Politics is not policy. Politics is about the fight for power; policy is about the fight to make things better.
For the past 12 months, under a highly improbable “unity” coalition, the news in Israel was very much about policy—about the fight to make things better. This followed two years of virtual paralysis as politics ruled and Israel went through four elections.
Now, with the fall of the “miracle” coalition, Israel is back to its political comfort zone, following events with the breathless excitement of watching a championship sporting event. The media has little choice but to play along: Who is winning? Who is losing? Who will be humiliated? Who will be redeemed?
Compared to such riveting drama, things like improving transportation in congested Tel Aviv, or investing in underdeveloped periphery towns, or addressing the rise in violence in Arab communities, or even just setting budgets, don’t stand a chance. This is the hard work and drudgery of setting policy, of compromising for a greater good, that the unity coalition engaged in during its year of living dangerously.
To put policy above politics, one must first put country above ideology. Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid did just that when they scraped together a razor-thin coalition of unlikely bedfellows, from the far right to the far left, even including an Arab Islamist party. The cynics rolled their eyes at the time, predicting the coalition “wouldn’t last five minutes.” It lasted 12 months.
Now that the divisions will once again dominate, we can only wish that a noble attempt to put country first will hold a rightful place in Israel’s collective memory.
It matters that the impetus for the coalition was a shared aversion to Benjamin Netanyahu, a ruthless political warrior under indictment for corruption. To stay on his throne, few things were off limits for Bibi. His overriding ideology is winning, even if he has to drag his country through five elections in three years.
Among his ruthless tactics, Bibi would pit groups against one another and attack his nation’s institutions. In fairness to Bibi, despite his hard-knuckle ways, he did some great things for his country, especially on the international front. But in the last two years of his tenure, when his legal troubles caught up to him and he failed over and over again to gather a majority coalition, the worst in him came out. It was Bibi first, everything else second.
Now, after an extraordinary interruption that will surely go down in history, the Israel of Bibi looms once again. This is the Israel where the right and far right and religious parties have enough seats to govern, and where the leader’s key mission is to stay in power, even if nearly half of the country feels disenfranchised.
Don’t be fooled by the argument that the right felt disenfranchised under the Bennett-Lapid coalition. The truth is that Bennett, who hails from the right, did nothing during his tenure to undermine traditional right-wing ideology. His innovation was to focus, along with his partner Lapid, on issues that went beyond ideology and applied to the whole country– things like health care, transportation, the economy, security and so on.
If anything, this was the landmark achievement of this coalition: a brief yet poignant reminder that despite the intense differences within Israeli society, there is more that unites them than divides them.
Now that the divisions will once again dominate, and the fight for political power will once again rule the airwaves, we can only wish that a noble attempt to put country first will hold a rightful place in Israel’s collective memory.
