A Conversation with Lahav Harkov

In an interview by Pamela Paresky, Lahav Harkov, a journalist and political analyst, discusses the Israeli parliamentary system, highlighting the challenges of forming coalitions and the voter’s role in selecting parties over individual candidates. She examines the tension between ultra-Orthodox Jews, exempt from military service, and the secular community, emphasising the need for mutual recognition in achieving peace agreements. Harkov explores the history of Israeli concessions, the complexities of settlements, and the significance of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Additionally, she addresses the interplay between religion and politics, the impact of conflicts with groups like Hamas, and the stability of the current government.

Pamela Paresky: Tell me about your background.

Lahav Harkov: I was at the Jerusalem Post for 13 years. I started my last year of college. Most of that time I was the Knesset reporter. I reported on Israel’s parliament and Israeli politics and mostly focused on the legislative side of things. For the past few years, I wrote about diplomacy and Israel’s international relations, and now I’m at the Jewish Insider where I write about both domestic politics and international relations.

PP: Can you just explain for people in the US what Israel’s parliamentary system is like, how it works?

LH: The best way to explain it is to start with election day.

In Israel, on election day, you show up to your polling place, which, like in the US, is public buildings, public schools mostly in Israel, public preschools, etc. You show your ID, which in Israel is not a controversial thing, and you go behind the screen and in front of you is a large tray with different sections and each section there is a little pile of notes that has a letter. The letter represents a party. You could have as many as 30 different options that you vote for. You pick the little piece of paper that represents the party you want to vote for. So you’re voting for a party, not a person. You put that piece of paper in an envelope, you come out, you drop the envelope in a box. Then the votes are counted. There’s a threshold. It’s 3.25 percent. Any party that doesn’t get 3.25 percent of the vote is not getting into the Knesset. Every party that gets above 3.25 percent of the vote, those votes are divided up proportionally between 120 seats in the Knesset.

No party has ever gotten a majority. There’s always been at least two parties governing the country because you need to form a coalition in order to get a majority. These coalitions are often very fractious and they tend not to last for full terms. A full term is until November of the fourth year from the election.

PP: This government has been in power since November 22 correct?

LH: Yeah. The election was on November 22 but it took about six weeks for them to actually establish the government and be sworn in.

PP: What has happened since the war with the government?

LH: So there was a 64-seat coalition, which was like a solid coalition because you need at minimum 61 seats. It was a right-wing and religious coalition. After the war started, one of the centrist parties in the Knesset joined the coalition to show unity in wartime. It’s also a party led by Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, who are two former Chiefs of Staff of the IDF. So you could understand that they’re people who feel very committed to the safety and well-being of the country. I think all of the political parties are committed to the well-being of the country but when you’re the head of the army, you view your own responsibility in a certain way. I think that played a big part in why they decided to put politics aside and joined in the coalition with Netanyahu.

Netanyahu formed a smaller war cabinet together with them and a couple of other people from his side and they’re the people who really run the war.

PP: When you say a coalition falls apart, what does that look like?

LH: It could be over a lot of things.

In my almost 15 years of closely following Israeli politics, it actually often has to do with the issue of the Haredim and whether they’ll serve in the military or not. That’s often a huge problem for coalitions because there’s repeated Supreme Court orders saying that the situation needs to change, and then when the government’s not able to change it, that leads to political turmoil. It’s not able to change it because you have the ultra-Orthodox parties that are very committed to the status quo and they won’t agree to anything.

It usually means that the prime minister says, “We’re not managing to get anything done, let’s have an election.” Usually the prime minister ends up calling an election and then he brings it to a vote in the Knesset and they vote on an election date, which is usually around 90 days from that point.

PP: Tell me about the Haredim not serving in the army.

LH: When the state of Israel was established, it was a few years after the Holocaust. The central institutions of Torah study, certainly in the Western world, had been totally destroyed. The top rabbis and biblical scholars, many of them were murdered, although there were their students, who often pulled together money or got them saved, got them to America, got them to Israel in some cases. But the way the Haredim describe it is that the world of Torah had almost been destroyed. So there were about 7,000 people who wanted to dedicate themselves full time to Torah study. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, agreed to this and said, “Okay, these people can have an exemption.” Ben-Gurion was a secular man, but he understood the value of tradition and Jewish history as something that has kept the Jewish people alive and together.

