Why I’m Going Green

For years I have preached against small parties. Whenever my friends get excited by the latest new and fashionable political movement or the latest political star whose ego-trip involves founding and leading his own party, I’ve warned that a vote cast for a small party is both wasted and wanting. Wasted because, in Israel’s system of proportional representation, a vote that goes for a party that does not get over the two percent threshold required for Knesset representation functions like an abstention. Wanting because in a democracy large big-tent parties are, for all their faults, important and effective arenas for the political give-and-take necessary to create consensus around policies.

Large parties should not be chucked out like a perfectly good-but-old refrigerator just because the latest model dazzles you. And Labor (which I’ve almost always voted for) and Likud (which I’ve always voted against) have emerged, through the natural selection of the Israeli political environment, as the fittest parties to lead the country.

But these are unusual times, and I’m about to violate my own rule. I’m going to abandon Labor and vote for the new Green Movement.

The Green Movement (not to be confused with the older but largely ineffectual Green Party) has managed in just a few months of activity to put together a high-quality, diverse team of experienced, wonky, and personable activists. Party leader Eran Ben Yemini started as a student environmental activist and has studied both physics and acting. Number two on the list is Alon Tal, the American-born founder of the Israel Union for Environmental Defense and of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. In recent years, when I’ve sat around daydreaming about my dream Knesset, these two have always been high on my list.

Israel needs to make rational environmental planning a priority. As I have written, the country is rapidly losing its remaining green spaces to a combination of misplaced Zionist ideology and overdevelopment.

But rather than being a one-issue party where being green trumps all else, the Green Movement has a broad agenda. “Israel today finds itself in environmental crisis, yet the alarming ecological impacts are only a symptom of a much broader malaise,” says the movement’s mission statement. “It attests to distorted priorities, narrow interests at the expense of the common good, non-transparent and undemocratic decisions, unjust allocation of resources, deep social schisms, and a crisis in values.”

In other words, these Greens see intelligent environmental planning and conservation as a model for how to approach the entire range of issues that Israel faces, from the peace process to social stratification to economics. Environmentalists are used to planning for the long term, rather than putting all their chips in tomorrow while losing sight of the day after.

The Labor Party is moribund; it has no message and is saddled with a leader who seems unable to articulate not only a vision but also day-to-day policy in a way that can attract voters. Meretz, seeking to absorb a group of other left-wing activists, is bogged down in yesterday’s slogans and is in large measure no less a sectorial party than is the ultra-orthodox Sephardi Shas movement.

The Green Movement can offer badly-needed new ideas and new talent to Israel’s parliament. But can it get sufficient votes to gain seats in the Knesset? And with Israel’s political map so fragmented, will a new small party, no matter how intelligent and dedicated, make it even harder for any Israeli government to govern?

Recent polls show the Green Movement scaling the two percent mark. But other small parties have started out with similar figures, only to fail in the general election. To succeed, the Green Movement will have to get beyond its base of college-educated yuppies and attract voters who have not in the past shown significant interest in environmental issues. The potential is there—the party’s policies should be attractive to Israelis who live on Israel’s rural periphery, both Jews and Arabs, and to disaffected Labor voters. But it will take talent, money, and organization.

For that reason, it would be wise for the movement to seek to expand its base. The Green Movement recently rejected an offer from Meretz to explore running a joint list. But if not Meretz, the movement should certainly seek an alliance with other reform movements, most notably Meimad, with its core of moderate religious voters and its politically seasoned leader, Rabbi Michael Melchior.

The fragmentation argument has lost much of its force with Labor’s collapse and with Tzipi Livni’s failure to take off as a candidate. The field to the left of the Likud will be badly split anyway. Such a situation is politically fluid one in which new faces and new ideas are desperately needed.

It’s too late to recycle Labor. In evolutionary terms, the Israeli left is experiencing a mass extinction. The future may well belong to a little critter with a major innovation (a placenta? a larger brain? an intelligent land-use policy?) who doesn’t look right now like a much of a match of the dinosaurs. Right now, the Green Movement looks like a good bet.

Read more by Haim at South Jerusalem