I suspect that one big reason the ultra-Orthodox have so much political clout is not that they have a lot of votes, but that they have a lot of capacity to make things really nasty if they are not catered to. Due to the unique nature of the Israeli state and Israeli society, their de-facto control over religious affairs, and the zealotry of their (in a word, fundamentalist) followers, they can and do cause all sorts of harm to a government that won’t heed their wishes. Has little to do with their absolute electoral power, and everything to do with how Israel is built, psychologically.
It’s not disproportionate because other parties are willing to form a coalition with ultras, which means every voter for those parties supports the ultra-orthodox influence. That it’s not a direct vote doesn’t matter.
If voters do not like this influence they shouldn’t vote for parties that are okay with dealing with ultras.
antlers
4264
I can do the math in terms of utility if you want: proportional lists end up with situations where small parties have disproportionate power. Say you have a polity with two issues A and B. The population is divided into 3 groups, X, Y and Z. X is 48% of the population, and are in favor of A, assigning it 70% of the importance of their vote, and against B assiging it 30% of the importance of their vote. Y is opposed to A, assigning it 70% of the importance of their vote, and opposed to B, assigning it 30% of the importance of their vote. Z consists of 4% of the population who don’t care about A, but are in favour of B and will allow that issue to determine 100% of their vote. In a proportional vote system, with X Y and Z parties; Z would determine the ruling coalition so B would always be the policy, even though the electorate as a whole would be happier with not B, regardless of the result of A.
It’s a well-established political science concept; it’s kind of the converse of the principal that FPTP voting creates two dominant parties. Israel is a textbook example of the pitfalls.
Yeah, let’s be fair. Israel is more like South Africa’s apartheid state.
Only if you look at it superficially, in that yes, the country has physical barriers that divide its territory into areas for the people with power and areas for those without power, and yes, there are laws that discriminate against Palestinians (neither of these things are good things, IMO, but that’s neither here nor there). What’s absent are the formal establishment of an actual ideology like white supremacy/apartheid as the defining aspect of national identity, a hard-coded uncrossable divide between the haves and have nots (as in race-based like South Africa; it’s entirely if often only theoretically possible for Palestinians to shift their status in relationship to the state), and perhaps most importantly a strong shared sense of agreement among the dominant population about the treatment of the oppressed. So while I’d agree that there are aspects of the day to day reality in Israel that are reminiscent of some aspects (and nasty aspects at that) of South Africa under the Afrikaaners, Israel is far from being a clone of apartheid-era South Africa.
It’s hard to say that stuff is absent. Israel is deliberately a Jewish state, and while non-Jews in Israel proper can vote, effectively non-Jews in the annexed / occupied territories can’t, and that distinction is deliberate so as to maintain a Jewish-majority polity. And given that the pro-war pro-settlement pro-annexation party has been in power now for the lion’s share of the last 4 decades, one can’t reasonably argue that there isn’t at least some popular consensus for their extremism.
It’s not totally absent, no, but it’s also not, I would argue, truly analogous to apartheid, strictly speaking. One big reason is that a race-based system like apartheid is pretty binary, while there is a lot of uncertainty about who is a Jew and who is not; Jew and non-Jew are, often, contested categories, and this problem permeates the whole system. In addition, Israel was founded as a Jewish state, yes, but was also founded on a basis of European-style parliamentary democracy, by people who were by any stretch of the imagination in the mid-20th century pretty radically democratic. While that has eroded a lot, the legacy is still there, and the tension between liberal democracy and authoritarian sectarianism is a large part of Israeli politics–something missing as I understand it from South Africa’s past. There was a time when Israelis entertained the idea of Jews and non-Jews living together; the fact that that is far less common now does not erase its existence, and its something that was pretty much totally absent from South Africa, where to my knowledge there was never a strong biracial democratic movement in the old days.
None of this excuses the political and ethical misdeeds of various Israeli governments. And yes, there is indeed “some popular consensus” around these acts, and as a democracy, Israel itself has to take responsibility for what its government does. But as noted elsewhere, there are plenty of Israelis who object, and far more I suspect who, with the right inducements and good leadership, might be persuaded to back down on a lot of stuff. But yes, I agree, it’s not something you can hand wave away.
I don’t want to say that this is all wrong, but at best it is all overstated. The Cape Colony had a long tradition of color-blind franchise, and the Act of Parliament (1909) that gave South Africa home rule entrenched that tradition in the Cape Province though it failed to extend it to the Afrikaner-dominated provinces. Still, the Cape preserved it for another 22 years against the efforts of the national government to end it. And the governments of South Africa were quite clearly modeled on
European governments, both the dominion-era government and the later republic.
Good to know; as i noted, I am not an authority of South Africa at all, so it’s good to hear more about it. I’m not sure it makes that much difference in our discussion here, though, Israel was founded by people who would have been and often had been chased out of European systems for being too liberal, so I’m not sure there’s that much parallel with South Africa. Also, I’d be curious as to when, then, South Africa institutionalized apartheid, and how that happened. My only real point I guess is that the situations in the two countries, Israel and South Africa, are different enough in important aspects to make one to one comparisons, as you phrase it, overstated.
In 1936 the SA Parliament separated black voters (in the Cape) from the electorate and they were assigned separate token ‘members’ in Parliament.
In 1948 the first Apartheid government was elected, and in 1949 they banned mixed-race marriages. This was followed by a ban on interracial sex in 1950, and a law which required everyone to carry ID cards which listed their race.
This law was paired with another law which proscribed areas of the country where black people were not allowed to live or even to enter. Enacting the law required evicting most people from their homes because those homes were now in ‘white only’ areas. You may want to consider if there is any similar process going on in Palestine.
In 1952 they further constrained freedom of movement for blacks, and 1953 they segregated public facilities, including transportation.
Up to this point mixed-race people were treated mostly as whites. However, in 1958 they also lost their parliamentary representation, getting separate ‘members’ instead. In 1960, black voters lost even this token representation, and mixed-race people lost it in 1970.
I suppose I’d add the obvious: Like the Nazi regime, the Apartheid government used the institutions of representative democracy to enact their tyranny. Everything was done legally, by acts of parliament, and with attention to the details. I’m reminded of the great film Conspiracy, where officials of the Nazi regime argue with their lawyers over what the Nuremberg laws do and do not permit. So I’m not really made to feel better by the argument about democratic tradition and institutions.
Fascinating; thank you. Israel’s descent towards its current situation seems to have been less orchestrated, though certainly there have always been elements within Israel who have wanted something more or less like what has become the norm there.
If there is a distinction, I think it is simply that they’re not working as a demographic minority yet, as they were in SA. But people see it coming, and they have been talking for years about what oppressive measures they will need to take to combat it. Annexing the occupied territories will make things worse from that perspective, not better; unless what you want is a reason to subjugate the majority.
Annexation seems to be justified by Israelis on grounds of physical security, for the secular, and religious mandate, by the Orthodox. The inevitable consequences, as you note, are that Israel gets turned into an occupying power (a la Rome!).
Interesting that Israeli’s are the least likely to believe Climate Change is a threat. While not stated, I see this more as a function of relativity, in that Israel as a nation has larger threats to deal with.
Timex
4276
Yeah, when folks are firing tickets into your cities, it’s hard to worry about stuff 100 years from now.
RichVR
4277
Timex, buddy, you have to turn off auto-correct. :)
Or traffic cops have gone high tech.
jpinard
4279
When you already live in a desert, having the world temp increase 5* doesn’t seem like much of a change.
It might be understandable but it’s not rational.
