The Palestinian elections will probably take place next week as scheduled. Still, with the anarchy now rampant in Palestinian society, one never knows. Last-minute outbreaks of violence, or even of fraud and coercion on election day itself, could conceivably lead to canceling the vote, which is something that Abu-Mazen’s ruling Fatah Party, threatened with a Hamas victory, would gladly do if it thought it could get away with it.

And yet, although Palestinian politics are hardly a model for democracy, there is perhaps one thing that Israel, now in the midst of an electoral campaign of its own, might consider copying from them. This is their mixed electoral system whereby the 132 members of the Palestinian parliament stand to be chosen by two different methods: Half by proportional representation and half by direct vote.

Sixty-six of the Palestinian legislators, in other words, will be elected, as they are in countries like Israel and Italy, according to their place on nationwide party lists; if Party X, say, gets a third of all the votes, it will win 22 seats in parliament, which means that the first 22 members on its list will get in. The other 66 seats will be filled by individuals, whether party-affiliated or independents, running under their own names in districts like Ramallah, Bethlehem, etc., similar to the practice in countries like England and the United States. (The difference is that in the Palestinian system, more than one candidate will be chosen from each district.)

Why might a system like this be good for Israel? One might begin to answer this question by considering why the present system is bad.

National elections in Israel, from its establishment in 1948 until the present, have all been held on the basis of proportional representation, with parties being awarded the same percentage of seats in the 120-member Knesset that they receive in the national vote. In practice, this has made the central institutions of parties like Labor and Likud, which pick all candidates for the Knesset, all-powerful. It is as if the Republican and Democratic National Committees were to choose which politicians get to run for Congress and then to list them by order of preference, one to a 100 for the Senate, one to 435 for the House.

How many Americans would know who represented them, much less have anyone at the national level of government to whom they could ask for help with local issues, if such were the system in the United States? How many politicians in Washington would care about what is happening back home and about the opinions of the people living there if they didn’t have to be re-elected by them?

This is in effect the situation in Israel. And this not only means that the Israeli citizen living in Rehovot or Rosh Pina has no address in Jerusalem to turn to, it also means that capable young people are discouraged from entering national politics. You can get elected mayor of an Israeli town just as you can in an American town, by dint of your own abilities; yet moving any further up the political ladder means then devoting your time not to satisfying to your constituents, but to currying favor with party bosses and pols. It’s no wonder that so little political talent and vision make their way to the top in Israel, and that the country’s politics have over they years been so dependent on high officers entering them from the army, where ability is all that counts.

And at the same time, to the detriment of Israel’s political stability, all this results, paradoxically, in the constant splintering of national parties. The reason for this is simple. If a popular Republican congressman from Missouri, say, wishes to defy the Republican national leadership on a specific issue and vote with the Democrats, there is little that leadership can do but grin and bear it; our congressman knows that he can be returned to office by his constituents even if Ken Mehlman would like to put him out to pasture. Yet this also means that he will remain a Republican, since there are definite advantages and few disadvantages to having a national affiliation.

In Israel, on the other hand, a Knesset member who bucks his party on key issues has little chance of being re-nominated the next time elections come around. The logical conclusion? If you don’t get along with your party’s leaders, bolt it and start a new party while you are still in the Knesset and command the funding and prominence that this gives you.

And indeed, Israel’s political history is chock-full of this happening, the story of Ariel Sharon and Kadima, in which the bolter was the party’s leader, being a singular twist on a common occurrence. Thus, as opposed to the United States Congress, in which there only two parties but a great deal of latitude within them for individual initiative and differences, the Knesset has many parties with very little freedom for the members of any of them.

For years, Israel has debated and briefly experimented with electoral reform, but this debate has always centered on the direct election of the prime minister, rather than on that of Knesset members. This is understandable when one considers that the party machines that run the Knesset are hardly eager to weaken their own power – which is why the complete replacement of proportional representation by direct district elections seems a utopian proposition. Perhaps the best that can some day be hoped for is a half-and-half arrangement like the one the Palestinians are trying out now. If, that is, they ever get to the polls.

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