Israel’s liberals should consider a Faustian bargain - on strict conditions

The Jewish state will not make it to 2048 unless its squabbling factions work together to address fatal problems

Image by Alessio Zaccaria via Unsplash

It is a grand question of parliamentary democracy: should the losers join the victors as junior partners in a broad coalition held together by spit, rubber bands and saccharine talk of “unity”? 

To do so is usually a Faustian bargain, a weaselly grasping for remnants of power that shatters credibility and harms future prospects. But there are exceptions.

Sometimes the sides are ideologically close enough that it hardly matters; so it was when Germany’s Social Democrats joined with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in her later years in power. Sometimes the winning side is actually so splintered that its main party will reach across the aisle to agree on reasonable terms.

Mostly, though, it is a deal with the devil. The trick is knowing the difference. It is a nuance politicians are not often well-equipped to comprehend.

Which brings us to Israel at this moment in its troubled history, after the right-religious bloc won the Nov. 1 election (or sort-of won: the vote was roughly tied before the center-left threw away 12% of its ballots through splintering that pushed two little parties below the threshold needed to get into the Knesset).

Now the country’s up in arms (for the moment, still just metaphorically). Among the top three income deciles of Israelis – who pay almost all the taxes – perhaps 80% voted for the losing side. They are not just frustrated but horrified; many consider the right-religious bloc to be more dangerous that the unfriendliest Iranian.

There are several reasons why.

First, the right insists on holding on to the West Bank, where Israel rules over millions of Palestinians who are not citizens. Israel has filled the area with Jewish towns and is now set to accelerate this, which will ultimately make the country inseparable from the occupied areas. Together with Israel proper’s Arab citizens non-Jews will make up about half of this Frankenstein’s monster of a polity, which will descend toward civil war.

Second, the right depends on the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) political parties and so will not change a status quo in which children are subsidized (pushing birthrates to seven per family in the Haredi sector) as is lifelong religious study for (in theory) up to all Haredi males. The Haredim mostly refuse to allow their children to be taught math, English and science, are now 20% of the Jews, and (at the current birthrate) will be a majority in less than 40 years. Secular Jews – who built the country and drive its high-tech economy) will gradually leave, leaving the hapless Haredim, who mostly refuse to serve in the military, to be swiftly overrun.

And as a bonus, the incoming right-religious coalition appears set to enact reforms that add Israel to the ranks of authoritarian democracies like Hungary and Turkey. For starters, they plan to enact a law allowing parliament to override the Supreme Court by a simple majority. And there is much more (see here).

Part of the problem is that the far-right is now very powerful – because of the left’s splintering meltdown combined with a rightward shift within the right. Not only did Haredi parties win 17 of the 120 seats, but a genuinely fascist party called Religious Zionism won 14. Some of the darkest forces the Jewish people have ever produced – many of them convicted criminals – are about to control national security, education, the finance ministry and the calamitous settlement enterprise.

Under these circumstances, some are calling on the leaders of the center-left, meaning outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who together control 36 seats, to join Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud Party controls 32.

The move would be unpopular among the core of the center-left, because their politicians have a history of debasing themselves in “unity” governments, and because Netanyahu is a criminal defendant seem by many Israelis as a crook (here’s why). But while his Likud has brought much calamity upon the country over the years, it is not actually a fascist party; not yet, anyway.

It all depends how the deal is structured and framed. I have a proposal which appears at this writing to be unique: Lapid and Gantz should offer Netanyahu unity under exacting conditions whose adoption would be an electrifying game-changer for Israel and the Palestinians both:

• The government would adopt as a goal Donald Trump's 2020 Israeli-Palestinian peace proposal (which, unlike his pullout from the Iran nuclear deal and much of his domestic agenda, was not imbecilic); this would mean establishment of a Palestinian state along temporary borders encompassing 70% of the West Bank as a basis for negotiations with the Palestinians. Most settlement activity would end, and Israel would seek Palestinian agreement to its annexing settlements close to its pre-1967 border.

• The government would condition budgeting and licensing of all schools upon an exactingly enforced core curriculum of math, science and English, and would establish a massive and free adult education program for all who wish it. Moreover, child subsidies would be phased out after the third child, for children who have not yet been born.

• The government would enact significant law-and-order steps to eradicate crime in the Israeli Arab sector, whose growing outrageousness is part of what drove the far-right vote.

• At the same time, it would establish a national authority for equality that will devise concrete measures to significantly reduce the socio-economic gaps between general society (whose per capita GDP surpasses $50,000/year) and the ultra-Orthodox and the Arab sectors (where, to be polite, it does not).

In return for Netanyahu's agreement to such a non-negotiable package, Lapid and Gantz would not demand a turn as prime minister (the usual unity nonsense) nor try to bring down their own government (as unity partners often do). They might even throw in a promise to not oppose a comfortable plea bargain in Netanyahu’s corruption trial (shocking as it may seem, justice can sometimes be political); it’s infuriating, but such is the cost of running one of history’s lamest campaigns, in which none of the above issues were addressed (see here).

Most of the public would be happy with these policies. Without them, in my view, Israel in its current form will not survive to its centennial in 2048. Moreover, none of the two political blocs that emerged in Israel could enact them alone, in the foreseeable future: the right depends on religious and nationalist fanatics; the center-left is too weak, too polite, and too divided.

Israel’s two blocs are unhelpful, and this deal would blow them both to Kingdom Come, where they belong.

Can the Likud break away from its lunatic allies? It won't be easy. A considerable proportion of the somewhat normative people the party once housed are no longer there – much as reasonable Republicans have been drummed out of the freak show their former party has become. And yet, many of the remaining senior figures – including Netanyahu himself – sure do not want the country to become a Jewish variant of Iran –  or Yugoslavia. They know; barely consciously, but they know. Though they won’t admit it, this may be a case where the main party on the winning side may be afraid of its own allies.

It can be assumed that even if Lapid and Gantz got over their egos and made such a proposal, Netanyahu would not accept it; at least not right now, since as a defendant he has a personal need to undermine the legal system first.

But it doesn't matter: controlling the narrative has its own rewards. Israel’s liberals should grow up and try it. Every Israeli would then finally know what the alternative is, while they watch the country burn. A genuine and much-delayed discourse would commence around the real issues. If survival is the goal, then there is no other way.

(A version of this article appeared in Haaretz in Hebrew)