Likud MK Yuli Edelstein’s refusal to cooperate with the legislative process to advance the government’s judicial overhaul resulted in an announcement by the party, which leads the government coalition, that he would be punished.
Edelstein would not be allowed to propose private bills, raise topics for discussion or speak in the Likud’s name in the Knesset plenum for a few weeks, due to his intentional absence from a judicial reform vote earlier this month, said coalition whip and Likud faction head MK Ofir Katz, last week, in the immediate aftermath of Edelstein’s protest move.
The 64-year-old Edelstein, who has served as a cabinet minister on multiple occasions, is currently chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. There are those who would argue that bitterness over his exclusion from the current cabinet is the source of his decision to play rebel on the judicial reform issue.
Edelstein has spoken out in favor of freezing the legislative process. Fellow Likud MK Danny Danon has called for a watered-down reform. Danon, as well, was left out of the cabinet in the new government inaugurated on December 29.
Are Edelstein and Danon voting with their conscience?
Whether or not Edelstein and Danon are working with purely ideological motives or perhaps are getting back at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the political insult, their standing up to party discipline in this case raises an age-old political question in Israeli politics. It is, in fact, a question positioned at the very center of the discussion over how our parliamentary system functions or doesn’t function all too often.
Amid the battle cry of saving our democracy from what is called the autocratic or dictatorial endgame of this judicial reform plan, there is an ongoing argument about the very essence of Israeli democracy.
Enough of the fancy terminology; the bottom line is whether MKs serve the people or their party leader. In parties where there are primaries, the MKs must at least win over the membership. In parties without primaries, the need to win over the leader is absolute.
Either way, our system is such that unless a party’s parliamentary faction decides to allow its MKs to vote according to their conscience, they must all vote the same way – I always loved that expression. And if a faction decides to impose party discipline, MKs are potentially forced to vote against their conscience.
WHEN I place the stub for a party in the ballot box on election day, I am voting confidence in a bloc of people who will confer among themselves. I am not voting for any one MK candidate who will have to answer to me.
Currently, if Edelstein and Danon oppose their party’s position, they are not viewed within the party as responsible politicians standing up for what they view as right; they are viewed as rebels and subject to punishment.
When it comes down to it, there must be a certain amount of discipline to prevent disarray. On the cabinet level, ministers can argue among themselves but when an executive decision is reached through a majority vote, then ministers are expected to toe the line when the cabinet’s decisions go to the legislature – the Knesset – for parliamentary approval.
So perhaps a middle road should be agreed upon between the need for discipline but also the necessity to run a system where parliamentarians are indeed answerable directly to the public, as independently-thinking politicians, not just as a number – five, 10 or 20, for example – on a list of political hacks.
That is exactly what I remember was under discussion in the early 1990s. I was a witness, as a Knesset correspondent, to talks over setting up constituencies. What is better known from that period was the passage into law by the Knesset of a system to directly elect the prime minister.
The logic behind that move was to have the people directly decide who their next leader would be, instead of the leader emerging as a result of horse trading among the parties to cobble together a coalition. In what was a short-lived system, voters chose their candidate for prime minister with one stub in one envelope placed in the ballot box on election day and chose a party with a second stub placed in the ballot box.
However, the bid to establish constituencies never really got off the ground. And if the direct election of who the prime minister was to make it a definitive choice who the next leader would be but the parties remained static lists voted in as one, the system had a far greater chance of failing, and it did.
Not only did horse-trading persist but it increased. It took place not only after the general election when the largest parties conducted negotiations with smaller factions based on the election results but now it was also taking place before the election when the candidates for prime minister had to convince various parties ahead of time to tell their people to vote for them as the country’s leader in the first place, with that other ballot stub on election day.
If you’re confused, imagine the atmosphere in the Knesset when these 1990s discussions on changing the electoral system were taking place, sometimes in the middle of the night. The talk about constituencies took place with the realization that we could not have the entire 120-seat Knesset voted in as such: everyone individually.
THERE HAD to be a middle road. We were not the United States system or perhaps, exactly like any other system. We were also still a very young country, not even 45 years old, an ingathering of exiles with many groups still feeling that they needed their own specific, independent representation.
The middle road that was proposed was to combine the systems: let’s say 90 MKs still voted in on a national party list and 30 in constituencies or perhaps 80 and 40. A more ambitious proposal was 60-60.
But again, this isn’t America. Constituencies couldn’t be divided only geographically because smaller sectoral parties feared they would lose and perhaps disappear because their voters were only in certain, very specific parts of the country and would not be represented sufficiently in the constituency-based part of parliament.
So proposals about how to make constituencies based on sectors and not only geographic location were raised. But smaller parties were not convinced or perhaps they simply were just as confused as you are right now.
The path is complicated but the objective is simple: a prime minister cannot be a dictator but he also cannot be a prisoner to the whims of factions that make up a small portion of the Knesset.
Blocs of ideological factions are still deemed necessary to prevent a complete free-for-all but with part of the Knesset having been voted in via constituencies, such an MK hopefully would more likely say, “I don’t have to answer to a party boss or toe a party line. I have voters who specifically chose me and they will not vote for me again if I don’t put aside party politics and vote, yes, according to my conscience and what they expect from me.”
Think about various turning points in Israeli history, including right now, and think about how conflicts within our society could be resolved differently. There probably is no system that is perfect. Also, the problem is that politicians imprisoned in the current mindset are those who would have to vote for legislation to pass such a law enshrining a system of nationally-elected MKs serving alongside those elected by constituents.
But imagine if one day, the mindset could change.
The writer is the op-ed editor of The Jerusalem Post.