Whatever the results of the third consecutive round of elections, it will not end the structural political crisis. A clear win for any side will only postpone it for a while. Some elements of this crisis are not unique to Israel. In Europe and the US, the social-class unrest is palpable, resulting in instability in the party system that is vital for representational democracy. Fluidity, uncertainty, and the upending of conventions today characterize even stable and bipartisan democracies.
The nature of this instability is not clear. Warnings of "fascism at the gate" or the terrors of communism are nothing more than unsuccessful attempts to understand new troubles using old terminologies. More in-depth explanations focus on the under-functioning of the nation-state and the social-class implications of globalization and unrestrained immigration.
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On the surface, Israel's current crisis of government is due to the tie between the two main political blocs (similar to the deadlock that resulted in the unity governments of 1984 and 1988) coming together now with a considerable reduction in Likud's room for maneuver and its ability to form coalitions due to its head-on confrontation with the legal system. Up until now, Israeli politics was largely one of "politics by consensus" and compromise. This enabled the establishment of unity governments, for example. But the art of compromise has been almost completely lost because of increasing levels of judicialization and the incrimination of political-media relations.
The judicial system is by definition one of decision: there is a discussion, and ultimately someone decides. The more involved the judiciary becomes in Israeli politics, the more political it becomes, and the more politics become judicial, the more we see characteristics of "politics by decision". But unlike in the US and Britain, two countries where "politics by decision" is common, in the case of Israel the decision is left not to the politicians who won the elections and are representatives of the people, but rather to a kind of judicial-politician, the senior officials. Our law and order officials get down into the deepest weeds of politics in order to save it from itself, but instead, actually paralyze it.
In this miserable state, politicians cannot compromise or find solutions of the type that resulted in the unity governments of the 1980s or that suggested by President Reuven Rivlin not long ago. They are subject to an external political-judicial force that does not know what compromise is.
The current seed of calamity was sown by Benny Gantz in his first speech. He declared his unyielding allegiance to the political judgments of the judicial system, which of course are presented to us as being apolitical. He defined Blue and White as a party of mandarins, i.e. military, economic, legal, media, academic or diplomatic experts, and subordinated it to the orders (or the "juntas") of the free professions and business in Israel. In a radio interview this week, he declared that he accepts the "primacy" of the judicial system over the political. That is why Blue and White is not primed for political compromises. When you put this together with the conflict between the law and order system and the rival party of government, you are left with the current logjam.
These are the immediate characteristics of this logjam. But its true severity is further exposed when one realizes that this is actually the nadir of a protracted political crisis that began with the collapse of the unity governments of the 1980s and Shimon Peres' "stinking maneuver" of 1990. Israel's politics of compromise was based on its extreme system of proportional representation which encouraged a proliferation of parties and forced them to comprise.
But the coercion that enabled compliance through this system was based on the dominance of the Mapai Party, and later the dominance of the two rival parties, Likud and Labor. In 1990, this complicated balance was undermined, and ever since we have been clumsily trying to patch things up, for example with direct elections for the prime minister, or raising the electoral threshold. These Band-Aids did not prevent the weakening of the political system, which was a precondition for the detrimental intrusion of the judicial system into the political arena.
And thus we have been left with a hybrid, dysfunctional system. On top of the system of proportional representation, which necessitates "politics by consensus", has been mounted a judicial system which is increasingly a political tool in the hands of the elites of the former Labor פarty movement, as Prof. Menachem Mautner has demonstrated. The result is the inability to decide because of the proportional representation system, and the inability to agree because of the judicialization of politics.
