I Accuse the Israeli Political System

Zola wrote his letter to a president about one wrongly convicted officer. I want to borrow the form for something less dramatic and more damaging: not one case but a machine, and not a conspiracy but a design. Nothing below is secret. Every fact is in the civics textbook. That is the point of the form: the charges are things everybody already knows and has agreed not to add up.

I accuse the party list

An Israeli voter chooses a party, not a person. The party's list of candidates is assembled before the election, by a primary if the party bothers, and otherwise by a committee, a leader, or a rabbinical council. The voter's only input is a slip of paper with the party's letters on it.

So the people who sit in the Knesset were selected by a few thousand party members at most, and in several parties by one man. The public did not choose a single member of its own legislature. It chose a brand and received whoever the brand had decided to ship.

I accuse the absence of a constituency

No member of the Knesset represents a place. There is no district, no town whose residents can say "this one is ours" and vote him out for what he did to them. The only people a member must please are the ones who compile the next list.

The consequence is exact and predictable: loyalty runs upward, to the party, and never downward, to the people who cast the ballots. A member who defies the party leadership on behalf of the public is not punished by the public. He is punished by the list, and the list is where his career lives.

I accuse the coalition

Because no party wins a majority, every government is a coalition, and a coalition is assembled by paying its smallest members. A party that brought five percent of the vote can hold a ministry, a budget, and a veto over legislation that the other ninety-five percent wanted.

This is usually described as "the price of a coalition." It should be described as what it is: a system in which the size of your leverage is inversely proportional to the size of your public. The smaller you are, the more indispensable you become, and the more of everyone else's money you can extract for the people who did vote for you.

I accuse the missing questions

Here is the charge I care most about. In all the elections I have voted in, the questions that decide the country's future have never once been on the ballot.

Not the borders. Not the relationship between religion and the state. Not who serves in the army and who does not. Not the distribution of income. These are the questions, and they are exactly the ones every coalition agreement is written to avoid. The parties agree, across the whole spectrum, on one thing: that the public will not be asked directly. They differ in what they promise about the questions and agree in never letting the answer out of their hands.

A citizen can vote every two years for a decade and never express a single opinion on any of these. He expresses an opinion about a brand.

I accuse the defence

The standard defence is that this is how parliamentary democracy works everywhere, and that the alternative is chaos. Both halves are wrong.

Many parliamentary systems have constituencies, so that at least the first two charges do not apply. And the alternative to a system that never asks the public is not chaos; it is asking the public. The mechanics are not exotic. I have worked through one that needs no change to any law at all: a party that casts its seats according to a public poll on each vote, with a formula that makes a small party behave like a single vote and a large one behave like the electorate.

That a fix this cheap has never been tried is itself evidence. The system is not stuck for lack of ideas. It is stuck because the people who would have to adopt the fix are the people the fix would replace.

The verdict I am not entitled to give

Zola could point at a man and demand a retrial. I cannot; there is nobody to retry. The party list was written by people doing their jobs, the coalition was formed by people doing theirs, and the questions were kept off the ballot by people who believed, sincerely, that the public could not be trusted with them.

That is what makes it an indictment of a system rather than of anyone in it. Replace every member of the Knesset tomorrow, by the same method, and every charge above would still stand the day after.