What Should Be Israel's Real Reform

With unilateral disengagement, the main and practically only campaign plank of Ehud Olmert's Kadima Party in last March's election, now dead in the water, electoral reform is shaping up as one of the main issues that will occupy the Olmert administration in its remaining term of office. Even though Mr. Olmert declared rather testily in a recent television interview that "a prime minister needs to run a country, not to have an agenda," he is well aware that a country runs better when its leaders know what they wish to accomplish. If this is not going to be disengagement, the prime minister needs something else to take its place.

And electoral reform is indeed something that Israel requires badly, if not quite as badly as it needs a respite from the Palestinians. Last March's election demonstrated this clearly. The voter turnout was the lowest in the country's history, slightly above 60% (over the years, Israel has had average turnouts of close to or over 80%), and the vote itself, conducted as usual according to Israel's system of proportional representation, resulted in an unprecedentedly fragmented nation and Knesset. Israel's traditionally two largest parties, Labor and Likud, which used to garner between them two-thirds of the Knesset's 120 seats, barely totaled half that amount. The election's "winner," Kadima, won only 29 seats, meaning that three out of four Israelis did not vote for it.

Proportional representation, whereby each party gets the same percentage of seats in parliament that it receives at the ballot box, is ultimately responsible in Israel both for the decline in voter interest and for the weakening of the larger parties. It has led to voter apathy because, since Israeli elections are not held by district, so that Israelis vote not for a specific candidate but for a national list proposed by each party, voters feel no connection to specific candidates, who are in turn dependent upon party bosses for their positions. And it has led to fragmentation and the growth of small, sectoral parties at the expense of the larger, more broadly based ones because even a small percentage of the national vote can translate into considerable strength in the Knesset.

Now that disengagement has fallen by the wayside, Mr. Olmert is negotiating with Avigdor Lieberman, the head of the anti-disengagement, right-wing Yisrael Beitenu Party, over the latter's entrance into Kadima's coalition government — and electoral reform, which has long been on Mr. Lieberman's agenda, is one of the topics that the two men reportedly have been discussing. This would be all to the good if the reform they are said to be thinking of were the right one. Unfortunately, it isn't.

Mr. Lieberman has for some time now been calling for the establishment in Israel of an American-style presidency that would replace the current prime-ministerial system, in which the chief executive is chosen not by popular vote, but by the Knesset. The reasoning on behalf of such a change is simple. Whereas dependence on a coalition involving many small parties pulling in different directions weakens the executive office and makes it difficult to govern, a president elected by the people and deposable only by impeachment does not have to pander to parliamentary politics. He can act on principle rather than according to political expediency without having constantly to worry about losing his job.

The problem is that although a strong, independent president may be what Mr. Lieberman thinks Israel needs — in fact, it may be what he thinks of himself as being at some point in the not too distant future — it is precisely what Israel does not need, certainly not if not balanced by a strong, independent parliament, the way an American president is balanced by Congress.

Yet Israel's failed experiment with election by popular vote of its prime minister, a system that prevailed, until its repeal, in the elections of 1996, 1998, and 2000, demonstrated just the opposite: This "reform" only weakened the political system further by encouraging voters to abandon the major parties and vote for narrowly defined, special-interest lists. After all, many voters told themselves, a Knesset that didn't choose the prime minister wasn't going to decide the fate of the nation anyway. In that case, why not vote in two different ways: once, for the good of the nation as a whole, in electing a prime minister; and once for the good of one's own narrow interests, or social or religious group, in choosing a Knesset list.

This is precisely what happened in these elections and what will happen again if Israel adopts an American-style presidential system. A powerful president with no strong legislative check is a danger to any democracy, much less to one as chaotic as Israel's.

What kind of electoral reform, then, does Israel need? The answer is: direct popular election not of a president or prime minister, but of Knesset members on a district basis. Such a system, whether only one representative per district is elected on a winner-take-all basis, as in America, or whether several are, would give Israelis the single most important thing that they have lacked in politics until now: a personal representative who is in office because of their votes, who is accountable to them, and who must meet their expectations while in office in order to be re-elected. It would also eliminate many small parties, which could never win or even come in second or third in any district, while strengthening the larger ones.

This is apparently the electoral reform that is about to be proposed by the Katsav Committee, a group of academics and public figures chosen by President Katsav to weigh possible changes in Israel's voting laws. It is so obviously desirable a change that one might wonder why it has never been implemented until now — until one recalls that many of the very parties in the Knesset that would have to enact it into law would be voting themselves out of existence if it passed. This is the real reason that genuine electoral reform has not gotten very far in Israel to this day.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.