PP: Was that intended to be just for those 7,000 people?

LH: It was not so clear, because it wasn’t precisely codified.

Over the years, the numbers grew, in part because the Haredim tend to have more children than the average Israeli. It became a successful system of schools where they were able to give people stipends and so people didn’t necessarily have to go to work. So it just grew and grew over the years.

They did try to codify it into law in a way that it said, “Well, you’re not just exempt by being ultra-Orthodox, you’re only exempt if you truly are in a yeshiva all day long.” This was about 25 years ago when they passed this law. It was called the Tal Law. There was a whole government commission that came after a Supreme Court ruling to decide what to do. But what that ended up doing is that you would create these yeshivas where you would study for very few hours or maybe you wouldn’t even study at all, but because you were registered at the yeshiva, you didn’t have to go to the army and then you also can’t work on the books because you’re registered with the yeshiva. It just made everything worse not only in terms of who’s serving in the army or not, but also in terms of the employment levels and whether people are getting a secular education or not.

PP: So it incentivised people to be on welfare, essentially?

LH: Yeah. It just blew up to this point where you have tens of thousands of people every year who could be serving in the army. Other Israelis have a mandatory draft. Ultra-Orthodox Israelis like the Haredim, if they are in yeshiva, they don’t get drafted. But everyone else does.

PP: So this creates a lot of tension between secular and the ultra-Orthodox Israelis?

LH: Right. The secular especially. Although the non-Haredi Orthodox also serve at an even higher rate than secular Israelis actually because it’s considered a really important value. We see this in the war now. What’s called religious Zionists, which are Orthodox Jews who are not Haredim, they’re about 10 percent of the population and they've been about 40 percent of the casualties in this war.

PP: You said that there was a party that joined the coalition. So now the coalition is more than 64?

LH: Yeah.

PP: What’s the number now?

LH: I think it’s 73.

PP: So if, for example, the ultra-Right or the very religious became upset with the direction of the government and they wanted to leave the coalition, would there still be a government?

LH: If you have one party pull out, then you could still have a government. But if they’re all upset about the same thing, then you’d have an election. I don’t think it’s likely for all of them to get upset about the same thing because they have different emphases.

PP: If even two parties pulled out when there was still more than 61, would they still have a government?

LH: In theory they would. It’s happened. One of my craziest days as a reporter in the Knesset was in 2012. The parties weren’t agreeing and they were going to have an election and the Knesset was already voting on the law to disperse the Knesset and call an election and at 2:00 am a party joins the coalition and the election was cancelled.

PP: If these leftist centre parties had agreed to form a coalition with Likud, do you think Likud would not have a coalition with the far-Right and the religious parties?

LH: Netanyahu has become increasingly anathema to everyone who’s to his left, for a variety of reasons. He has invented this concept of the bloc. There’s all of these parties that follow him through fire and water and join him in every coalition and those are the ultra-Orthodox and the far-Right. We had this period of political instability in Israel where we had four elections within a year and a half and then we had another election a year after that supposedly stabilised everything and the bloc always stuck together. Even if the Centre or the Left were willing to form a coalition led by Netanyahu that wasn’t in wartime, I think Netanyahu would be wary of doing it because he feels the parties to his right are more loyal to him.

I didn’t mention when I was explaining the processes that generally the Prime Minister is the head of the largest party in the Knesset, but definitely the head of the largest party in the coalition.

PP: I see. So there can be a largest party in the Knesset that’s not part of the coalition.

LH: Yeah. In 2009, when Netanyahu returned to being Prime Minister, he was in the second largest. Likud was the second largest party. The other party, Kadima I believe, was two seats larger than Likud, but Netanyahu was able to form a coalition and Kadima was not.

PP: What is the general trend in young people versus old people? Is there a difference in political affiliation?

LH: Overall, the polling in Israel shows that younger Israelis are more right-wing than older Israelis.

That has a lot to do with the political experiences of the different generations. Up until a few years ago, young people in Israel had never seen any kind of peace deal that they could be enthusiastic about. The boomers saw peace with Egypt and Gen X saw the Oslo Accords as they were coming into themselves politically. Those were times of great optimism for a lot of people.

