The soul of democracy is on the ballot in Israel and America

ISRAEL’S unprecedented national unity government sadly collapsed last week. Why should you care? Because in so many ways what ails Israeli politics today is just the Off Broadway version of the hyper-partisanship that has infected US politics.

The victory-at-any-cost mentality of the Trump far right — which was vividly described in Washington on Tuesday during Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony to the Jan 6 committee — is part of a broader trend of deeply antidemocratic values that are at odds with what many Americans and Israelis still aspire to. If this trend prevails, it will tear apart both societies, which is why the soul of Israeli democracy and the soul of American democracy are on the ballot in their next elections.

It is not inevitable. Bucking all the recent political trends — and in the wake of three inconclusive elections in two years — Israel did something quite remarkable a year ago: It put together a governing national unity coalition that for the first time included not only right-wing and left-wing Israeli Jews but also an Israeli Arab Islamist party that had won four seats in Parliament in the March 2021 election.