Time for Accountability

Viewpoint: If we cannot guarantee our prime minister’s ideological loyalty, let us start at least with locally elected Knesset members.

By AMIEL UNGAR
bibi (do not publish again) (photo credit: avi katz)
bibi (do not publish again)
(photo credit: avi katz)
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU HAS continued his inglorious retreat from the platform on which he contested the 2009 Knesset elections with his advocacy for a second, but this time “we really mean” final, freeze on building in Judea and Samaria. In doing so, he has changed my mind: Not about the inanity of his over-conciliatory policy, but on the need to reform the electoral system.
The two-state solution embraced by Netanyahu in his Bar-Ilan speech in June 2009 simply spells continuation of the conflict from strategically vulnerable borders. There will be no closure. The Arabs insist that no treaty can invalidate the refugees’ right of return, and that anything short of “total justice” for the refugees leaves open the “gates of conflict.” These and other pretexts for protracted discord are built in.
Nor will an independent Palestine arrest Israel’s growing delegitimization. On the contrary, it will only accelerate it. Instead of bickering over Judea and Samaria, the argument will revert to the pre-1967 questioning of Israel’s very existence. Professor Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania, a fierce critic of Israel, recently visited the yahoos in Judea and Samaria, including my community in Tekoa, and predicted “with regret” Israel’s demise within 30 years. Why support or invest in a “mistake” or a terminal patient?
Netanyahu, however, has managed to overcome my objections to electoral reform simply because his current policy demonstrates that political cynicism in Israel has become as toxic as the polluted Kishon River. I am, of course, aware that our presence in Judea and Samaria is criticized in Israel and abroad by many who claim to have Israel’s best interests at heart. Had this school commanded a Knesset majority, a building freeze imposed exclusively on the Jewish side would be tragically mistaken, but legitimate. Netanyahu cannot pretend to such legitimacy. In the last Knesset elections in February 2009, when he sensed the importance of the pro-settler religious Zionist vote, he spent the last weeks of the campaign in a flurry of photo ops, planting trees at various locations in Judea and Samaria and signing a strategic pact with religious Zionists like Effi Eitam, who had joined Likud. The Likud then went on to achieve a first by emerging as the strongest party in Judea and Samaria, as well as in some of the historical bastions of religious Zionism within the green line.
Yet now Netanyahu, who promised that the 10-month freeze, which ended September 26, would be the last, has acceded to another freeze under even more draconian terms. When one allows the Arabs to build at will while freezing Jewish building in disputed territories, one is making a very dangerous statement. Those who welcome Netanyahu’s “Road to Ramallah” should ponder how they would feel in similar circumstances. Imagine US President Barack Obama in his next State of the Union Address informing the assembled representatives and senators: “My fellow Americans, in my effort to reunite the American people and Congress behind my Administration, we will initiate a repeal of last year’s health care act.” The resulting firestorm would be all consuming.
It was Ariel Sharon who used the same “bait and switch” tactics and this resulted in the Jewish expulsion from Gaza. In the aftermath of that disaster, I participated in a panel that mulled institutional remedies to prevent a similar betrayal. Professor Paul Eidelberg of the Jerusalem-based Foundation for Constitutional Democracy in the Middle East suggested switching to single member Knesset districts that would allow the voters to sanction Knesset members who betrayed their trust. I opposed the proposal on the grounds that in the United States the vast majority of districts were not competitive. I was also averse to constant tinkering with the electoral system that had previously produced grief with the since abandoned direct election of the prime minister. Perhaps I was also unwittingly reacting to the Israeli penchant for trying everything once.
Now I feel I owe Eidelberg and the audience an apology. In the US mid-term elections, an energized electorate swept away incumbents who had taken voters for granted. If we cannot guarantee our prime minister’s ideological loyalty, let us start at least with locally elected Knesset members. If enough MKs honor their pledges to the voter, the message may penetrate to the top. Israel’s proportional representation was justified when it ensured equitable representation to an ideologically divided electorate. But if a Likud prime minister believes that ideology is for electoral purposes, only to be abandoned once he attains office, then the proportional system has failed. If the embarrassing profusion of religious Zionist parties cannot abandon their vanity politics and unite in this moment of crisis, there is no reason to perpetuate them via proportional representation.
So bring on the single-member district model of parliamentary democracy. This will at least accelerate the rationalization of the party system, leaving us with a party of the left, a party of the right, an ultra- Orthodox party and an Arab party. It may also re-empower the periphery and give it the voice it lost when development town mayors were prohibited from simultaneously holding a Knesset seat. Will it work? I don’t know, but, as my friends on the left would say, at least we will know that we tried.
Contributing editor Amiel Ungar is a columnist for the Makor Rishon daily and the national religious monthly Nekuda.