Benjamin Netanyahu did not win last week’s Israeli election. But he hasn’t completely lost it either. The real loser may be Israel’s fragile democracy, which is corrupted from within, perhaps beyond repair, by Netanyahu’s decades-long lethal grip on power.
On the eve of a major election in the United States, the parallels are both inaccurate and unavoidable. Israelis must now decide what kind of state they will have, or at least what kind of state they aspire to have. They must decide whose votes really matter and whether some citizens are more equal than others.
Americans face the same question, both in this week’s midterm elections and more broadly on the larger political and historical stage. There is no doubt that it is easy for liberals and progressives to express outrage at the glaring flaws and contradictions of Israeli democracy. But to quote Christian tradition here, before you try to take the speck out of your brother’s eye, it’s best to take the log out of your own eye.
On the surface, Israel’s electoral arithmetic seems simple. Parties opposed to Netanyahu’s far-right government won 67 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. So a majority coalition of anti-Netanyahu forces is clearly achievable, right? You might think so, except that the shocking fact that Israel’s “Arab parties” won a record 19 of those 67 seats threw the entire political system into disarray.
Netanyahu and his allies have spent the last week making baseless claims that the election was fraudulent or rigged, claims that Americans are likely to hear a lot of in the coming days. What the Zionist far right means is that too many Israeli Arabs — the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the creation of the state in 1948 — decided this vote, an outcome that no one expected and that no party representing the Jewish majority particularly wanted.
Today, Israel’s Arab minority—not a monolithic group in political or cultural terms, and which has so far never played a significant role in elections—holds the balance of power and perhaps the country’s future.
That Israel’s Arab minority – not a monolithic group in political or cultural terms, and so far never electorally significant – holds the balance of power, and perhaps the country’s future, is a wonderful touch of historical or perhaps biblical irony.
Gadi Eisenkot, a former general who leads the centrist Zionist opposition to Netanyahu, pledged during the campaign not to form an Arab-backed government. Thousands of demonstrators in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem over the past few nights have urged him to do so because the only realistic alternative is a grim default environment for Israeli politics: another shaky right-wing government led by Netanyahu, which means more brutality and destruction in Gaza, more war with Iran and more settler violence in the West Bank.
As Gideon Levy of the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz explains,
Israel’s future now depends on the attitude of its Arab citizens and its Jewish citizens toward its Arab citizens. Eighty years after the Nakba and the establishment of the Jewish state, Israeli Palestinians may decide its fate. Is there any greater historical justice than this?
Levy wrote that the unexpected results of the election were “pleasant” because they offer Israelis a clear choice “between a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and a government that includes Arab parties.” If the “change bloc” within the Zionist majority cannot accept an alliance with Arab Israelis, he continued, “they will make it clear that they are in fact the same as Netanyahu, that they even prefer the devil Netanyahu to the racism that suppresses them. … [E]Everyone will know that racism is the highest value in this country, above all other values across the board. “
Such ferocious language certainly does not represent mainstream views in Israel, but it is fair to say that the strong emotion behind Levy’s words is felt by a wider range of people. I don’t think it is possible for non-Jewish observers (such as myself), no matter how educated or compassionate, to understand the pain felt by Jews—no matter where they live or what their political views are—that there is a huge gap between what Israel originally represented or claimed to represent to the world and what it represents now.
I’m old enough to remember that most American liberals and progressives viewed the state of Israel in an overwhelmingly positive light, as a place of charisma or a heroic revival of a people Hitler couldn’t kill, infused with the spirit of European socialism, and, not far below the surface, the collective guilt of the Holocaust. I grew up in one of the most left-liberal corners of America, surrounded by educated adults who supported the civil rights movement, opposed the Vietnam War, hated Richard Nixon, and loved Israel. Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan are both beloved celebrities. According to US media reports, the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 were direct battles between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.
I must admit, this says more about the moral blindness or willful naivety of American liberalism than it does about Israel. Regardless, I understood this when I watched Joe Biden share a fatal embrace with Netanyahu on the tarmac of Ben-Gurion Airport after the horrific attacks on October 7. I recognize the country Biden comes from because I’m from there too: a Democratic majority in the not-too-distant past, when Israel was seen as the light of the nation and the left-wing radicals who raised the Palestinian cause were irrationally reckless, if not overtly anti-Semitic and tinged with Nazi overtones.
What Israel has become during Netanyahu’s long and destructive rule is now clear to most of the world, especially the many Jewish or Israeli critics who have been speaking hard truths for years, often at great personal cost. I am reluctant, however, to judge too harshly those who insist that Israel is an outstanding nation—a nation that may have stumbled, but may yet get back on the right track.
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As I said before, we should first mind the plank in our own eyes. Isn’t this the same vision that many Americans still cling to? Somehow, on the other side of this terrible phase of our history—yes, Donald Trump has been in office for a full decade, but I’m afraid the damage goes back much further—the “indispensable nation” articulated in various ways by Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama still exists, is still redeemable, still bends its moral arc toward justice.
Americans and Israelis are bound together by history, for better or worse, and now, as the King James Bible says, they see each other as distorted reflections through a darkened glass. This week we face versions of the same decision, about whose votes matter and whether the high-sounding words of our Constitution apply to everyone. On whether to face terror and tyranny for what they are and turn a new page.
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