Liberate yourself from the political definitions of yesterday

A Passover tradition calls on us to identify the restrictions that contained us in the previous year so that we may liberate ourselves from those same restrictions in the year to come. This year, my hope is that we find a way to liberate ourselves and our societies from the political definitions that cause so much polarization, so much unnecessary strife: the categories of Left and Right.

In Israel, Left and Right have come to symbolize distinct societies. Each has its own derogatory view of the other: the Right claims the Left are traitors, willing to sell out Jewish interests for misguided universalistic ideals that put Israel at risk. The Left views the Right as supremacists, applying the same racist behaviors to non-Jews as Jews suffered for centuries in exile. The Right claims the Left forgot what it means to be Jewish, the Left claims the Right forgot what it means to be Zionist.

The Right claims the Left is blocking its ability to govern with the deep state. The Left claims the Right has been in power for nearly two decades and has thoroughly corrupted the system.

And so on. None of it is entirely true, of course. Yet these prejudices are repeated nearly daily, tearing our society apart.

Those who seek to break from this polarization claim to be Centrists, and, in doing so, reify the Left-Right spectrum by staying within its narrow confines. They call for resilience, for unity, for common sense politics – and have lost the battle for hearts and minds again and again and again. In a world where the polar opposites are so radically opposed, the center has not held.

If we are to learn anything from the Seder and the Haggadah’s insistence on framing the story of our liberation, how we explain the past and present determines how the future is crafted.

For example, once we free ourselves from the Left-Right paradigm, we can observe that the current government led by Benjamin Netanyahu is the most socialist government in over half a century: more money is being redistributed from the makers to the takers than ever before. Calling Yesh Atid centrist covers up the extremely capitalist economic policies at the party’s core, a finance-friendly worldview that most social democrats would find an anathema in any other context. Adhering to the terms Left and Right leads us to forget that Netanyahu funded Hamas knowingly and willingly, while Yair Golan literally threw himself into the breach to defend our country and its citizens while our leadership hid in their holes.

This is the Mitzrayim, what the Sages explained as the narrow straits or mental confines, that we need to break from during this holiday of liberation.

I believe a better way for us to define our politics is on the spectrum between Concentrated leadership and Distributed leadership, or to give us a spectrum, Vertical vs Horizontal leadership.

Those who believe in Vertical leadership hold that the wisest and most successful knows best and should make decisions for the rest of us. Like many of the parties that make up Netanyahu’s coalition, parties where a small number of rabbinic figures determine policy based on their perceived wisdom. Vertical cultures believe leadership, once earned, deserves loyalty. The leader knows best.

Those who believe in Horizontal leadership, on the other hand, hold that each individual shares agency and should have the right to determine their wellbeing. Horizonal cultures believe in distributed leadership and depends on laws made in broad agreement upheld by civil servants who aspire to impartiality. Horizonal cultures seek to devolve the decisions affecting everyday life to the individual and their community, to spread power out to the edges so that no one person or special interest group can coerce individuals by amassing control.

If we view Israel’s political history though this political spectrum, we can better explain why so many on today’s Right are comparing themselves to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion: the Left was originally Vertical, and Begin’s Right Horizontal. Which is why so many of the classic Likud oppose the current government’s attempts to concentrate power, and why Netanyahu’s government literally rests on the votes of orthodox and ultra-Orthodox parties whose devotion to vertical rule by their Rabbinic councils is near complete.

Israel has at most two more years before its next elections. As the past five elections have proven, our existing parties arrayed along the spectrum of Right to Left are in deadlock. Yet more than 70 percent of Israelis oppose the Vertical culture that Netanyahu represents, oppose the concentration of power in the hands of the few.

We need a new political movement to represent that commonality. A new political alliance to further Israelis’ commitment to the distribution of power, to rebuild our state institutions to protect the ethos of personal freedom, to prevent us from ever returning to these narrow straits.