Editor’s Note: Those of you who read last week’s post will be relieved to hear that, after driving the car to shul last Friday afternoon, I then remembered, on Saturday evening after shul, not only that I had taken the car but also, more remarkably, where I had parked, so that I arrived home on time with no mishaps whatsoever. Positive thinking is all about acknowledging one’s small triumphs. Thank you for listening.

I write to you this week in a fairly depressed state. I have been witness, over the last couple of weeks, to a number of events that have saddened and worried me. But first, a little dry factual background.

I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of Israel’s rather convoluted system for calculating, after the votes have all been counted, the allocation of seats between parties. Suffice to say that the Israeli electoral system is a fixed-list direct proportional representation system, with an electoral threshold and using the Bader-Ofer (known to the wider world as the Hagenbach-Bischoff (de-Hondt)) method of allocating excess votes to parties and also to alliances of two parties that have agreed in advance to pool their excess votes. All clear so far?

All of the above is designed, principally, to reduce the number of parties represented in the Knesset, and to create a smaller number of larger parties. In this election, of the 40(!) parties that contested the election, 13 received enough votes to gain at least one seat, but, because of the electoral threshold, only 10 will actually sit in the Knesset. The system also tends to have the effect of favouring the larger parties, for reasons that I won’t go into.

After all the votes were counted, and the complex calculations carried out, the final result looked like this, for the four parties that went on to form the coalition.

Party	Votes	% of Valid Votes	# of Seats
Likud	1,115,336	23.41%	32
Religious Zionism-Otzma Yehudit	516,470	10.84%	14
Shas	392,964	8.25%	11
United Torah Judaism	280,194	5.88%	7

There are a couple of points that I want to emphasise here. Obviously, this coalition can be characterized as a right-wing religious coalition; however, each of the constituent parties has a very different interpretation of what religious means, and also what right-wing means.

Those of us brought up in a two- or three-party system are used to a situation in which, even though a wide range of positions are represented in any given party, there is usually a broad recognition within the party of a consensus within which everyone is happy to work. I would argue that the previous government, whose range of parties was arguably wider than that of the present government, nevertheless created a unity of purpose by recognizing, and focusing on, the consensus.

In the current government, by contrast, it became very clear as negotiations progressed between Likud (whose leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, was charged with attempting to form a government) and each of the other parties, that none of those other parties had any intention of compromising on its narrow and small constituency’s partisan agenda.

For those of you who are balking at the word ‘small’, let me point out that the Religious Zionism–Otzma Yehudit list (a list formed from three parties whose leading figures are Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Avi Maoz) won just under 11% of the vote, and has under 12% of the seats in the Knesset.

Similarly, the two ultra-orthodox lists (Shas and United Torah Judaism) together won under 15% of the vote, and ended up with just 15% of the Knesset seats.

All of which makes me upset to hear supporters of Smotrich or Ben-Gvir speaking about them representing the will of the people. They, and the ultra-orthodox parties, are in the coalition only because they are the parties that are prepared to sit in a Government led by Netanyahu as Prime Minister, and because when their 32 seats are added to the Likud’s 32 (each 32 seats representing under 27% of the vote), the total is 64.

I have no doubt at all that Bibi would be much more comfortable forming a government with the ultra-religious parties and, for example, Benny Gantz’s National Unity party, a centrist party to the left of the Likud, which would offer him the possibility of being able to temper both ultra-religious extremism because of the need to keep Gantz in the government, and centrist-left policies, because of the need to keep the ultra-orthodox sweet.

To watch the Government coalition being formed was a painful and nationally humiliating exercise. None of the other parties in the coalition trusts Bibi an inch, which is a tribute to his serial treachery in forging coalitions in the past. (Smotrich was even caught on microphone calling Netanyahu ‘a liar and the son of a liar’.) These parties insisted in having all of their demands met up front and in writing (although it has to be said that, on past form, that may not be any guarantee of good faith). So we watched a parade of blatantly ad hominem laws rushed through even before the government was formed.

The most outrageous is probably the blatantly-called Deri law, which amends the Basic Law that previously prevented a person convicted of an offence involving moral turpitude from being appointed as a minister within ten years. Because Deri resigned from the Knesset, he avoided the need for the court to rule on the question of moral turpitude.