Millennials came of age politically during the Second Intifada where there were constant Palestinian suicide attacks against Israelis. I was a teenager at the time. I was living in the US, but I was visiting Israel a lot. I have family here. I was in New York taking the subway, hanging out, and yes, 9/11 had happened, but overall you felt free and safe. Here, my teenage cousins would think twice before getting on the bus to go to their friends’ house because buses were being blown up. They didn’t feel the optimism of the Oslo Accords. A few years later, there was the disengagement from Gaza, which is when Israel withdrew entirely from the Gaza Strip, and a year later, Gazans elected Hamas. Then Hamas went out and murdered all of the other parties in the Gaza Parliament and started its reign of terror over Gaza and shooting missiles regularly at Israel.

There just wasn’t a lot to be optimistic about. This experience continued because periodically every few years we had these massive rocket attacks from Gaza. That’s where people’s heads were politically in Israel, that you want to protect yourself, that you want to have a strong security state and that concessions were not working out very well for Israel.

PP: Just briefly talk about the concessions that were made in the past.

LH: The concessions that did work well for Israel was when Israel conceded the Sinai to Egypt for a peace deal. That peace deal has held strong since 1979. Egypt is not Israel’s best friend but the peace has held in terms of there’s peace and the sides talk and get things done when we need to.

That peace works because Egypt really wants it to work. Ultimately, that’s what you need. But in the Oslo Accords, Israel pulled out of the major Palestinian cities in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority was formed and they governed and still govern the day-to-day lives of Palestinians.

Yasser Arafat, who was the Palestinian leader, was shaking hands with Tizkar Karabin on the lawn of the White House was also, on the other hand, commanding terrorist attacks on Israel. Within weeks of that handshake there was a bus bombing.

PP: And this is called the First Intifada?

LH: No, the First Intifada happened in the 1980s. To some extent, that was what led the world to say Israel needs to get onto some path for Palestinian statehood because this situation is not sustainable. That was when there started to be massive pressure to negotiate with the Palestinians.

The Second Intifada was a lot more deadly than the First Intifada. The First Intifada was a lot more ... I mean, you can still kill someone by throwing stones and Molotov cocktails and things like that but that was more of what it was in the 80s. The end of 2000 is when the Second Intifada started. That was a lot more suicide bombings. But there had been more sporadic suicide bombings through most of the 90s.

PP: So the concessions in the Oslo Accords were land, with the Sinai and the West Bank?

LH: Right.

People like to present the Oslo Accords as that Israel agreed to establish a Palestinian state but it doesn’t actually say that. Israel agreed to autonomy and to a great extent the Palestinians in the West Bank have that today. In Gaza they had it too, which is to say that they’re really self-governed in their everyday things. They just can’t have an army. Israel is in charge of the surrounding security situation.

So in 2000, Rabin signed the Oslo Accords. He was assassinated by an Israeli right-wing extremist. The Oslo Accords were pretty popular at the time they were signed. By the time Rabin was assassinated, there had been quite a few terrorist attacks. They were less popular, but there was not widespread support for the assassination.

Netanyahu was elected prime minister the next year and Netanyahu adhered to the Oslo Accords. He didn’t reverse them even though he had opposed them. He even advanced them, and there were certain things, milestones that were supposed to happen, and he stuck to them.

But he lost the election three years later. We then have Ehud Barak. There’s talks in Camp David and he makes the biggest offer Israel ever made to the Palestinians and Arafat said no. Barak offered 90 something percent of the West Bank including dividing up Jerusalem and international control of the old city. Arafat turned it down and very soon after the Second Intifada began. This was in 2000. The excuse that they used was that Ariel Sharon, who was running for prime minister, visited the Temple Mount. Back then, the Temple Mount was pretty open to people to just come and visit. It’s not like today, where it’s like a bunker practically if you’re not Muslim.

PP: What’s the Temple Mount?

LH: The Temple Mount historically was the site of the two Jewish holy temples in Jerusalem, which of course Christians also believe are holy sites but right now on the Temple Mount, there’s what’s called the Dome of the Rock, which is that golden dome that people see in pictures of Jerusalem, and right next to it is the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Some Muslims regard it as the third holiest site in Islam. So, the third holiest site in Islam and the holiest site in Judaism are in the same place. Because there’s a mosque there and because there’s been a mosque there now for hundreds of years, it’s essentially a place where Muslims go to pray and very few Jews go. But from 1967, when Israel won the Six Day War and was able to access the old city of Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, which is above the Temple Mount, you could visit the Temple Mount pretty freely and easily for a long time. Only in the Second Intifada did the place become really, really difficult to visit, with really, really high security.

