The Pensioners’ Complaint
Natan Levin, chairman of Keren Lazaken, told The Jerusalem Post (April 27, 2006) that Gil [Pensioners] MKs were “only worried about themselves and their positions in the government and did not care about the people they were sent to the Knesset to represent.”
He informed The Post that before the March 28 election, the Gil politicians had signed a declaration promising to fight for the pensioners’ rights in the areas of economic aid and health, but that in the month since election, “all we have heard in the media is fighting over [cabinet] portfolios”
Mr. Levin’s complaint illustrates a fact which I have repeatedly emphasized, namely, that Israel’s inability to deal effectively and honestly with its socio-economic and security problems is a direct result of its inept and pernicious system of governance.
Here I will mention only two of its basic systemic flaws. First, members of the Knesset are not individually elected by and accountable to the voters in constituency or regional elections—the practice of 74 democratic countries, many smaller in size and population than Israel. Given the lack of constituency elections, an MK need not worry about facing a rival candidate in a local district— someone who would surely expose the incumbent’s record to the voters.
The second and even more insidious flaw is this: Knesset members are not excluded from the cabinet (as they are in a presidential system of government). This magnifies their political ambitions. MKs lust for a cabinet portfolio because this is the road to personal or political power. It’s not the Knesset but the various government ministries where major legislation is formulated. Moreover, as a cabinet minister, an MK can more readily secure a safe place on his party list, can entrench himself in office and even aspire to the premiership.
Despite the democratic veneer of periodic, multi-party elections, the government utterly dominates the Knesset. This it can do because cabinet ministers are the leaders of the various parties forming the Knesset’s ruling coalition. This why no Labor- or Likud-led government has ever been toppled by a Knesset vote of no confidence; and the only national unity government that fell was that of 1990, as a result of the so-called stinking maneuver within the cabinet itself by Shas and Labor leaders. And even that failed to unseat Yitzhak Shamir, who was then Israel’s Prime Minister
The heart of the problem is this: In Israel the entire country constitutes a single electoral district in which party lists compete for Knesset seats on the basis of proportional representation. Since no party has ever won a majority of seats, the cabinet invariably consists of a multiplicity of rival party leaders whose business is not to pursue a national program “but merely to divide positions of influence and the national budget”—to cite David Ben-Gurion’s Memoirs. Mr. Levin’s complaint to The Post must be understood in this light.
Many parties advocate this or that social or economic reform or a new security policy. But these same parties cannot be relied upon because, statements to the contrary notwithstanding, they want to preserve the institutional status quo, which entrenches their power, especially of their leaders.
But as I have repeatedly emphasized, basic institutional reform is a necessary precondition of changing the malaise of this country—of overcoming institutionalized corruption, public cynicism and apathy, and, above all, the decline of Jewish national pride.
