Boston Globe: Israel's broken politics

I have been reading columns and articles bemoaning problems with the Israeli political system for 48 years. Here is the latest from the Boston Globe.

Israel's broken politics

February 13, 2009

ISRAEL has enough troubles without having to cope with a dysfunctional political system. Yet that is exactly what Israelis are now struggling to do in the aftermath of Tuesday's general election. This was a democratic exercise in which the winner, Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni, is almost certain to end up the loser, while the loser, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, will likely form the next government with a melange of partners he would rather not have.

This knot of contradictions is the result of some arcane rules: A political party needs only to surpass 2 percent of the votes cast to gain seats in the Knesset, so special-interest and extremist parties gain undue influence - sometimes enough to make or break a government. Using political blackmail, they can extract from the larger parties excessive budgetary favors or a veto over crucial national-security decisions. [To read the entire article, click here.]

The usual logic of this discussion concludes that Israeli gridlock makes peace impossible and that the USA has no any ability to do anything about it

• even though the whole world quite justifiably hates the State of Israel,
• even though the Zionist State is completely dependent on the USA for its continued existence, and
  
• even though the USA had no problems with overthrowing the far less obnoxious Iraqi Baathist regime.

At some point, one has to consider the possibility that Israeli political gridlock is a red herring.

The blog entry Peninsulares versus Criollos explains the irrelevancy of Israeli politics by arguing that external Zionist intellegentsia and political economic oligarchy form the real leadership of the Zionist system, of which the State of Israel is the keystone but hardly the only or even the most important component.

Keeping Israeli politics broken makes sure that the real Zionist leaders will face no challenges by an Israeli Jewish politician that might use an argument with Zionist legitimacy against the external oligarchy and the intelligentsia.

If the Israeli political process were not biased toward gridlock and if such a criollo leader could gather sufficient political power to consider policies independent of the oligarchy, the oligarchs would simply use their wealth to support more compliant candidates in the national elections.

From the standpoint of the oligarchs, a dysfunctional political system is preferable simply because it is cheaper.

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