In 2000, Ariel Sharon, who’s running for prime minister, went to visit. The next day, the Second Intifada was launched. So there was this propaganda line that it was because of Sharon. But actually, Arafat’s wife and senior figures in the Palestinian Authority later said that it had been planned. They were just looking for a trigger.

PP: Jews are not actually allowed to pray at the Temple?

LH: By law, you are not supposed to pray there unless you’re Muslim, because it offends Muslims.

PP: And that’s an Israeli law.

LH: Yes. It’s not a law passed by the Knesset. It’s the regulation that the police uphold. They gave control of that area to the Islamic waqf. The waqf administers those sites. It’s the waqf for the Jordanian Islamic Trust, actually, which, when Israel made peace with Jordan, they basically let Jordan’s selected Islamic clerics be the ones to run the area.

PP: So back to the timeline of concessions and violence, there was the successful concession of the Sinai with Egypt, then a sort of semi-successful concession with the West Bank.

LH: Ultimately, I think that the through-line is that, in order for peace to be successful, the people that Israel is making peace with have to actually accept the fact that Israel exists and is here to stay.

PP: And to want peace.

LH: And to want peace. You don’t have to like Israel. You don’t have to be best friends with Israel. Egypt is not best friends with Israel, Jordan is really not best friends with Israel, but they accept that Israel exists. I think that’s the difference between the Palestinians and those other countries. In their school textbooks and in the politicians’ speeches to the public, you see that the Palestinians do not accept the existence of Israel.

PP: Gaza was taken in a war, as were other territories, and Jews had been in Gaza for 2,000 years, roughly. So 1967, Jews started to go back?

LH: It’s worth noting it’s not just Gaza. There are a few other areas in the West Bank where Jews also had had a long-standing presence before the 1948 Israeli War of Independence when they were kicked out. There’s Hebron and Gush Etzion. Today, they’re basically suburbs of Jerusalem but they are settlements technically. After 1967, a lot of people wanted to go back. There were people alive who had lived there 20 years before and they wanted to go back and rebuild their home.

PP: You said technically a “settlement.” That word that has a couple of different meanings. We say that something is a settlement meaning that it is in territory that’s disputed. Is that what the word means here?

LH: It’s interesting because in Hebrew, there’s a word for settlement that’s used for any new place.

PP: Like subdivision?

LH: Right, right. It just means any new town. It’s a place where people settle. But in English, of course, it has colonialist implications.

When Israel wins the 1948 war, it’s a very small slice of the land that Israel wins. You hear that chant, “From the river to the sea,” the land was a small part of that. It was the bottom chunk, the top chunk, and then a narrow sliver of land connecting them along the shoreline, along the sea. The river side of that chunk was occupied by Jordan.

In 1967, Egypt was lining its tanks up on the border with Israel, and other Arab armies were preparing to attack. So Israel struck the Egyptians that were very clearly gearing up for attack. Israel won that war, won that chunk of land towards the river, which we know as the West Bank, the Golan, which is the north of mountain area in the north bordering on Syria, and the Sinai, which Israel has since given back to Egypt.

But the West Bank specifically was the historic heartlands of the land of Israel. Judea and Samaria are the biblical names. Judea is where Jew comes from. Historic Jewish cities like Bethlehem, Hebron, those were now controlled by Israel. But Israel has never officially annexed that land. So it’s not considered Israel’s by anyone, including the settlers themselves who live under Israeli law in terms of they pay taxes to Israel and their schools are in the Israeli school system. But technically, if they want to add a new two rooms to their house, they don’t call the interior minister or whoever to get the building permission. The army technically has to sign off on the permission because the governor of that area is still the army because Israel has never annexed that land.

PP: So everybody who lives in those areas, whether Jewish or Arab or other, have citizenship rights?

LH: They have the right to become a citizen. In Eastern Jerusalem, very few of the Arabs living there have availed themselves of that option, though some have. They identify as Palestinians and they don’t want to be Israeli citizens. But they still get, for example, Israel’s universal health care and their schools are paid for by the Israeli Department of Education. It’s complicated.

