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Call Me Back - with Dan Senor
ISRAEL VOTES: How Israel’s Elections Work - with Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal
00:31:45
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign you are listening to an art media podcast. Hi, it's Dan. Over the past couple of years, Call Me Back has grown into something much bigger than we ever expected, a place for clarity, context, and honest conversations at a time when those things can seem hard to find. That's what ARC Media is all about, building a truly independent voice, which means no one shaping what we say or how we say it. To help support our rapidly expanding operations, we created Inside Call Me Back, our members Only feed, where we answer your questions and bring you into the conversations that typically happen after the cameras stop rolling. If Call Me Back has been meaningful to you and you want to be part of what we're building, I hope you'll join us. Your contribution goes a long way in helping us show up when it matters most. You can subscribe@arkmedia.org or through the link in the show Notes and to our insiders. Thank you. It's 10:00am on Sunday, May 31st here in New York City. It's 5:00pm On Sunday, May 31st, in Israel, as Israelis wind down their day as you probably know, in a few months, elections will be held in Israel, the first since the October 7th attack of 2020 and arguably one of the most consequential elections in Israel's history. The fault lines that already divide Israeli society are likely to sharpen as many Israelis and many Jews around the world feel that the very character of the Jewish state will be up for a vote in this election. As things heat up, we want to make sure that callmeback and ARC Media give you the coverage you need to keep up. That's why we launched our special series, Israel Votes, in which we will be speaking with analysts, politicians, and of course, ARC Media contributors Nadavael and Amit Segal to help you make sense of this dramatic race and more importantly, to explore the underlying social, political, economic and ideological currents that will define coming months in Israel. We've been covering the politics, the players and the polls, but we've also heard from many of you, especially listeners who came to the show because of the war but are newer to Israeli politics, that before we go deeper, you'd like to understand how the system actually works. So today that's what we're doing. Think of this as your Israel Votes tutorial that will walk you through the whole architecture, why Israel has a parliamentary system in the first place, and why it is distinctive from almost any parliamentary system in the world, and how the different branches of government are structured, how the Knesset works, how votes become seats, how coalitions are formed what went wrong in the five consecutive elections between 2019 and 2022, when the current government was ultimately formed, what the specific challenges are heading into this election, and finally, what election night might actually look like. Your guides, as always, are two of the best people in the world at explaining Israeli politics to an international audience. Archimedia contributor in Channel 12, political analyst Amit Segal, an Arc Media contributor, and Yidiot Ahronot analyst Nadavael. Amit Nadav, you ready for this?
- [03:26]
B
Yes, absolutely.
- [03:27]
C
Amit was born ready.
- [03:29]
A
Amit was born. At least for this. All right, gentlemen, we are going to get into this crash course here. Amit, let's start with you. And I want to start at the beginning. Israel's founders chose a parliamentary system, not a presidential system. For an American audience that's used to a very different architecture, walk through the basic logic. Why this system and what does it mean for how power actually works?
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B
So the reason why parliamentary system was chosen was because the roots of the Israeli system lied in the British one. There was the British Mandate here. That's why we have our very unique version of the Supreme Court and the High Court for justice. So it was quite natural. What wasn't natural, and still isn't, is the fact that Israel has no constituencies. Unlike the systems in the United Kingdom and the Congress, in the United States. There is only one district in Israel named Israel.
- [04:24]
A
So basically, in the United States, there's congressional districts. So every citizen of the United States has someone in Congress that represents a geographic jurisdiction where they live in. Same with most parliamentary systems around the world. Canada, Israel, save three, Serbia, the Netherlands, and Israel and Iraq.
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B
Four, the great democracy of Iraq. Yes.
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A
So Israel and those other three, if you're in the country, you don't have a geographic representation. You just vote for a national vote.
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B
Exactly. For two reasons. One was practical. The first election was held in 1949, when Israel's independence war was still happening. So one cannot draw draw districts if you don't even have a map of the country, because IDF soldiers were fighting and borders changed on a daily basis. But there was a deep reason Ben Gurion came from the kibbutz system, while 98% of the first Israelis in 1949 did not live in kibbutzim. Still, the aspiration was to be more and more similar to the kibbutz, to this socialist, almost communist system in which you pay 100% taxation and then the kibbutz or the movement gives you everything. It was a society of we, a society in which the rudest thing to Say was me, myself and I. That's why Israelis never elect and are never elected individually. You always elect a list. No one in Israel's history has ever elected Benjamin Netanyahu to Parliament. He was always elected among other Likud members. So technically, he's the chairman. Yes, technically, he's the candidate for prime minister. It means nothing. The only thing that it means is that he's number one in a list from one to 120.
