. Mor -- parliamentarism is not a bad way, with this messiness and these divides, is not a bad way to run a small country, a young democracy that is with a very divided society. It's not a bad way to run it. And we should not be attracted to all of these newfangled things that they're dangling in front of us with, you know, better this and better that, and presidentialism, and regional representation and all these ideas from the Anglo-Saxon world being brought in by English speaking think tanks, as if that will be the great solution. We've had so many great solutions. None have worked. And so it's time to just think from the other direction. What is Israeli society? Who are we? What do we need to be at the table? How does that table function? The fact is, if we cannot feel ourselves represented in the political system, the only solution is violence. Conflict in the political system -- that messiness is not a bad thing. That messiness is the way that a democracy solves its problems, deals and mediates its divides without resorting to political violence. This is not a small question and this is not a small thing. We need to be much more humble and much more Israeli about all of this.

Borschel-Dan: Embrace the chaos.

Embrace the chaos. Is that not the most Israeli advice?

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