PP: They’re considered what? Legal residents?

LH: Yeah, they’re legal residents. It’s as if they had a Green Card.

They can vote in the local elections, but they generally boycott them. Every time there’s a local election, there’s always a bunch of news stories about some Arabs running for Jerusalem City Council and they never get in because almost nobody in the Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem votes. This is also interesting. The population of Jerusalem is roughly 50/50 Jewish and Arab. If they voted, it would dramatically change the politics in Jerusalem, but they don’'t do it.

PP: So back to Gaza. In 1967, Jews start to repopulate Gaza. Gaza was not officially annexed. Correct?

LH: Correct. Ultimately 10,000 Jews moved there and it was like a small strip of land by the sea.

PP: And in 2005, there was an agreement made to withdraw those people?

LH: Yeah, it was a very complicated political process, but ultimately the government decided and the government had majority support in the Knesset to withdraw all Israeli civilians and they withdraw from Gaza entirely.

PP: So all the army presence is withdrawn?

LH: Correct, but all the structures were left behind so Palestinians theoretically could come and move in and start their own farm or greenhouse or whatever there, but they didn’t do that.

The reason that I drill down on that point that they weren’t reselling Gaza is because part of the reason that the Israeli government decided it made sense to pull Israelis out and withdraw was that you have one and a half million Palestinians living in Gaza at the time and 10,000 Israelis. There were terrorist attacks on the civilians and there were attacks on the soldiers there. Ultimately, people made the argument, “Why are we there? What’s the point? Is this really helping our security? What are these people dying for? This is a very clearly a majority Palestinian area.”

Today, you see a lot of people on the Right saying, well, maybe if we had kept the military there, then Hamas wouldn’t have been able to build up its current capabilities and that Israelis being present in part of the land protects people in all of Israel because as long as there’s an Israeli presence, then less terrorism pops up.

I see the merits in that argument. I’m not entirely convinced by it.

PP: Dan Schueftan told me that the idea was that once all of the Israelis were out, if they shot even one rocket, then the military response would be so crushing that it just wouldn’t happen.

LH: Ariel Sharon promised at the time that if there was one rocket shot there would be like a crushing military response. Ariel Sharon had a stroke six months later. Who knows what he would have done?

But the person who took his place, Ehud Olmert, didn’t do that. Hamas took over. Olmert wanted to continue further disengagement from the West Bank. That was his plan: to just keep unilaterally withdrawing and let the Palestinians figure it out themselves. He won an election that year on that platform. Israelis were optimistic that this was going to work, but it didn’t. I think part of the reason that Olmert maybe didn’t come down so hard on Gaza was because of domestic politics. In 2006, there was the Second Lebanon War and Israelis felt it had not gone so well. Omert was taking a lot of heat for that and there were starting to be corruption allegations against him, and he ultimately went to prison for corruption. He just didn’t have the bandwidth but also maybe he felt he didn’t have the legitimacy to come down hard on Gaza.

Then Netanyahu came in. In 2009, his slogan was literally “Strong against Hamas.” There were some military operations against Gaza but he ultimately went on this appeasement route of thinking that if we pay them off, then they’ll have a reason to be quiet. If their quality of life is better, then they’re not going to want to attack us because they’re not going to want to lose that

That worked for a time. You had these several years in which, from 2014 until 2021, there was no major Gaza operation. If you were asking Netanyahu about it, he would say, “Look how well this is going.” Netanyahu presided over the quietest decade in Israel’s history.

It turned out Hamas were biding their time.

PP: There’s municipal elections coming up. Does that connect at all with the broader politics?

LH: The municipal elections and the national elections in some ways connect and in some ways don’t. I think the national elections usually have a lot more to do with national security and the local elections have a lot more to do with bread-and-butter things like jobs, education, traffic patterns, and parking and things like that.

But one thing that shows up in a big way, I think, in both, actually, is religion and state issues. We talked about the ultra-Orthodox Haredim. The issue of them enlisting in the IDF or not, that’s a national issue. But on the local level, there are things about whether shops are open or there’s public transportation on the Sabbath, because the mayor can decide to change things. They have to get approval from the national government. But you have Haifa where they have buses running on Sabbath. It’s a national issue, but it also plays out locally a lot. I can tell you, in the town where I live, we have no Haredi public schools. There’s a small but growing Haredi community and they’re always pushing that they want schools and the mayor always ignores them because he doesn’t want the city to have a big Haredi population. He doesn’t want the demographics to change.

