The Progressive Silver Lining Around Israel’s Political Cloud

Years ago, my oldest daughter—now a human rights lawyer—spent 8^th grade in an Ultra-Orthodox elementary school in Atlanta (don’t ask; life takes strange turns). Rav Mordechai Eliyahu was going to be visiting the school, and the girls were making signs for the boys to hold when they would greet him.

“Why are you making signs for the boys?” I asked.

“Because they aren’t allowed to miss their Torah class,” she answered, making it clear that the girls’ Torah class was not a priority. (For the record, neither I nor her mother wanted to send her to this school; she requested it.)

“And why aren’t you making signs for yourselves too?” I asked, giving up on the previous point before I even really started.

“Because only the boys are going to be singing the cheer,” she answered.

“What cheer is that?” I asked.

“‘Yamim al yemei melekh tosif, shenotav ke-mo dor va-dor’ (‘Add days to the days of the king; may his years extend through generations’),” she sang, probably not aware it was a verse from Psalms (61:7) about the Davidic monarch.

“And only the boys get to sing this ditty to Rav Eliyahu?” I asked encouragingly (okay, not so encouragingly).

Knowing I couldn’t effect any change, but being the cantankerous old man of 33 that I was at the time, I complained to the teacher when I saw her next, something along the lines of “This chant to a gadol about his being a monarch is not my thing, but if you are going to teach this silliness to your students, at least I’d appreciate it if my daughter was included as well!”

Did I really want her to do messianic cheerleading? No, but what I wanted was for her to be treated as equal to the boys in the school. That, at least, would have been a silver lining to the event.

I think of this story today as I reflect on the existence of silver linings in what appears to me a very dark place in Israeli political history.

As a centrist with progressive values, I have found the current hard-right coalition to be a calamity. Even though most of the polls imply that this coalition will be unable to form the next government, the election remains close, and the positions they take reflect a large chunk of the country’s electorate. But instead of railing against that—I’ll have other op-eds for such dirges—I want to highlight the silver lining I’ve been seeing, namely, the progressive values that have seeped into the conservative side, with or without their noticing.

Women—About one quarter of the Knesset is women. Many of these are from Yesh Atid or Labor—center and left parties, and none at all from the Haredi parties, who do not allow women to serve. As for Likud, female representation there has dropped over the years from 11 (out of 36) in 2020, its high point, to 6 (out of 32) in the current Knesset, to 3 in the top 20 of their current slate—a drop from 31% to 15%. While the center and left parties—Yashar, Beyachad, and HaDemocratim—all have between 45% and 50% female representation in this same run, on one level we can say same old same old. And yet, it is worth noting some trends:

1. Bennett is a right-winger, and at the same time, he has long been an advocate of significant women’s representation, going back to when he partnered with Ayelet Shaked and continuing into this election. Of his 9 slots in the top 20 of Beyachad, his joint list with Lapid, 5 are women; of Lapid’s 11, 4 are.
2. Itamar Ben-Gvir’s number 2 in the extreme-right Otzma Yehudit party is Tally Gotliv. In 2022, Otzma’s only woman, Limor Son Har-Melech, was 13th on the joint list with Smotrich. Ben-Gvir did have a woman, Adva Biton, as his #2 once before, in September 2019, but that list failed to pass the threshold. Gotliv is the first woman in that slot on a list expected to enter the Knesset.
3. Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist party put a woman, Michal Waldiger, at #2 in 2021, and she was elected. In 2022 it had two women, Orit Strook and Michal Waldiger, and the former is still in a realistic slot (#3) for the next Knesset.
4. Ofer Winter’s right-wing Amcha Yisrael party has 3 women in the first 6 slots (though this party is unlikely to pass the threshold).
5. Einat Wilf, an important author and political thinker, is #3 in Yoaz Hendel and Yaron Zelekha’s Miluimnikim (Reservists) party.
6. Iman Khatib-Yassin, the first MK to wear a hijab, entered the Knesset in 2020 when Ra’am ran within the Joint List.
7. Most importantly, in Moti Leitner’s new Haredi Public party, the 3rd and 4th positions are women, Nechumi Yaffe and Ziva Glanz. This is a first for a male-led Haredi party. The only precedent is U’Bizchutan, a party of Haredi women that Ruth Colian founded in 2015 after Shas refused to let her run, and which won 1,802 votes. Though this party will not pass the threshold, it sends a strong and positive message that things are beginning to change.

Of course, it would have been nice if women headed some of the major parties this round (Sharren Haskel heads her new right-wing Israel First party, but it is polling below the threshold), but even the trend we’re seeing has meaning.

Arabs—Virtually all Jewish-led parties (with the exception of HaDemocratim) refuse to form a government that depends on Arab parties for its parliamentary majority. They extend this proscription even to Ra’am, although that party sat in the coalition in 2021-2022, and even before that, Netanyahu had negotiated with them, hoping for their support. While this certainly implies a continuing solid divider between Jewish and Arab politicians, there is a silver lining here too:

1. Ofer Winter’s right-wing Amcha Yisrael has Yosef Haddad, an Israeli Arab, as its #2. The irony: Winter refuses to sit with Arab parties at all while welcoming a Zionist Arab at the top of his list. That is limited inclusion, but it is inclusion.
2. Ra’am has Yoav Segalovitz, a Jewish former police commander, as its #2. While Ofer Cassif has been a member of Hadash for years, that is a secular, majority-Arab, communist party. Ra’am is an Islamist party, socially conservative, and Segalovitz is not a Muslim.
3. The phrasing many parties use, “not relying on Arab seats to form the government,” implies that those who use this language are open to sitting with them once a coalition is formed. It still keeps Arab parties out, but it hedges: out-ish, rather than out-out.

Gay representation—The left and center parties have unsurprisingly had several gay members. Meretz was first with Uzi Even (2002) and Nitzan Horowitz (2009), Labor with Itzik Shmuli (2013), Yesh Atid with Idan Roll (2019) and Yorai Lahav-Hertzanu (2019), and Blue and White with Eitan Ginzburg (2019). (Marcia Freedman from Shulamit Aloni’s Ratz party was before all of them, but she only came out after she left the Knesset.)

And yet, already in 2015, Likud brought on Amir Ohana, who is married to another man, and the couple have two children through a surrogate mother in Oregon. In 2019 he became Israel’s first openly gay minister (Justice). More than that, in 2022 he was elected Speaker of the Knesset by 63 votes, essentially the entire coalition, including Likud’s openly anti-gay partners. This round he is #3 on Likud’s list. And Eitan Ginzburg, Israel’s first openly gay mayor, is #8 on Beyachad, one of Bennett’s own picks.

None of what I note above is meant to convey that the coalition is somehow progressive or liberal. They are exactly what they seem to be. And yet, the goal posts are moving, quietly. This is the cloud’s silver lining.