These days, Israeli politics are focused on political and legal issues surrounding the choice of Knesset speaker, for the sake of passing personalized legislation that would keep Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from forming a government or running for election again. This legislation appears to have been part of a wider plan to form a minority government through a dubious alliance with the Joint Arab List, which rejects the Jews' right to self-determination in Israel. It was thwarted thanks to the integrity of a few "rebels" among the Blue and White MKs, as well as Gesher leader Orly Levy-Abekasis.
Supposedly, Blue and White is in a wretched situation – apparently unable to establish a minority government but capable of passing laws to block Netanyahu, which the party rebels will indeed support. But if it passes them, thereby torpedoing any chance of an emergency government, the party will drag us into a fourth election, coronavirus permitted. When that happens, the fraud perpetrated against voters who are outraged at the alliance with the Joint Arab List and the lost possibility of an emergency government could hurt the list badly. The Likud could rebound and revoke the law against Netanyahu, enabling him to form a government.
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But too few people are seeing the signs of a Plan B from Blue and White: They want to use their alliance with the anti-Zionist parties to pass a law to hold a direct election of a prime minister that would also bar Netanyahu from running in said election. The plan will be presented as a way out of a political draw, or, in other words, a national solution. In an interview on Sunday, Blue and White No. 2 Yair Lapid gave the impression that this was the working plan while Benny Gantz would still be trying in vain to form a government.
For anyone who has forgotten this harmful election system, voters are invited to vote twice: once for prime minister, and a second time for a Knesset list. Sometimes, an election can be held for prime minister only. This hybrid system of voting, when it was in place, broke down Israel's representational system and made it much less stable. Israeli politics still hasn't recovered. It is one of the reasons for the comparative weakness of our governing parties.
The nihilistic mood that has seized Blue and White might have given them hope of instituting a structural change in Israeli politics by giving Arabs voting for the prime minister the power to arbitrate between Left and Right. They see the model of the US Democratic Party, and want a coalition with an Arab minority against the Right on Election Day, but not afterward.
There is either blindness or malice here, because American patriotism is fundamentally different from patriotism here, be it Jewish or Arab: the American version developed within the nation, whereas the patriotic alignment of Israel's Arab and Jewish citizens existed before any state did. This is the deep-seated historic reality, and it cannot be changed through legislation. Therefore, the Jewish, democratic state gives personal rights and rights of language and religion to minorities whose patriotic alignment cannot be doubted. But Israel cannot grant them collective national rights, as the vision document that shaped the Joint Arab List's platform demands. The entire region is full of Arab national states, including one (Jordan) and a demi-one (the Palestinian Authority), which are comprised of Palestinian Arabs. Anyone who demands that Israel meet the national requirements of these Arab citizens is in effect proposing to leave the Jews without collective national rights anywhere in the world, because the ultimate conditions of this Arab region will gradually turn this country into an Arab one.
The status of arbitrators between Right and Left in Israel that direct elections for the prime minister would give to Arab voters would herald the Arabization of Israel, to the point where the name of the country would be changed – as may Arabs hope it will – and a stop to the process of Israelization that is taking place among Arabs, as contradictory as that might be. In truth, the Arab leadership's main project is to stop the process of Israelization.
On the Jewish side, making the Arab voter the arbitrator between Left and Right will usher in a general collapse, alienation, and hatred that will make the current tensions look like child's play. The idea of holding direct elections for the prime minister in order to get rid of the Right is playing with fire. No one should discount how the majority of Israelis will respond to this dangerous foolishness. The idea has been twinkling recently in the anarcho-nihilist circles that call themselves the Israeli "Left," and on their social media and their local paper Ha'aretz, creating the impression that politicians like Lapid and Ofer Shelah are planning to hold onto the plan as they slide down a slippery slope.