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C
That's all.
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A
And so how does representation actually work in the Knesset?
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B
So each party elects or nominates its candidates either through primary election, like Likud and Democrats, or by the decision of the chairman. And then when you go to the polls and you vote for Likud, if Likud got 23 seats, it means that number one to 23 are going to become Knesset members. Number 24 isn't. And the same applies for every other party.
- [06:43]
A
So if you are a senior member or an influential member of the party, you're higher up on the list, which means you have more likelihood of getting a seat in the Knesset if you're way at the bottom of the list, because each incremental few thousand votes or whatever percentage of the vote means another seat. If you're way at the bottom of the list, you're unlikely to get in the Knesset.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
Okay, Nadav, I want to talk about the different branches of the Israeli government. Now, before I do that, just one caveat. When we use the term branches, like the way Israelis talk about the three branches of their government, the Knesset, which is what we would think of as the legislative body, the Parliament, the government, which you could say is loosely like the executive branch, and then the judiciary. I want you to explain how they divide power and practice. But I do, for our American listeners, it's when you hear about branches in government, it's not how we in the United States talk about branches of government where voters elect independently a congress, and it's a completely separate vote for how they elect the executive branch. So we're going to use the same term, branches, but it's not branches the way we think about it in US Constitutional terms. So, Nadav, the three branches, the three Israeli branches, the Knesset, the government and the judiciary, can you describe how they divide power?
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C
So first, the Knesset legislates, but it also has another power that was given to it by the Founding Fathers, and that's its constitutional power. So actually, the Knesset has two powers enshrined. The first power is to make laws, the law of the land. But the second power is that every Knesset, according to Israeli courts, sits actually as a constitutional assembly and it can make basic laws. These basic laws are the chapters of the Israeli constitution. For instance, a basic law that is called basic law, human dignity, which was passed in the 1990s. And much of what has happened in Israel in terms of the judicial, what we call the judicial revolution, what many commentators in the US called judicial activism, happened because of that basic law. Some laws, for instance, if you want to change laws of election, you need a special majority to do that, because the legislature didn't want for every majority in the Knesset that happens to be there every other day to change laws as to elections. And the intention there is of course, that the government won't be able to change election system every other day without some sort of a balance of power. So a super majority was built there. Now, the number one job of the Knesset, in practical terms, that gives it the most power more than laws, is that the Knesset gives its trust to any new government. And without a vote in the Knesset, no new government can be founded. So in order to have a government in Israel, a candidate for prime minister needs to come to the Knesset and say to the Knesset, to the legislative body, this is my government, this is my Cabinet, I'm asking for a confidence vote. And that's the reason that Israeli prime ministers always need to have a majority of a coalition in the Knesset, because if they don't, they won't be voted in.
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A
Right?
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C
So three positions of the Knesset first, voting in or voting out an Israeli government, legislating laws in the Knesset, and of course having this constitutional hat of sometimes going into actual constitution with basic laws. I just summed up the Knesset. Now, as to the executive, it's really simple. The executive is the government. The government makes policy and rules Israel according to the Israeli laws, etc. Etc. But in terms of the monitoring of the Knesset, on the one hand, the Knesset can lead to the downfall of the government if the government loses its majority in the Knesset. But on the other hand, every government in Israel has an automatic majority in the Knesset. If the government survives, it means that they have a majority. So you don't have a split government. Unlike in the US where since 1945, I think half of the years it was a split government. You had Congress and a White House, not from the same party. In Israel, it's always the same coalitions that controls the prime ministership and the Knesset. If it isn't, the prime minister would need to go to an election. The judiciary, the judges are elected in the judiciary by the commission to elect judges. And these are the people who choose judges. And these judges are the ones that would go into both the Supreme Court and every other court in the land. And this doesn't go through a Knesset vote. And then the judicial branch does two things exactly like in the US it makes law in terms of trying the cases, criminal cases, administrative cases, immigration cases, and all the rest. And the other elements are constitutional. For instance, some sort of monitoring of the legislature and the executive branch.
- [11:49]
D
I'm Deborah Pardes, the host of Ark News Daily. What's happening in Israel and the Jewish world right now matters, but it can be hard to keep up, let alone make sense of it all. That's why we started ArkNews Daily. Every weekday morning, I walk you through the most important news, give you the context you need, and let you know what to look out for next. I don't try to convince you of anything, and I don't waste your time. On most days, I'll be in your ears for about 10 minutes or less. Then you can move on with your day, hopefully a little bit smarter than before. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or follow the link in the show notes. I hope to see you tomorrow.
