Israel Time for an Overhaul

By JON D. HULL JERUSALEM

Britain has Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. The U.S. has an alternative press. But in Israel it is the parliament that serves as the country's platform for outrageous minority views. With only 1% of the vote -- just 22,000 ballots in 1988 -- needed to win a seat, the 120-member Knesset must give house room to a stunning variety of opinions in an exceptionally opinionated nation. Its 15 parties offer something for everyone: ultra- Orthodox rabbis who disdain Israeli statehood, Zionist leftists and Arab communists who support Palestinian statehood, and right-wing extremists who want to expel the Palestinians.

That diversity can make for great theater, but it is a political disaster for a nation that lacks any clear consensus. For the past eight weeks, Israel has been effectively without a government as first Labor and then Likud attempted to patch together a ruling majority. Both parties' shameless display of vote buying has reached a new low, discrediting Israeli-style democracy at home and abroad. In his Independence Day address last week, President Chaim Herzog warned that the current "political machinations make an absolute mockery of the principles of democracy." Herzog was later handed petitions signed by 500,000 Israelis -- nearly 10% of the population -- demanding that he initiate electoral reform. Popular protest has been growing steadily. Last month 250,000 rallied in Tel Aviv to denounce the political system; this week protesters plan to hold a mass demonstration at the Knesset. Says lawyer Eliad Shraga, who has been staging a vigil outside Herzog's house in Jerusalem: "We need a skipper who will take us to the left or to the right." Otherwise, he fears, "we will reach a state of anarchy."

The electoral-reform movement emerged after Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's national-unity government collapsed last March in bitter disagreement over the peace process. Since then, the two main blocs and the handful of small religious parties that hold the balance of power have engaged in an especially crude game of barter. The five-member Liberal party demanded a $10 million bond to guarantee that a Likud-led coalition would stick to promises swapped for Liberal support. Labor leader Shimon Peres spent five weeks trying to purchase his own majority with generous offers of ministries and money to the religious parties.

Now Shamir is trying to form a narrow coalition with the demanding right wing. To woo it, his caretaker government has been raiding the nation's coffers to build new Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Christian quarter of Jerusalem. "Our leadership is morally unworthy of leading this country," says Uriel Reichman, dean of the law faculty at Tel Aviv University.

/ No party has ever won a majority under Israel's system of proportional representation, which also perpetuates the dominance of longtime leaders. The candidates are chosen by the party, voters cast their ballots for a party, and parliamentary seats are allotted to each faction according to its share of the total vote. Since the mid-1980s, the electorate has been evenly split between right and left, making a decisive outcome all but impossible.

Three major reforms would break the deadlock by strengthening the premiership, reducing the number of smaller parties and increasing the accountability of politicians:

-- Direct election of the Prime Minister. Unruly coalitions make for weak leadership. Presidential-style balloting would give the Prime Minister a personal mandate from the voters, enabling him to make tough decisions unfettered by coalition agreements, and would make him answerable to the public.

-- Regional representation. Knesset members are accountable only to the party; a constituency system would require them to speak for the voters. But full regional representation would also require safeguards to ensure that Israeli- Arab and ultra-Orthodox Jewish voters were not wholly disfranchised.

-- Raising the threshold for a Knesset seat from 1% to at least 4%. This would dramatically reduce the number of small parties represented.

Since Knesset members have a vested interest in the current system, none of these reforms stand much chance of passage in the coming months. Moreover, Labor and Likud would have to work together -- an unlikely prospect -- to steamroller the necessary bills past the smaller parties. And even if reform succeeded, it would not alleviate the profound divisions within the Israeli electorate. "The Messiah won't come through changing the system of elections," says Rabbi Abraham Ravitz, whose Degel Hatorah party holds two seats. But at least the nation would be guided from the top by leaders chosen by the people.

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CREDIT: TIME Diagram by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: WHAT'S WRONG

With reporting by Robert Slater/Jerusalem