PP: What do you think the likelihood is of this coalition holding?

LH: This is really interesting. When the war began, everyone was like, “Netanyahu’s toast." He’s not going to last six months.” We’re now more than four months into the war. I don’t think anybody thinks he’s going to be out of office in the next two months.

There have been protests but it is not actually that easy. It seems like it’s easy to get rid of a prime minister because we constantly have elections but it is really not that easy to get rid of a prime minister if the prime minister himself doesn’t want to call an election.

There’s different parliamentary tools. You have what’s called a vote of no confidence. In Israel, you have them all the time. I know in some other countries if you have a vote of no confidence it’s a huge deal. In Israel, you have them all the time but they don’t actually do anything unless a majority of the Knesset agrees on an alternate candidate for prime minister. So Israel has them all the time but normally it’s just the opposition airing its grievances and they don’t go anywhere.

You could have a party pull out of the coalition and join up with the opposition parties to put forward a bill to disperse the Knesset and call an election. First of all, they would have to agree on all kinds of things like the date of the election. But also, it has to be in their interest. I don’t think that any of the parties in the current coalition has an interest in leaving the coalition. The Haredi parties are not going to have it better if there’s a centrist or left-wing coalition because they are less likely to be willing to subsidise the Haredi schools that don’t follow the core curriculum of Israel and therefore don’t leave their graduates prepared for employment in the modern economy. They’re less likely to be okay with the continued exemption from military service and those are things the Haredim care the most about. The more you get to the Left, the less tolerance people have for these things that the Haredim want and polling shows that the centre parties are really strong right now. So it would be a less favourable coalition for the Haredim.

Then you have the parties on the far-Right. The centrist parties don’t want to be in a coalition with them. They are not willing to because they view those people as extremists. So even though the most extreme right-wing party in the Knesset is polling better than the seats it has in the Knesset now, they’ll do better in an election, but they’re not going to get into a coalition. They’re not going to be cabinet ministers again.

I just don’t think that anyone in Netanyahu’s coalition and Netanyahu himself sees would do well in the next election. He’s not going to be able to form a coalition probably. Nobody has an incentive to break this apart and the opposition doesn’t have the numbers to force it. So that’s where we are.

I don’t think that this is going to last to the end of 2025. That is legally how long we can wait till the next election. But I think that it could last until the next budget vote, which is the end of this year. I think that’s a pretty fair prediction that this government will at least last to the end of this year.

PP: And what do you think will break it apart?

LH: I think that the budget vote is always really difficult and I think that it might be a fair time for somebody to pull out because they’re not getting what they want.

PP: And usually this is how the coalitions fall apart because of the welfare and the service for the party?

LH: There’s all different kinds of things. In the past 15 years, governments ultimately fell apart because Netanyahu, who had been prime minister for the past 15 years, just realised that the coalition was not getting along at all and therefore was not able to get anything done. He said, “Okay, we need an election so we can form a new coalition and come to new agreements,” even though it often ends up being the same people.

PP: So, this sounds extremely crazy too, but you were telling me before we started that Israel’s not even the most unstable parliamentary system.

LH: Yeah. When Israel was going through this whole cycle where we basically had four consecutive elections within a year and a half, Belgium at that point was the world record holder of the most time without having an actual government.

This happens in parliamentary systems. Periodically, there are all kinds of proposals on how to change and to stabilise things. I’m a bit of a nerd. I like to read all of these different proposals and try to think what would work and what would make us more stable. But I think you need a really serious overhaul. I think maybe if we had a bicameral system instead of one House of Parliament, that might help and if we had a regional election system and not just the whole country voting for the same people, that might help. But I don’t think there’s a lot of political will to make those big changes.

PP: Each party has a roster of people and depending on the number of votes they get, that’s the number of people in that roster who get it. So you vote in a primary for your party?

LH: This is part of the craziness in Israel that there’s no law regulating how a party can choose its list for the Knesset, right? When you go on election day and you pick up that little piece of paper, you’re supposed to have known by reading the newspaper or by Googling it or whatever, who stands behind that name in theory. You might just know who the leader is and decide I want to vote for this person because I want him to be prime minister. The information is out there.

