On Monday, a ministerial committee approved legislation, to be submitted to the Knesset as a whole, that would bar any individual from serving as prime minister for more than eight years. The bill is clearly written with the recent case of Benjamin Netanyahu—who served as head of the government from 1993 to 1996, and again from 2009 to 2021—in mind. There are those who simply want to keep him from making a comeback, and others, including some of his erstwhile supporters, who feel he wore out his welcome, and that his desire to stay in power led to the two recent years of multiple elections and political stalemate. To Ariel Kahana, the reform is short-sighted, and creates far more problems than it solves:
On the national level, . . . history shows us that prime ministers serve a very short time—too short a time. In an era that requires long-term planning, very long-term, Naftali Bennett is the thirteenth prime minister of Israel since 1948. This means that each prime minister has served an average of 5.6 years. If we put aside Ben-Gurion and Netanyahu, who together spent 27 years as prime minister, the average term in office drops to four years. So why is it so urgent to put an artificial eight-year term limit in place?
Even before the political crisis of the last two years, the governments of Israel didn’t tend to last for long. A technical cut to terms will only destabilize them more, at a time when we need stability, not increased turnover. Israel hasn’t even been rescued from the political maelstrom that engulfed it. The current government is still rotational, and enjoys only a single-MK majority. When everything hangs on a thread, why strike another blow?
What’s more, experience shows us that changes to the rules of government in Israel leads to unexpected, negative results. In the 1990s a passing whim, similar to what is taking place now, led to a law for the direct election of the prime minister in a separate ballot. At the time, it was presented as a revelation that would save the government from chronic instability. The result was the exact opposite. The representative parliamentary system suffered a major blow from which it still hasn’t recovered.
Read more on Israel Hayom: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/term-limits-wont-help-with-stability/