With Israel heading for its second national election this year on Tuesday, polls show the two major parties getting a near-equal share of seats in the Knesset, raising the specter that the ostensible winner may again fail to form a coalition. The situation exposes some of the drawbacks of the Jewish state’s electoral system. Recalling various attempts at reform in the past few decades, proposed by expert political scientists, Shalom Carmy notes that even those that were implemented failed to produce the desired results, and suggests that all such attempts may be futile:

The . . . important question is whether any electoral system, however cleverly devised, can render invisible, as if by magic, deep social and political divides. In Israel’s early years, despite the flaws of [the system of] proportional representation, anything else would have been disastrous for Israeli democracy. Under a system [more like that of America or Great Britain], religious Jews, Arabs, and non-socialist secular Jews would have been without a national voice in a parliament dominated by the left. Proportional representation made coalition government a virtual necessity. It led to an unwieldy system, but it was one well-suited to maintaining unity in a potentially fractious society populated with lots of uncompromising idealists and zealots, to say nothing of men who had only recently served in paramilitary formations in order to throw off British rule and secure independence.

It is noteworthy that Ben-Gurion, the champion of [the British system of] regional representation, preferred to form his governments with the Orthodox Zionists and the bourgeois centrists rather than exclusively or primarily with the Marxist parties to his left. Doing so was certainly a cagey political move. . . . But Ben-Gurion was a statesman, and a significant motivating factor for this willingness to forgo ideological uniformity was his recognition that a united, hegemonic Israeli left would have disenfranchised and fatefully alienated the politically marginal Jewish groups.

There can be no doubt that the details of an electoral system affect political reality. . . . But the effects are limited, and no manipulation of the voting system, however clever or well-intentioned, can get around deep-seated differences in a sharply divided country. More importantly, no tinkering with election laws can repair those divisions and forge a new, unifying consensus. In the end, the schemes of experts cannot substitute for the talents of true statesmanship and the spirit of the people.

Yasir Arafat was often quoted as saying that his “strongest weapon is the womb of an Arab woman.” That is, he believed the high birthrates of both Palestinians and Arab Israelis ensured that Jews would eventually be a minority in the Land of Israel, at which point Arabs could call for a binational state and get an Arab one. Using similar logic, both Israelis and their self-styled sympathizers have made the case for territorial concessions to prevent such an eventuality. Yet, Yoram Ettinger argues, the statistics have year after year told a different story:

Contrary to the projections of the demographic establishment at the end of the 19th century and during the 1940s, Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is higher than those of all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Saharan Muslim countries. Based on the latest data, the Jewish fertility rate of 3.13 births per woman is higher than the 2.85 Arab rate (since 2016) and the 3.01 Arab-Muslim fertility rate (since 2020).

The Westernization of Arab demography is a product of ongoing urbanization and modernization, with an increase in the number of women enrolling in higher education and increased use of contraceptives. Far from facing a “demographic time bomb” in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state enjoys a robust demographic tailwind, aided by immigration.

However, the demographic and policy-making establishment persists in echoing official Palestinian figures without auditing them, ignoring a 100-percent artificial inflation of those population numbers. This inflation is accomplished via the inclusion of overseas residents, double-counting Jerusalem Arabs and Israeli Arabs married to Arabs living in Judea and Samaria, an inflated birth rate, and deflated death rate.

The U.S. should derive much satisfaction from Israel’s demographic viability and therefore, Israel’s enhanced posture of deterrence, which is America’s top force- and dollar-multiplier in the Middle East and beyond.