Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on January 27, 2015

For a Fractious Nation, a Splintered Knesset Works Best

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Diverging Opinions: Israels Knesset, where its contentious politics plays out.

Jewish suffragettes scored a signal achievement in 1920, when the first nationwide elections were held in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. They received 600 votes.

This smattering of women we may presume that nearly all of them were women went to their polling places and chose, from among nearly two dozen others, the slip of paper designating the slate of the Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights. Six hundred votes constituted less than 1% of the Yishuvs total population at the time. They equaled just 2% of the eligible voters in the Yishuv and less than 3% of the votes cast.

But those 600 votes entitled the womens party to five of the 314 seats in the assembly. Two other members of the union were elected on the slates of other factions, and seven other women entered the Assembly of Representatives, as the Yishuvs legislature was called, on the lists of the labor parties. Together these 14 women constituted a womens rights caucus in this forerunner of Israels Knesset. Paradoxically, they had been elected provisionally, before women had in fact been officially granted the right to vote and to serve in elective office. The Yishuvs religious and Haredi communities opposed womens suffrage widely. Had these women not been a salient presence in the legislature, it is quite likely that those rights, finally granted formally five years later, would not have been recognized for many years thereafter.

The womens party was able to gain representation thanks to the proportional electoral system instituted by the Yishuv leadership. Its a system that remained in use throughout the pre-state years and was adopted by the State of Israel. And, with minor modifications, its the method by which Israels citizens will choose their new Knesset on March 17 of this year. Its a system thats been widely criticized inside and outside Israel for encouraging factionalism and granting small sectoral and ideological factions inordinate bargaining power which, supposedly, an American style system does not. Yet, for all its flaws, it is the best possible basis for our countrys democratic government.

The Yishuvs suffragettes stand as proof. Although a womens right to vote now seems inalienable, at the time, the British Mandate administration put pressure on the Yishuv leadership to sacrifice womens rights on the altar of national unity.

The Mandate administration was charged with creating a Jewish national home in Palestine. But to do so, the new rulers needed a body that represented the countrys Jews all of them. Creating such a body required reaching a consensus among the Jews on how it would be structured and, most important, how it would be chosen. As with any Jewish polity from a synagogue upward, there were more opinions than voters and more factions than voters fingers and toes. Most important, there was a fundamental division in the Yishuv. On the one side was what was called the Old Yishuv, the Haredim, with whom the religious Zionists allied themselves. On the other was the New Yishuv the Zionist immigrants who had founded Tel Aviv and the moshavot, as well as vibrant Hebrew-speaking Zionist communities in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem.

In imagining a Jewish polity and its governance, the Old and New Yishuvs looked in different directions. The religious Jews looked to the Bible and Talmud, while the Zionists looked to the democracies of the United States and Western Europe. In Jewish tradition, including the self-governing Jewish institutions of Eastern Europe, women did not vote. In Western democracies, women were demanding the vote and, increasingly, receiving it. In fact, Zionism was a pioneer in this regard: Women voted for and were elected to its governing body, beginning with the Second Zionist Congress of 1898.

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Why Israels Crazy Electoral System Might Be Best Idea Ever

Category: Talmud
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