Even before the Covid-19 crisis, Israel had experienced unprecedented levels of political instability in the last two years. Most notably, Israel held an unprecedented three national elections between April 2019 and March 2020. At the same time, for all of the churn, all three elections effectively ended in a tie between Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and his opponents. This tie was only broken under the cover of the Covid-19 crisis and a near consensus that any government was better than a fourth election. Together, these provided an impetus for the two largest parties, Blue White and Likud, to form a coalition government which kept Netanyahu at the helm. Although there are some notable changes in the government (like the exclusion of the religious-Zionist parties from the government and the cooptation of the Labor party into it), its basic orientation appears to remain remarkably stable despite three elections in a single year.
The combination of deadlock, electoral instability, and little resolution raise important questions beyond the Israeli case: What does this combination tell us about the quality and prospects of Israel’s democracy? Will Israel follow Turkey, Hungary, and Poland down the path of reduced democracy, or not? What are the implications for democratic norms, relations between different groups in Israel, and between Israelis and Palestinians? What accounts for the odd combination of volatility and stasis in Israeli politics?
The essays collected in this section address various aspects of these questions. Using a series of public opinion surveys, Tamar Hermann shows that while there is surprisingly little evidence of systematic “election fatigue”, a significant minority of Israelis do not have faith in the fairness and integrity of their political system – a condition that poses a threat to the quality of Israeli democracy.
Lotem Bassan-Nygate and Chagai Weiss zero in on the causes of the deep affective polarization in Israel and explore ways it might be reduced. On the one hand, they show that Jewish Israelis are divided into two hostile political camps and that this affective polarization has been increasing over Netanyahu’s last decade in power. They also provide convincing evidence that the repeated elections over the last year likely exacerbated this affective polarization even more. At the same time, they suggest that grand coalitions, like the one currently in place, can reduce affective polarization in the public at large. This lesson is one that is relevant in the growing number of deeply polarized countries around the world.
Meirav Jones and Lihi Ben Shitrit turn to examining a longer-term transformation in Israeli political discourse that may help explain the persistent power of the Israeli right. Specifically, they show that Israelis as a whole are increasingly coming to understand the meaning of “sovereignty” in ways that are less consistent with democratic norms than in the past. While they focus on the genesis and application of this discursive turn in the context of discussions over the Trump Administration so-called “deal of the century,” this discursive turn may also underlie the delegitimization of the Israeli judicial system and the radicalization of the religious parties in Israel.
Finally, Michael Freedman’s essay concludes this section by addressing the latter issue. He focuses on sociological changes among the Jewish religious public to explain the increasing radicalization of the once politically quiescent ultra-orthodox parties and the fragmentation and concomitant loss of organized power of the religious Zionists. His conclusion that the interaction between the decentralization of religious authority, on the one hand, and voter demand for religiously sanctioned parties and the institutional structure of the religious political parties, on the other, shapes relative radicalization and the power of religious parties resonates well beyond the case of Israel.
Nadav Shelef, University of Wisconsin – Madison, shelef@wisc.edu