Some parties, like the Likud party, they do have primaries. The way Likud’s roster works is the first 18 seats are national seats, but then after that they have regional seats. So members living in different regions vote people in from their areas, and that’s how you get new blood into the party.

PP: There is one extremist Arab in the Knesset, right?

LH: There are two Arab blocs, I would call them, in the Knesset.

One is a bloc of a couple different parties, and then one is just a party that got in on its own. They occasionally will all run together as one united block, and sometimes they’ll split up depending on also their own sort of infighting.

The one party that got in on its own is actually more moderate. It’s interesting because they’re Islamists, they’re a very religious party, but they’re politically more moderate.

This is a new development. In the past five years, they’ve become politically more moderate because they believe in greater cooperation with the government of Israel.

PP: Explain to me how these Islamists are moderate?

LH: That’s part of what was so shocking. When the leader of the party started to take a more moderate and coexistence position than they had in the past. They had come out of the philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s where their early founders came from.

They almost see themselves operating the way Haredi parties do. They say, “We live in Israel, we want to get budgets and whatever for our schools and for our municipalities and we want to be able to live our way of life, and we live in this country and we’re part of this country.”

That’s really interesting. The other Arab parties, one of the big criticisms that some Israeli Arabs, but a lot of Israeli Jews have had, is that they’re very focused on the Palestinian issue. They’re in the parliament of the State of Israel and they’re focused on people who are not in the state of Israel. Now, of course certain policies of Israel influence the Palestinians a lot. But that’s not what 85 percent of what they’re doing in the Knesset is about. And yet they’re very, very single-mindedly focused on that issue a lot of the time.

What changed in 2021, but you could see the change coming a couple of years before that, this leader of Ra’am, what we call the Islamist movement in Israel, Mansour Abbas, agreed to join a coalition. He didn’t want to be a cabinet minister, but he wanted to work with the government to focus specifically on crime, which was a big issue. The crime in Israeli Arab towns in the past decade or so has gotten really, really out of control. There’s a lot of theft of weapons and a lot of shootings. He decided that whatever they were doing before wasn’t working, so let’s try working with the government now and that was a big change in the domestic politics of Israeli Arabs.

PP: Has that helped? Has that done anything to alleviate the crime?

LH: No. Also that government only lasted a year and a half but not because of him.

PP: Just to close out the interview, what is the one thing that people in America don’t understand about Israel that they need to understand?

LH: There’s so much. I think a lot of American Jews are like: “Why are Israelis so different from us in many ways?”

When you are the minority in America, it affects you psychologically in the certain way you look at the world. People like to look at, oh, Israelis, they’re tough and they’re rude and they’re like this. I think it’s just more of a mentality of we don’t have to apologise or hide. Not to say that all American Jews are apologetic or hiding, but it’s just a very different ... you’re coming from a different place.

PP: I think in the US in particular there’s been a long history of “just keep your head down and don’t be raped,” you know?

LH: Right. The founding ethos of Israel is we’re sick of having to keep our heads down and that’s why we need to have our own country where we can just be ourselves.

PP: The last question is for non-Jews, and especially because this is a Quillette podcast which comes out of Australia: What’s the most important thing to understand about Israel right now in this moment?

LH: This is related to my previous answer.

Sometimes when you see polls or surveys or man-on-the street things and you ask people to point to Israel on a map and they’ll choose a huge country that’s close to Israel and choose Saudi Arabia or Turkey or Egypt and they don’t understand that when you look at this map of the world Israel is this tiny, tiny, tiny country. It’s the size of New Jersey. I don’t even know what to compare it to in Australia but it’s a tiny fraction of the size of Australia.These people are like, “Well what’s the big deal I'll just give this little bit to the Palestinians,” but these are all issues of survival for Israel. It’s not that easy to just give up and the threats are constant.

People don’t understand that we live here. We’ll go about our normal lives that look a lot like Western lives, but then suddenly there’ll be a terrorist attack or rocket attacks 45 minutes from the biggest city. We live with that, we realise that it’s just not that easy. It’s just not like you signed a piece of paper and we’re done and we’re going to have peace. It’s a reality that few people in the West are really able to wrap their heads around.

PP: Thank you very much.

LH: Thank you.