Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig – The Jewish Heritage & Israel: Tribal Partying

“Political Culture” is deep-rooted – sometimes so deep that uprooting it proves impossible. Contemporary Israeli politics and society might seem to be light years away from the biblical era (and the rest of Jewish Diaspora history), but that’s an optical illusion. If anything, from a societal (and “political”) standpoint, modern Israel has long been reverting to its biblical pattern, perhaps never having completely lost its connection to yesteryear.

A short historical recapitulation: the Jewish People started out as the twelve sons of Jacob, with sibling rivalry leading to some pretty dramatic twists and turns. Later in the desert, the tribes became so obstreperous that God called them a “stiff-necked people”; to prove Him correct, they occasionally even fought and killed each other (e.g., the Golden Calf episode). Two and half tribes decided to settle across the Jordan River, separating themselves from the rest. Later, civil war broke out between most of Israel and the tribe of Benjamin over the senseless murder of a concubine. Once the monarchy was established, it lasted no more than a century before breaking up into two “kingdoms” – ultimately ten tribes “disappearing” into Assyrian exile. Centuries later the Second Temple was destroyed as the Romans ended Jewish sovereignty because the various Jewish sects – Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, Sicari (Assassins), and others – couldn’t get along (understatement!). And from there the Jews spread out over the world, gradually distancing from each other ethnically, socially, politically, and even halakhically: Sfardim, Mizrachim, Ashkenazim, Karaites, Shabbtai Zvi adherents (Messianists), Hassidim vs. Mitnagdim (the latter split between Galicians and Lithuanians), Bundists, and others.

Is it any wonder, then, that when Herzl convened the First World Zionist Congress in 1897, numerous “sectors” showed up, each with their own “Zionist” ideology/theology? By the time the Zionist Movement in Palestine held its first local elections (Assembly of Representatives in 1920), the only option to maintain some sort of inclusivity among all the factions was to establish a system of total proportional representation. And they outdid even the bible: NINETEEN “parties” were elected!

And so it has gone ever since, with the number of political parties garnering enough votes for a seat in the Knesset (post-1949) usually fluctuating between ten and fifteen – this, among thirty to forty parties that try to get elected! In short, Israel’s contemporary electoral muddle is not something new, but rather a continuation – some new wine in very old bottles – of the Jewish People’s political culture and Zionism’s institutional structure from the very start of both.

Most people decry this “balagan” (mess) and seek solutions. One of these was to raise the vote threshold for party electorability – from 1% to 3.25%. That has been only a very mild success, as the number of elected parties still remains at around ten (not coincidentally, the Jewish “minyan” required for communal prayer). Another “solution” tried and quite quickly abandoned in the 1990s and early 2000s was to directly elect the prime minister, but the double ballot led to further fracturing of the party setup! If in the 1980s the largest party would garner close to 50 seats out of 120, by the 2000s the most successful party could barely scrape together 30 seats (a mere 25% of the national vote).

In any event, these are band-aids on a serious wound: Israeli social cleavages are not some passing phenomenon but rather constitute endemic differences – not only of “opinions” but of ways of life and perceptions as to how Israeli society should work: from anti-democratic, Jewish-theocratic all the way to non-Jewish, liberal-universalistic, with many shades of Jewish/Democracy combinations in the middle.

And as if this were not enough, there’s another central aspect to Jewish political culture going all the way back to biblical times: non-Jews! Jacob “purchasing” Esau’s birthright; Simon and Levi slaughtering Shechem for raping Dinah; 80% of those leaving Egypt were non-Jews (“erev rav”); the seven “Canaanite” nations that had to be conquered but remained in the Land of Israel; King Saul against Amalek; Baal worship throughout the era of Judges and Kings; Ezra forcing the Jews who did not go into Babylonian exile to divorce their Gentile wives; Hellenization (the Maccabees against the pro-Seleucids); mass Jewish conversion to Christianity; and so on.

Which brings us to last week’s headlines: Mansour Abbas’s speech (in Hebrew!) to the Israeli public, calling for “unity” between the Jewish and Arab sectors in Israeli society and politics – and the bewildering reactions: right-wing PM Netanyahu trying to bring Abbas’s RAAM party into the coalition; Bibi’s erstwhile allies (even more extremely right-wing) Smotrich and Ben-Gvir emphatically nixing such a coalition; the center-left parties inviting RAAM to form a coalition with them, after having refused to do so after the previous election. Such confusion is also a reflection of Jewish history’s inconsistent approach to Gentile, cultural-political “approachability threats”.

Mark Twain was supposed to have opined (he didn’t): “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure rhymes…”. Current Israeli politics is an excellent example of this – exceptional and very familiar at one and the same time. As the French are wont to say: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – what goes around, comes around. Around 3000+ years to be exact….