The resulting coalition was a mishmash of left-wing parties that entered the government after about a decade of exclusion and some right-wing parties that avowed to rid Israeli politics of Netanyahu. Writing to Novi Magazin a year ago, I predicted that the coalition would be stifled and end in a stalemate, unable to do anything meaningful. Was I wrong?
Before lamenting the government’s fall, allow me to recount its demise dispassionately. Hebrew has a saying like “a foreigner won’t comprehend.” Indeed, from the outside, the fall of the Change Coalition seems absurd. It began with a routine renewal of legislation: every five years, since 1967, the Israeli government renews a decree that extends Israeli civil law to Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories. This decree is often seen as some Israeli apartheid law, for it subjugates Palestinians to military rule while allowing Jewish settlers to enjoy the legal protections and procedures of ordinary citizens. But it was the right-wing opposition that blocked its renewal. The government fell in the aftermath; very few across the political spectrum would allow this legal cornerstone of Israeli occupation to be dismantled.
This was the final battle of a long war. The entire year, the opposition sought nothing but the demise of the coalition. Every law the coalition supported was opposed by the opposition, and essentially the same vice versa. Last month, a senior member of Netanyahu’s party was recorded in a private party meeting beseeching her fellow members of parliament from the coalition to vote against the coalition’s proposals for raising the salary of conscripted soldiers or the stipends paid to disabled people or single mothers. The most crucial goal was dismantling the coalition and returning to power.
Israel’s political bifurcation became devoid of ideology. Netanyahu’s party often hailed the free market but proposed almost socialist economic measures in a populist spree. A left-wing party minister did the seemingly impossible and privatized a portion of Israel’s ports at a time of labor conflict, a good measure for Israel’s economy and global shipping but an alleged betrayal of the port’s workers. One way to interpret these ideological conflicts would be to say that the spectrum of mainstream Israeli politics was not wide, to begin with, with the left and the right being closer than they’d acknowledge. A more important component would be identity.
For Netanyahu, the Change Coalition was “The Muslim Brotherhood Government.” This characterization is racist: it refers to the inclusion of an Arab party, an extremely rare occurrence in Israeli politics. There is an argument over whether Netanyahu promised this very party to be included in his coalition during his final hours of trying to assemble a coalition. Still, for his supporters, such a measure is inconceivable. Both the coalition’s supporters and its opponents in the public see politics not only as a sum-zero game but as a fight between light and darkness. Yair Lapid, who will now become interim prime minister until the elections, invoked this imagery directly in his speech after the election’s announcement. “We must return to Israeli unity,” he said. “We must not let the Dark Powers dismantle us.”
The chief pseudo-intellectual of this bifurcation is Avishai Ben Haim, a scholar of ultra-orthodox Judaism turned TV commentator. His theory divides Israel into “the First Israel” and the “Second Israel”. The former oppresses the latter. The latter are mostly Sephardic Jews from Islamic countries, the former is mostly Ashkenazi Jews. There are exceptions, of course, but in this theory, Netanyahu is the savior of Second Israel in face of First Israeli oppression. Another journalist, Galit Distel Atbaryan, who entered Parliament when Netanyahu reserved her a leading spot in his party, also propelled similar ideas. The “left” “globalists” oppress hard-working Israelis, who yearn for Netanyahu.
The Change Coalition did not revolutionize, but it did change. This made everyone angry. Those who subscribe to Atbaryan and Ben Haim’s analyses see the coalition’s very existence as an existential threat. They see the coalition as an insidious Muslim Brotherhood and anti-Israeli trojan horse that leads the country straight to extermination in Iranian hands. For many left-wingers, the Coalition was too right-wing in policies. Eventually, it fell over a technicality. It did not fail because of its politics. Unlike Yugoslavia, it was not a combination of rising nationalism and questions of differential funding. It is a political bifurcation that led to this absurd technicality, in which the coalition almost ended the settlers’ legal protections in the Occupied Territories against its interests. The coalition they denounced as the “hardcore left” wouldn’t let this happen. So, we are going to elections again, and again, and again.
The problem with nation-states remains the same everywhere: the gulf between members of the same nations can be much wider than across nations. Being members of the same nation does not really mean we all get along.
The author is a PhD student in European History at the University of Yale