He then negotiated a plea bargain, admitting a string of tax offences and accepting a fine and a suspended prison sentence. The law has now been amended to prevent only a person who has actually served a prison sentence for such a crime from serving as a minister. (Of course, Deri served a prison sentence after earlier conviction for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, but that was over ten years ago!)

So, Deri will now serve for two years as Vice Prime Minister (unfortunate terminology, it has to be said), Minister of Health and Minister of the Interior and Periphery, and then become Minister of Finance. I genuinely don’t know how to follow that statement!

Leaving aside the unashamed brazenness of Deri himself, I am, to be honest, more disgusted to see the depths to which Netanyahu is prepared to drag the name of the Israeli state in order to form a coalition. I wish I could escape the conviction that his over-riding aim is simply to secure the quashing, out of court, of the criminal case against him, but, so far, I haven’t succeeded.

This is, perhaps, the moment to remind you of Ambrose Bierce’s definition of ‘politics’ in his The Devil’s Dictionary: ‘Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage’. (And he was talking about parties contesting an election, not parties coming together to form a coalition!)

I honestly believe that Bierce’s definition does not apply to Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. They are, I fear, something altogether more frightening: ideologues. Smotrich is now Finance Minister and a minister within the Defence Ministry, with increased control over settlement and other policies in Yehuda and Shomron. He has a long history of statements that it is very difficult not to categorize as racist; he is also a self-declared, and was an activist, homophobe.

He has attempted to excuse some of his more outrageous statements by arguing that he ‘responded inattentively’. Whatever qualities one looks for in a minister within the Defence Ministry, ‘inattentive responses’ are not, to my mind, among them. I would also be looking for ideology to be balanced by pragmatism.

I turn now, with heavy heart, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, who will serve as the country’s national security minister in an expanded version of the public security portfolio, with unprecedented control over Israel’s police. Ben-Gvir makes no secret of his admiration for Meir Kahane, the cofounder of the Jewish Defense League who was convicted of terrorism in America and who served one term in the Knesset before his party was banned for its racist position.

Ben-Gvir is also known to have had a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. (He apparently removed the portrait after he entered politics.)

Of all the things that have saddened me over the last weeks, the most personally upsetting has been the number of people in our modern orthodox Jewish religious circle that have not expressed outrage or even undue concern over all that has happened in the process of forming a government. They would, I believe, argue that the end – achieving a religious Zionist government (if you can classify the incoming government as either Zionist, given the disproportionate influence of the ultra-orthodox parties within it, or religious, given that the majority Likud is a traditional, but not religious, party) – justifies the means by which it is achieved.

My conviction is that the moral and ethical price that will be paid by the government, and ultimately the nation, in achieving that end is far too high. There comes a point where sacrificing your principles for the sake of advancing your principles is a pointless exercise.

Nothing in Netanyahu’s actions over his last five terms as Prime Minister gives the slightest hint that he shares the views of Smotrich or Ben-Gvir about the direction the state should move in the areas of Jewish-Arab relations, religious-secular relations or the LGBT+ community. I am sure that he believes that he will be able to control and rein in their excesses. I have seen enough of his political nous over the last decades to sustain a hope that he will be able to. (Bernice does not share my very cautious optimism.)

I suspect that Netanyahu’s game plan is to keep the coalition together long enough to legislate for the changes necessary to make his trial go away. In the meantime, it can almost be guaranteed that the security situation will deteriorate. He will then plan to tie Smotrich’s and Ben-Gvir’s hands until they threaten to leave the Government. He will not relent, and, when they leave, he will turn to Benny Gantz and invite him, with his 12 seats to join the Government, for the sake of national unity.

Gantz was, of course, enticed into a previous Netanyahu government on the same premise, with the promise of alternate prime ministership. Whether he will allow himself to risk being humiliated in this way a second time I do not know. However, if Netanyahu pulls that off, he will have proved himself Israel’s greatest prime minister – at least in the Machiavellian sense – and he will find himself exactly where he wants to be, at the centre of a coalition whose extremes he can moderate in the name of maintaining the Government.

Next week, I promise something light and fluffy. Perhaps a piece on different ways of threading laces in shoes. Meanwhile, I can only hope that the public world our grandchildren build will be an altogether better place. Now there’s a big ask!