Elections in the United States and Israel were among the dozens of subjects presented at the Day of Discovery Jewish learning day held Jan. 18 at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center.
About 275 people attended the daylong event at which local rabbis, teachers, community officials and experts on a wide variety of Jewish subjects gave presentations.
The day was sponsored by the JCC, the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Coalition for Jewish Learning and the Wisconsin Council of Rabbis.
To a great extent, these two elections will speak to each other in their likely results for U.S.-Israel relations and the prospects of Middle East peace, the presenters suggested.
Lilly Goren, associate professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, pointed out in her presentation on the U.S. elections that U.S. presidents have a tendency to wait to try Arab-Israel peace-making until after the midterm Congressional elections of the president’s second term in office.
In the case of the new Barack Obama administration, the U.S. economy is likely to be the top priority for the first period in office, and he “will not want to spend political capital” on the Middle East early on, she said.
Indeed, he may delegate the Middle East and other foreign policy problems like India-Pakistan tensions to lower level specialists under Secretary of State-designate Hillary R. Clinton, possibly former President Bill Clinton’s Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, she said.
As for Israel, Milwaukee’s Israel emissary Rakefet Ginsberg said in her presentation that Obama’s election seems likely to affect that country’s elections, scheduled for Feb. 10, in both substance and style.
Though recent polls show Israel’s electorate leaning somewhat right, toward the Likud Party and its leader, former Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Israel probably “can’t have a radical right government” while the U.S. has the liberal Obama in office, she said.
That means that if Likud wins the chance to form a government, it likely will have to try forming a coalition with the left wing Labor and/or the center Kadima parties instead of the radical right wing smaller parties, she said.
But in style, all three major party leaders — Netanyahu, Kadima’s Tzipi Livni and Labor’s Ehud Barak — are trying to portray themselves to Israel’s public as resembling Obama as agents of change, Ginsberg said. “That’s something we’re learning from America,” she said.
Different systems
Ginsberg spent most of her presentation explaining how Israel’s electoral system differs from that of the U.S. But she titled it “Crazy, Crazier, Craziest” because the way it works apparently seems bizarre and loose even to many Israelis.
Israel has a parliamentary system modeled loosely on that of Great Britain. However, unlike Britain, which elects its parliament members from districts, Israel is one large national electoral district, and Israelis 18 or older vote for parties that present lists of candidates; they do not choose individual candidates or representatives.
Moreover, Israel’s government does not have the separation of powers between the legislature and the administration that the U.S. has. Most of the members of the administration usually also hold seats in the Knesset (parliament).
Ginsberg said that in Israel’s 60 years of existence, it has held 17 national elections, of which only six occurred at the end of a fully completed term. The others were held early because of Knesset votes of “no confidence” in the administration.
Moreover, of Israel’s 12 prime ministers, none finished a whole term of office, she said.
Nevertheless, Israel’s government “works. You see a kind of stability, even with so many elections,” Ginsberg said.
The Knesset has 120 seats, a number chosen from the “Great Assembly” (in Hebrew “Knesset Hagedolah”) of 120 sages that functioned in the time of the Second Temple, Ginsberg said.
A party has to win at least 2 percent of the vote to receive one Knessset seat. Ginsberg recalled the time when a small party with only one person on its list of candidates received enough votes for two seats.
However, no one party in Israel’s entire history has ever won 61 of those seats to give it a real majority. So parties have to form coalitions with other parties in order to be able to govern.
This gives small parties power often out-of-proportion to the number of popular votes they receive. Today, Israel has 34 parties of which 14 have seats in today’s Knesset, Ginsberg said.
Israel, like many European countries, distinguishes between its “chief of state” or president, a largely ceremonial office, and its “chief of government” or prime minister. (The U.S. president fulfills both functions.)
However, Israel’s president does have one important power. After each national election, the president invites one of the parties, usually but not always the one with the most Knesset seats, to try to form a government.
If its succeeds in assembling a coalition, that party becomes the head of government and the top person on its list of candidates, usually the party’s leader, becomes prime minister. If the party can’t make a coalition after a set time, usually about three months, the president offers the task to another party.
At present, Kadima has the most Knesset seats, 29; Labor is second with 19, Likud third with 12. Likud, however, is not part of the governing coalition.
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