Israel First, Citizens Last
Sharren Haskel has proposed an elegant solution to Israel’s democratic deadlock: everyone may vote, but not every vote may be allowed to govern.
Her proposed role for Israel First is remarkably clear. The party would prevent Benjamin Netanyahu from rebuilding his familiar alliance with the ultra-Orthodox parties, prevent Gadi Eisenkot from forming a government dependent on Arab parties, exclude Yair Golan, and then compel Netanyahu and Eisenkot to govern together. The language is one of healing, competence, responsibility and national unity. The mechanism is a prior decision about which elected representatives are politically admissible.
This is not merely coalition strategy. It establishes a hierarchy between votes before the votes are even cast.
Arab citizens may participate in elections, but their representatives are not to be permitted to convert those votes into governmental power. Haredim may participate, but their parties become unacceptable when their political price grows too high. The Jewish left may win seats, but parts of it can be excluded as insufficiently Zionist. Netanyahu, however, remains available for government.
Political legitimacy no longer follows from citizenship, elections or parliamentary representation. It is granted through ideological certification. Some mandates are considered capable of producing government; others are treated as numerical residue. The ballot remains equal only until it threatens to become effective.
This mechanism deserves more than electoral analysis because it touches a deeper question about Jewish political form. We have allowed ourselves to be absorbed too completely by the modern grammar of sovereignty: survival, majority, force and national necessity. In doing so, we risk forgetting one of the strongest disciplines of Jewish thought: every human form must remain exposed to criticism precisely when it begins to speak as though it were revealed truth.
No government, party, majority or state becomes sacred because it calls itself Jewish. It makes no difference whether the claim arrives dressed as religion, security, liberal competence or national unity. The moment a political formula presents itself as unquestionable, Jewish thought should become most suspicious of it.
Less than eighty years of statehood is a brief episode. Jewish presence, memory and argument belong to a far longer duration. Our task cannot therefore be to defend every form Israel assumes merely because Israel has assumed it. We must submit that form to judgment before it hardens into an idol.
The exclusion proposed by Israel First creates two electoral realities. In the first, Jewish votes are presumed to possess governing capacity. In the second, Arab votes are valid for counting but suspect when they begin to influence the distribution of power.
Arab citizens are not expelled from democracy. That would be too crude and too honest. They remain inside it as proof that democracy exists, while their representatives are excluded from the executive consequences democracy is supposed to produce. Their votes may decorate the system. They must not determine it.
A state does not need to abolish universal suffrage in order to neutralize part of its citizenry. It need only separate the right to vote from the right to participate in the formation of power. Elections can remain formally intact while political effectiveness is reserved for those already recognized as belonging to the legitimate national camp.
The phrase “Zionist majority” performs precisely this operation. It does not simply describe a parliamentary majority composed of Zionist parties. It establishes Zionism as a threshold of political usability. Citizenship supplies the ballot; ideological admissibility decides whether that ballot may matter.
Once this principle is accepted, democracy becomes a ceremony conducted inside boundaries determined in advance. Citizens choose among parties, but an unelected political consensus decides which results may be translated into government. The public is sovereign only within the range of outcomes already approved by the guardians of national legitimacy.
The irony is almost too exact. Haskel has now been summoned to give open testimony after stating that coalition lawmakers were instructed to film their supposedly secret ballots for Netanyahu’s preferred candidate for state comptroller. She is not accused of ordering it, and the conflicting accounts remain under investigation. Yet the structural resemblance is difficult to ignore. A ballot may remain formally free while the acceptable result is supervised in advance.
Israel First proposes to enlarge that logic: from the monitored ballot of the legislator to the politically sterilized ballot of the citizen.
The case of Netanyahu exposes the obscenity of the arrangement. Haskel presents her proposal as a way to move beyond politics centered on one man. Yet the proposed structure does not remove Netanyahu. It removes or replaces the partners around him.
Netanyahu is not defended. He is disinfected.
The ultra-Orthodox parties are identified as the source of dysfunction, removed from the coalition table and replaced with respectable generals, centrists and former opponents. The system may then announce that it has changed because the furniture around the prime minister has been rearranged.
This is not an alternative to Netanyahu. It is the laundering of Netanyahu through national unity.
The operation succeeds by redefining accountability as obsession. Anyone who insists that Netanyahu’s record remains politically decisive can be accused of concentrating on “one person.” Anyone who refuses to join him can be accused of placing resentment above the national interest. Responsibility becomes divisiveness, memory becomes vindictiveness, and capitulation becomes maturity.
Netanyahu does not need to win this argument himself. His opponents are invited to complete it for him.
Elections would then cease to answer the question of who should govern. They would determine only which respectable opposition figures would be recruited to stabilize the same political center. A vote for change could be converted into a mandate for continuity, provided continuity arrived wearing the language of reconciliation.
This is why the proposal is not simply another centrist fantasy. It identifies an emerging constitutional instinct in Israeli politics: the state may preserve the ritual of democratic choice while restricting the political consequences of citizenship.
The disturbing element is not that politicians seek advantage. That is ordinary politics. It is that the exclusion of elected representatives is presented as the overcoming of division. A government constructed by declaring entire categories of citizens unfit for partnership will be called broad. A coalition designed to neutralize the electoral meaning of Arab citizenship will be called responsible. The preservation of Netanyahu will be called depersonalization.
Language performs the final act of purification. Exclusion becomes unity. Impunity becomes stability. Political surrender becomes healing.
Perhaps Israel First is more accurately named than its founders realize. The state comes first not merely before private interests, but before the political agency of its own citizens. Israel is treated as a form whose survival authorizes the prior selection of those permitted to shape it.
But a Jewish state that places itself beyond Jewish criticism has already misunderstood the tradition it invokes. Jewish thought does not exist to sanctify accomplished power. It exists, among other things, to interrupt every human institution that begins to confuse its own necessity with revelation.
The question is therefore no longer whether this proposal would produce a stable coalition. The question is what kind of state regards the votes of some citizens as politically sterile while preserving the admissibility of a leader it claims to have moved beyond.
Perhaps this is no longer merely a deformation of Israeli democracy. Perhaps it is the Israel a substantial part of the country increasingly wishes to become: a state that retains elections while limiting what elections are allowed to change; a state that counts citizens without accepting the consequences of their citizenship; an Israel convinced that democracy can remain in the shop window while power is reserved for those certified as nationally acceptable.
Perhaps the crisis is not that Israeli democracy is failing to protect its original form. Perhaps this is the form now being chosen.
Israel comes first. Its citizens come afterward. Accountability does not come at all.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