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A
Okay, I want to get to how votes are cast and how the actual math work. So, Amit, can you just talk about how raw votes become Knesset seats and what happens to the vote for parties that don't clear the electoral threshold.
- [12:48]
B
Okay, so first of all, you cannot vote by mail in Israel or digitally or abroad unless you are an ambassador or work for the Sukhnut. You have to vote in the ballot that was designated to you according to where you live or where you are registered to live. So this is one very important thing. And nonetheless, the turnout in Israel is very, very high. Something like 71, 72% of the popular vote, which is an effective 90% because you always have half a million Israelis abroad, etc. Now, once the election day is over at 10pm, votes are counted domestically, registered, and then when you have the entire number of votes, first of all, the first thing that you do is to see which lists passed the threshold, which is 3.25%. So let's say that now you have 10 lists that pass the threshold and they account for 93% of the votes that were given to most of the lists. Now, you take the entire number of lists who pass the threshold and you divide it by 120, okay, because this is the number of Knesset members. So let's say Likud gets 25.73 seats. So automatically it's going to get 25 bene, 22.71, so they get 22, etc. Etc. At the end of this process, you have something like 110, 112seats distributed. Now the question is, who is entitled to get the other 10 seats, although you don't have the equivalent of a full seat because you got only 0.76 seats left. So here you have two arrangements. One is called redundancy agreement that for instance, Likud and Smotrich sign an agreement that they can actually share the redundant votes. So if Likud gets 0 at 22.75 seats and Smotritch 4.5, so altogether they have 27. And usually the new seat goes to the bigger party. That's give or take the math. And that's how the 120 seats are distributed.
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A
Okay, now, Nadav, one thing I think is very confusing for a lot of folks is that when you go to the polls, when you go to vote on election day, you vote for a party. There's no box that says Netanyahu or Bennett or Eisencot. So how does a Prime Minister actually emerge from that?
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C
So you vote for a party, and if that party passes a threshold, it supports a candidate for a Prime minister. Because at the end of the election night, you see which bloc won? Either the center left bloc or the right wing bloc. Today it's not the case anymore, because many of the parties at the anti Netanyahu bloc are actually right wing. But generally speaking, this was the division. Now, your party that you just chose supports always a candidate for prime minister. And the way it supports it is that immediately after, after the election, the President of Israel begins conversations with different parties. He invites them to the President's residence, and there he asks each party that entered the Knesset, which candidate or which person do you think needs to be the next Prime Minister of Israel? And they recommend a name. They need to recommend a member of Knesset, any member of Knesset. So, for instance, there will be elections in September and October. If you were in Israel, you would have voted. Let's just say, theoretically, Dan, you would have voted Likud.
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A
Okay, Theoretically.
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B
He's more of a Benqueville guy. I see it in his eyes.
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C
Not even as a joke. Not even as a joke.
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A
Come on, Nadav.
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C
The Likud will pass the threshold. Then President Herzog will call first on the Likud. And they will come at 10am to the president's residence. And he will ask the Likud delegation. Who do you recommend for Prime Minister? And of course they will all say, we recommend Benjamin Netanyahu. Then he will call the Bennett party representatives. It's not Bennett himself. And these delegates, it's like delegates in this country will tell the President we recommend Naftali Bennett. Then at the end of this consultation, which will last a week and is largely ceremonial because everybody knows who they're going to recommend, right? The President will look at his piece of paper and you will see that he has 64 people that rec, for instance, Netanyahu. He will summon Netanyahu as a member of Knesset and He will say, Mr. Netanyahu, I am now giving you the mandate to form a government. Now Netanyahu needs to go to these parties and sign coalition agreements. What are the terms in which they will join his government. And when he's finished, he will call the President and he will say the words, Mr. President, I have formed a government. Then the President will say, okay. And the Knesset will convene for a vote of trust of confidence in the government. If that vote of trust is successful. And for that you need a simple majority. You don't need any supermajority, not even a 61 vote. If it's successful, you have a new government in Israel. And this is the process from the moment you go into the ballot to the moment the government is formed in Israel.
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B
If it sounds very, very long, it's only because it's very long. Out of Israel's first 75 years, seven were spent on forming coalitions. So one tenth of the Israeli time was spent on doing this. Just to give an example, in the US it took, I don't know, two minutes. When the electoral college is summoned. There wasn't even a single minute in the United States in this twilight zone of non functioning government that is no longer elected by the people and a new government which is yet to be formed, it's terrible for governability, for long term planning, et cetera.
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A
Amit. So the President tasks the leader most likely to form a government and building a coalition. What do the negotiations actually look like? Who decides which politician gets which ministry and how binding is that?
