opinion
In Israel, the People Speak,
But They Are Not Always Heard
Liora Moriel
T he last election in Israel resulted in the fi rst solid
government in fi ve years. Benjamin Netanyahu’s
Likud party, right-wing but traditionally secular, aligned
itself with several ultra-Orthodox, ultra-nationalist and
ultra-extreme parties.

Some of the potential Knesset members were so
extreme that the High Court did not allow them to
be seated. In addition, the leader of the Shas party,
Aryeh Deri, who had been convicted of a fi nancial
crime for the second time (he had served time for
the previous case), promised not to take on the role
of a minister in a new administration in return for no
jail time. However, as soon as the government was
sworn in, Netanyahu gave Deri a double portfolio.

This was the opening salvo in the formation of a
government far diff erent from any in Israel’s past. Even
when Menachem Begin came to power, in 1977, the
government did not include people who had been jailed
for insurrection by the Israeli police. In 2023, Israelis
were shocked to discover that the minister of fi nance
and the minister of internal safety would be religious
settler rabble-rousers who advocate the death and
deportation of Palestinians and even Israeli Arabs.

Yes, the people have spoken. They voted for
Netanyahu’s coalition. But let’s not forget that the Israeli
election system is not one person, one vote. Instead,
parties need to garner 3.5% of the total vote to be repre-
sented in the Knesset. Many parties fail and their votes
are wasted; others sign mutual agreements for the distri-
bution of such votes. Thus, since the Meretz and Labor
parties did not agree to unite or even to use one anoth-
er’s votes, Meretz just failed to get in and Labor lost two
seats. The people speak, but they are not always heard.

This is the background to the surge of protests all over
Israel for so many weeks. It is not because, as Jerome
Marcus of the shadowy Kohelet group wrote last week
(“What’s Really Happening in Israel”), some Israelis are
trying to use tainted tactics to overcome the results of a
legal election. No, the reason is that instead of working
toward the goals on which he campaigned, Netanyahu
gave the running of the government over to his minis-
ter of justice, Yariv Levin, who tried to ramrod a series
of laws that would cripple the judiciary and give the
government dictatorial powers to enact and dismantle
laws, as well as decide who the judges will be.

Israelis have learned to be apathetic after three years
of COVID and endless elections. They want to live
where they can aff ord the rent, the food, the life. They
want some calm, a sense of a future for their children.

They go to the army and work their way up, making
Israel a modern miracle of innovation. But they see that
the ultra-Orthodox do not serve but get paid for Torah
study, and that while they work hard to pay for child care
the ultra-Orthodox have many children at state expense.

Ordinary Israelis are fed up with such inequality.

Netanyahu promised free infant care and low
mortgages. He promised a better life for everyone. But
as prime minister, he let the extremists run the show:
The tax on sugary drinks was eliminated, single-use
plates and cutlery returned to stores, and everything
else either became more expensive or stayed the same.

Yeshivah student salaries increased.

There is no left in Israel. There is the extreme right
— Netanyahu’s current government — and a few center-
right parties, along with the Arab parties that feel
increasingly marginalized. The Kohelet group has fi xated
on the idea that “the left” is trying to undo the people’s
will. The truth is that Netanyahu, who is on trial for
corruption while acting as prime minister of the state,
has abdicated his role to the hard right. The nascent
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intifada is one result. The steady protest of Israel’s
citizens is another.

It is not hatred of Netanyahu and his allies that brings
hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens to the streets
of almost every city and town in Israel every Saturday
night after Shabbat; it is a love of country. Many of my
family and friends, usually apolitical, go out every week
to protest what they see as an assault on democratic
values and long-shared understandings of what Israeli
democracy means. They are fed up with the inequality
of sacrifi ce for the nation. They are fed up with being
called unpatriotic. And they are particularly fed up with
being called left-wing terrorists.

What may be the worst ingredient Netanyahu has
infused into Israeli society over the past few months
is the cultivated division of the people in Israel into us
and them, good and evil. Netanyahu, with a straight
face, calls those who volunteer for military service
a month every year and pay high taxes “unpatriotic”
while embracing the poorest echelons, who cling to
him as the one who will lead them into prosperity,
as “patriotic.”
If Israel is to remain a light unto the nations, it must not
become a non-democracy like Hungary, where people
vote, but their choices are limited to those in power. ■
Liora Moriel, a former member of the editorial
board of The Jerusalem Post, was a lecturer at the
University of Maryland.

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