The Coalition of Hopkins Activists for Israel (CHAI) held an Israeli election party at Hopkins Hillel on Monday to prompt students to discuss topics surrounding Israeli politics in preparation for the country’s March 17 elections.
Senior Ariel Goldschlag, a member of CHAI, said the purpose of the event was to help inform students on Israeli politics.
“The Israeli elections were coming up, and we thought that not everyone knew about the different parties,” Goldschlag said. “We know that it’s a very important issue, and we want to help inform people of the decision that’s being made in Israel and what different parties are running. We can see it’s a little more complicated than Democrats and Republicans.”
Israel has a parliamentary system of government in which the Knesset, or the legislative body, elects the Prime Minister, who serves as the head of the Israeli government. Knesset members are elected using a system of party-list proportional representation, wherein voters cast their ballots for a party and seats are appointed to each party in proportion to the number of votes that it receives.
Unlike the United States, which has a winner-take-all system that favors large political parties, the Israeli system allows for small parties to have members seated in the Knesset. In Israel, a party needs at least 3.25 percent of the national vote in order to get members seated in the Knesset. Elections are being held earlier than their scheduled date this year due to a collapse of the government’s ruling coalition.
“[Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu tried to pass a Jewish State bill,” senior Lindsay Bauer said. “Some people in the government weren’t so happy about it and didn’t think it should pass, so Netanyahu was fighting with other people in his political party and kicked them out. And now they’re going to elections, because there is no longer a majority coalition.”
The Jewish State bill would have codified into law that the State of Israel is the home of the Jewish people. The bill states that Israel is the place for the Jewish people to pursue self-determination and that Jewish religious law is the inspiration for Israeli law. The Bill also enshrines Jewish religious holidays as national holidays and would make Hebrew the sole official language of the state. As a result, the bill would list Arabic as a language with special status.
The bill, supported by Netanyahu and the right-wing Likud party, has generated fierce controversy, with critics claiming that it puts Israel’s status as a Jewish state above its status as a democracy. The resulting disagreements within the governing coalition led Netanyahu to oust some leftist ministers and necessitated early elections. CHAI members said that corruption and economic issues were the most prominent matters in this election.
“There’s a lot of financial corruption in the government,” Bauer said. “Economically, people in Israel are struggling, and they want more transparency in where their money is going and what the government is using it on.”
Goldschlag agreed that Israel’s population is going into this election with economic issues in mind.
“It’s about improving the economic situation, a lot like the last American election,” said Goldschlag. “We saw with the last election that Israelis are more focused on fiscal concerns and repairing the economy than anything else in particular.” CHAI posted sheets explaining the ideologies of the plethora of political parties and the leaders of each one. Students could then write the name of their preferred party on a note and slip it into a box.
The winning party in CHAI’s mock election was Likud, and the Zionist Union, an electoral alliance between the leftist Labor and Hatnuah parties, came in second. Goldschlag said that this matched most predictions for the results of the actual Israeli elections.
Because of Israel’s system of proportional representation, smaller parties have the chance of being in the governing coalition or even having one of their members become prime minister if the other parties decide that one of their candidates is the best option. Some other notable parties running in the election include The Jewish Home, a right-leaning religious party led by Minister of the Economy Naftali Bennett, and Yesh Atid, a centrist secular party led by former journalist Yair Lapid.
“Last election, it was... [Lapid, who] kind of came out of nowhere,” sophomore Gabriela Mizrahi said. “They were a new party, and got the second-most seats. So he was a really big player, but now the party seems less popular, and it’s unclear if they’ll have such a great showing in this election.”