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B
Okay, so this is what we call this beautiful period of the year in which coalition are formed, coalition negotiations. This is the worst, longest nightmare in the life of Israeli political correspondents and analysts because basically nothing happens. No one wants to give you interviews because they are tired, they hate to see your face after a long campaign in which they offer their sound bites and interviews seven times a day. So they just Disappear. And if they talk to you, they lie. The idea is to reach the magic number of 61, and then you have a very subtle long dance with more than two dancers, usually something between five and seven parties that demand more than the Prime Minister can actually offer. But at the end of the day, it ends when the Prime Minister distributes the various ministries. Usually in Israel, the number one ministry that everyone wants is the Defense Ministry and then the Foreign Affairs Ministry, in recent years, the Justice Ministry, and et cetera, et cetera. So in the past, on average, okay, In Ben Gurion's first government, on every five Knesset members, the general rule was one minister. So if your party has 15 Knesset members, it's going to get three ministries, okay? That's why the first government included only 12 ministers and Ben Gurion. There was a rapid inflation in the price of a Knesset member's finger. Nowadays, the average number is 1.8 Knesset members per minister, which means that if, for instance, Ben Gvir has six Knesset members, he is entitled to three ministries. Smotrich, three on seven Knesset members, three ministries on seven Knesset members. Likud, 17 on 32 Knesset members. And inflation is just getting more and more wild, which means that the next Knesset would definitely see something like 37 to 40 ministers. Now, since there are no more things to decide on, it just creates empty ministries like the Ministry of Jewish Identity, the Ministry of Regional Cooperation. What I'm trying to say, it makes Israel's bureaucracy impossible. And to go even crazier, there are ministers without ministries. It's called a minister without a portfolio. What does a minister without a portfolio does when he or she wake up in the morning? To be honest, I don't know. But they're entitled to eight different advisors, a driver, a car, and an office. Because you have to put your portfolio that does not exist somewhere. Yes, that's utterly crazy. I had an idea in the past that ministers without portfolio would be allowed only if they are part of the cabinet. And then you have enough time to devote to the existential questions of, you know, I don't know, the Iranian nuclear project. However, it's not how politics work, because usually those who are represented in cabinet are the leaders of the parties. So they take both the prestigious ministries and they sit in the cabinet to which they cannot devote enough time, and the results are accordingly.
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A
Nadav, you've described Israeli politics as deeply tribal. One way to understand how that tribalism, as you call it, shapes the elections is to look at what happened between 2019 and 2022, when Israel held five elections. I want our listeners to just double click that. Between 2019 and 2022, Israel had election after election after election after election after election. How did the system break down in those years that resulted in that chaos?
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C
Well, Prime Minister Netanyahu went to the 2019 elections after a few years in which he had a stable government, and he didn't manage to get a majority from the Knesset for a new government, but no one else managed to. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who held office failed. Others failed too, because everybody failed. According to the Israeli system, the current government stayed in a sort of a limbo position of an interim government. It's actually a government that didn't receive the trust of the people, which is a democratic constitutional problem, and they just remained in office. It's like imagine in the US and every comparison I'll do now would be not accurate. But imagine in the US if the college, the Electoral College would not be able to form any decision. So the US Constitution is so wise, at the end of the day, it has Mechanisms in the U.S. constitutions to never allow a situation in which it's always a tie and there is no tiebreaker, and the president in power just holds office after January 20, years after January 20, because the electoral College didn't manage to have a new president. This is what happened in Israel since 2019 and until 2022, in which another person that isn't Prime Minister Netanyahu, and that was Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, managed to get a majority. And this is how we came to what was labeled the change government by Bennett and Lapid. But basically, in the Israeli system, to your question, there could be a situation in which nobody manages to have a majority. And this is a crisis within the Israeli system that wasn't solved by the legislature ever. What happens if again and again and again, no bloc manages to form a coalition and you just are stuck with an interim government that nobody chose? The Knesset has no confidence, but it can't vote it out because it's only an interim government on the way to the formation of a new government. What do you do? And the Israeli legislature never gave an answer to that. And right now, Netanyahu doesn't want, frankly, to have an answer to that because. Because that means he just stays in power. There is no limit to this crisis.
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A
Right?
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C
Theoretically, you can stay in power like that forever.
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A
Okay, Amit, let's talk about the experience of election night, okay? I just want people to understand that part. The polls close, what happens? Because up to that point, there's the exit polls and how reliable are they? When do Israelis get results? And when do they realistically know who's gonna be the next prime minister?
