How Israeli Elections Differ from US Political System

Everyone knows elections are coming. And with that comes talk of ballots, polls, and who is allowed to vote – or not. In the U.S., it will be the midterms in November. In Israel, the citizens will vote for their next national government. The date is yet to be determined but will be no later than Oct. 27.

But there are several significant differences between elections in the U.S. and Israel.

The most important contrast to understand is that the Israeli government is a parliamentary democracy. “Israel does not have constituencies like in the U.S.,” emphasized Dr. Kenneth W. Stein, founding president and chief content officer of the Atlanta-based Center for Israel Education. The country has one constituency, while the U.S. has 435, he noted, referring to the members of the House of Representatives. The Senate has another 100, representing each state.

Moreover, “Israelis vote for parties that will sit in the Israeli parliament,” known as the Knesset, Stein said. “The parties determine the ranking of the people on their lists and Israelis cast ballots for parties, not individuals.” The ranking of the individuals on the party lists is set by primaries or the party leaders.

How many representatives of each party are able to enter the Knesset is determined by the percentage each party receives in an election, Stein said.

“Let’s assume there are 120,000 votes cast,” he proposed a hypothetical, “and a party gets 10,000 votes. It will get 10 seats in the Israeli parliament,” since the Knesset is comprised of 120 seats.

In reality, a government must hold 61 seats to have a majority. However, no one party has ever won a majority of Knesset seats; the most won by a party was 56 and that was in the 1969 elections. So, each government encompasses a coalition of political parties based on a political or philosophical agreement.

According to Stein, there are three parts to an Israeli election cycle. The first includes the political parties choosing their lists of candidates. Those lists are presented to the Central Elections Committee about seven weeks before the elections. “The voters choose which person at the top of the list they most want to be prime minister,” and vote for that party.

The second part is campaigning. In Israel, the Central Elections Committee takes out a block of TV airtime before elections to present each party’s ad, free of charge, so that even the smallest lists have a chance to get exposure with voters. A few weeks before the elections, political advertising must stop, although campaign banners fly along many streets and highways, hanging from bridges and buildings.

For a party to receive the minimum seats of four, it must receive 3.25 percent of the votes cast. If two parties with the same ideology believe, before the elections, that one or both might not achieve the desired clout in the next Knesset, they can decide to run as one party.

For instance, as Stein pointed out, in April two leading party members who had both previously been prime minister – Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett — decided they would create one party, called Yachad, or Together. A leader of a new party, Gadi Eisenkot, reportedly has considered joining Yachad. “He looks at the pools of his constituents to see if they want him to join the other party,” Stein said.

The importance of small parties to join together to make sure they reach the required 3.25 percent of votes to attain four seats in the Knesset became very clear in the last election, held in November 2022. “Two left-of-center parties could have created a unity party but didn’t so both parties failed and were left out of the Knesset,” Stein recalled. “If those two parties had combined into one, the long-standing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would probably not have been able to cobble together a governing coalition.”

Stein stated that Israel is the “most heavily polled country” in the world. That polling includes projections by artificial intelligence and is quite sophisticated, he said, proposing who should run independently and who should unite with another party. “Polling is done on a daily, almost hourly basis,” he added.

The third part of the Israeli election process is the actual election and the procedure that determines who will be appointed the next prime minister. It’s not obvious on election night. “When Israelis go to elections and get the results [of which party received what percentage of the votes], they still don’t know who the prime minister will be. That’s the difference of a parliamentary system,” Stein said.

There are no run-off elections in Israel, like there are in the U.S.

After Israeli elections, the president of the country, which is mostly a ceremonial position, looks at the election results and tries to determine which party or which individual leading a party list has the best chance of forming a coalition and holding it together as long as possible.

From April 2019 to November 2022, Israelis held five elections. “That’s not healthy for a political system,” Stein emphasized.

After the president asks a party head to form a coalition, that person has 21days to succeed. If necessary, he can receive another 21 days. As Stein said, Israel“may not have a [new] sitting prime minister by the end of the year.” Until that time, the existing prime minister and his government remain in control. “If Israel goes to war in November after the elections, decisions will be made by those in office now.”

The Israeli system is definitely complicated. Moreover, in both the U.S. and in Israel, various issues may cause voters to vote one way or another. “The key issues that drive Americans generally have to do with financial issues,” said Stein. “In the Israeli landscape, the memory of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel is still strong.” And many of the residents of northern Israel who had to move south because of the Hezbollah attacks from Lebanon have still not returned home. “Will they hold this government responsible for that and Gaza? All Israelis have security in mind.”

Another issue in Israel is the current government’s taking away authority from the court system. A third issue for those on the political center left, they want to know which party will more likely make peace with the Palestinians.

Stein believes there’s another issue that will have a major impact on Israeli voters: the distance between the U.S. and Israel over the proposed agreement between Iran and the U.S. “Israelis know that the relationship with the U.S. is important. If they see that the prime minister can’t sustain a relationship with the U.S., they will not vote for the incumbent party,” he said.

On the other hand, recent international polls suggest that the relationship between the two countries has deteriorated due to the U.S. government. A Pew Research Center poll taken in June showed that the percentage of Israelis who believe the U.S. takes their country’s interests into account has fallen to the lowest in more than a decade. The percentage of Israelis who believe that the U.S.’s foreign policy takes Israel into account has dropped from 80 percent in 2013 to 68 percent.

Another poll disclosed that more than two-thirds of the Israeli public believe President Donald Trump’s policies are bad for Israel. The poll, conducted by research institute Agam Labs in partnership with Hebrew University in Jerusalem, showed 67 percent of Israelis believe that Trump’s policies are bad for Israel, including 28 percent who say they are very bad. The same survey showed 72 percent of Israelis blame Trump’s administration for harming the strategic relationship between the two countries. That might take some of the heat off Prime Minister Netanyahu.

And as Stein often points out, “events that haven’t happened yet” could still impact Israel’s upcoming election.