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B
Okay, so the election, the ballots are closed at 10pm sharp. And at the very same minute Israel's television channels actually publish their exit poll results. We're going to have something like four or five this year. The most reliable, of course, is Channel 12, where I work. And then.
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A
Shameless plug.
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B
Absolutely. Anyway, and then, then nothing happens for the next two and a half hours because it takes time to start counting the votes. The minute in which, the time according to which you start understanding what is really going on in the actual ballots and not at the exit polls is something around 1am, three hours after the election had already ended. Now, there were many instances in Israel's politics in which there were significant changes between the exit polls and the actual results. The most famous one, of course, is Prime Minister Peres leading the candidate Netanyahu in 1996 by 1.5% and only to lose when the sun rises around 5:00am okay, so usually it's crucial to follow the actual results. Why? Because one party that falls short of the threshold can actually change the entire political map. That's why every seat counts. And that's why usually during election nights I don't go to sleep. I burn the midnight oil and pull an all nighter and all those cliches.
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A
So I know our Israeli listeners will be glued to channel 12. Amit, I want to make sure I'm reinforcing your shameless plug. But listeners over here, When I say over here, I mean outside of Israel. What should they be paying attention to? How do they know where this is all going to?
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B
They should ask themselves two questions. One, has Netanyahu bloc reached 61 seats? And if not, has the Zionist opposition parties reached the same number? If the answer is positive for one of the two questions, it means that there is a winner for the election. If not, you can go to sleep. You can wake up in a month from now and you still won't have a government because it makes things very, very complicated. It's going to be a very long dance. If everyone is short of 61 seats for their block, it necessari means one of three options. Either a unity government or a minority government supported by the other parties, or a new election. But it's not going to decide within a month or even two months after the election.
- [27:43]
A
Okay, and a final question for both of you. We've talked about the system, we've talked about the history We've talked about the structural obstacles, the structural changes. We're going to get into another episode of the different scenarios for the election and what possible scenarios are for different governments to form. But if you just want to know, like, the system is working because the Sense was between 2019 and 2022, the system wasn't working because there was five elections in less than three years. So is there anything on election night where you think Israelis will be watching and saying, this wasn't a successful election, I may not like the outcome. And we'll get into the scenarios why people may not like the outcome, but people say, I may not like the outcome, but the system worked, or are we headed for another stretch of dysfunctional Israeli politics and election after election? What are you looking for that night to say? The system work, worked or didn't.
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C
So first of all, let me assure you that if it doesn't go the right way for your side, everyone will say the system didn't work. It's a catastrophe. Okay? So this distinction, it's really important for political culture, Dan, this kind of distinction that is always made in the US of celebrating the democracy, celebrating the fact that this is a peaceful transfer of power. You don't have these celebrations in Israel. The only questions that are asked are who won? And. And this is the things I'm watching. First of all, did the Netanyahu bloc get 60 or more than that? That's the first question. Did they get 60 or more than that? If he got 61 or even 60, it means that Netanyahu remains in power. That's it. Secondly, if the other bloc got more than 61, how much of this block is actually a natural coalition, which means some Arab party and Lieberman won't sit together in the same government? It's just a fact of life. Okay, Bennett is saying he's not going to sit in. So can Bennett form a coalition with Zionist parties? So I'm looking, for instance, does he have 60 to form a government without Arab parties that are non Zionist on the record? That's the second thing I'm looking at. These are the two key questions. These are really the questions of the elections. This would determine everything from that moment.
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A
So, Amit, what are you looking for to determine whether or not it was a quote, unquote, successful election?
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B
You know, I support the stability of the system as long as my side wins. That's what every Israeli believes in. Other than this, I'm enthusiastic to see more and more election campaigns. So I think that if no side has 61 seats, it necessarily means that the next election are going to be held no later than a year and a half from now. Because if you have 61 for Netanyahu, he will always have his base to rely on. And the same applies for Benitoy or Eisenkot with their Zionist opposition parties. If each side falls short of it, it necessarily means that it's going to be a nightmare, the coalition negotiation, that the parade to the president is going to last forever, and that no matter what comes, it necessarily means a shaky, unstable and with low life expectancy government.
- [30:47]
A
Okay, gentlemen, we will leave it there. We'll be picking up an episode with the two of you on the scenarios for the election, which is when we get into full speculative horse race mode, which will no doubt be interesting given that we have two political savants to lead us through that. So until then, thanks for doing this.
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B
Thank you so much.
- [31:06]
C
Thank you.
- [31:07]
B
Bye bye.
- [31:16]
A
Call Me Back is produced and edited by Lon Benatar. Our production manager is Brittany Cohn. Our community manager is Ava Weiner. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Sound and video editing by Liquid Audio. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.