Israeli Politics: How the Knesset, Coalitions, and Democracy Work

The Most Complicated Democracy

There’s an old joke that if you put two Israelis in a room, you’ll get three political opinions. Given the country’s political system, this might be an understatement.

Israel is a parliamentary democracy — one of the most vibrant, contentious, and frequently chaotic democracies in the world. It holds free and fair elections, has an independent judiciary, a free press, and citizens who exercise their right to protest with a frequency and volume that would exhaust most other nations.

It also has no constitution, a parliament that routinely contains more than a dozen parties, coalition governments that can collapse over almost anything, and a political culture in which shouting is considered a form of civic engagement. Understanding Israeli politics requires accepting that contradiction is not a bug — it’s a feature.

The Knesset: 120 Seats, Infinite Arguments

Israel’s parliament is called the Knesset (literally “assembly”), named after the Knesset HaGedolah (Great Assembly), a legendary governing body from the Second Temple period. It has 120 members (MKs) and sits in a purpose-built building in Jerusalem, donated by the Rothschild family and opened in 1966.

The Knesset is a unicameral legislature — there is no upper house or senate. It passes laws, approves the budget, oversees the government, and can dissolve itself to trigger new elections (a power it has used with alarming regularity).

MKs are elected through proportional representation from a single nationwide district. Citizens vote for a party list, not for individual candidates. Each party submits a ranked list of candidates before the election, and seats are allocated proportionally based on the party’s share of the total vote. If a party wins 10 percent of the vote, it gets roughly 12 seats, filled from the top of its list.

The electoral threshold — the minimum percentage of the vote a party needs to enter the Knesset — is currently 3.25 percent. This relatively low bar means that many parties win seats, producing a fragmented parliament that makes coalition building both essential and agonizing.

Coalition Building: The Art of the Impossible

No single party has ever won an outright majority (61 seats) in the Knesset. Every Israeli government in history has been a coalition — an alliance of multiple parties that together command a majority.

After an election, the President (a largely ceremonial role) consults with all party leaders and tasks the leader most likely to form a coalition with doing so. That leader has up to 42 days (with a possible 14-day extension) to cobble together a government.

Coalition negotiations are intense, transactional, and often ugly. Small parties with just a handful of seats can extract outsized concessions — cabinet positions, budget allocations, policy commitments — because without them, the coalition doesn’t reach 61. Religious parties, in particular, have historically leveraged their position as “kingmakers” to secure funding for yeshivot, exemptions from military service for ultra-Orthodox men, and control over religious affairs (marriage, divorce, conversion).

The result is governments that are often internally contradictory, with coalition partners who disagree on fundamental issues but are held together by the mathematics of parliamentary arithmetic and the desire to keep their opponents out of power.

The Major Political Blocs

Israeli politics doesn’t map neatly onto American or European categories, but several broad blocs have defined the landscape:

Right: Likud and Allies

Likud (“Unity”), founded by Menachem Begin in 1973, has been the dominant right-wing party for decades. It favors a harder line on security, is skeptical of territorial concessions, and draws support from Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews, religious nationalists, and working-class voters. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has led Likud for most of the period since 1993.

Left and Center-Left

The Labor Party (and its predecessors, Mapai and the Alignment) dominated Israeli politics from independence through 1977. It built the kibbutzim, the Histadrut, and the state’s institutions. Labor has declined dramatically in recent decades, its base eroded by disillusionment with the peace process and demographic shifts. Meretz, further left, advocates for peace, civil rights, and secularism but has struggled to cross the electoral threshold.

Center

Centrist parties — Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”), Blue and White, Kadima — have periodically surged, often built around a single leader’s popularity. They tend to focus on economic issues, secular-religious tensions, and good governance.

Religious Parties

Shas (Sephardi ultra-Orthodox) and United Torah Judaism (Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox) focus on religious community interests. The Religious Zionist Party combines nationalism with religious ideology and has moved further right in recent years.

Arab Parties

Arab citizens of Israel (about 20% of the population) have their own parties. The Joint List and Ra’am (United Arab List) represent Palestinian citizens of Israel, with Ra’am making history in 2021 by joining a governing coalition for the first time.

President vs. Prime Minister

Israel has both a President and a Prime Minister, but their roles are very different:

• The President is the head of state, a largely ceremonial role. The President is elected by the Knesset for a single seven-year term. Duties include tasking a party leader with forming a coalition, granting pardons, and representing the state at official functions. The President is expected to be above partisan politics.
• The Prime Minister is the head of government and the real center of executive power. The PM chairs the cabinet, sets policy, and represents Israel internationally. The Prime Minister serves as long as they can maintain a Knesset majority — there are no term limits.

The Supreme Court and Basic Laws

Israel has no written constitution. When the state was founded in 1948, David Ben-Gurion and the religious parties could not agree on one — secular leaders wanted a liberal democratic document; religious leaders argued that the Torah was the Jewish constitution. The compromise was to defer the issue indefinitely.

Instead, the Knesset has gradually passed a series of Basic Laws — covering the Knesset, the government, the judiciary, human dignity and liberty, and other topics — that function as a quasi-constitutional framework. Unlike regular legislation, some Basic Laws require a special majority to amend.

The Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice (Bagatz), has taken on the role of constitutional arbiter, ruling that it has the authority to strike down Knesset legislation that violates Basic Laws. This judicial review power — not explicitly granted by any law — has been one of the most contentious issues in Israeli politics.

In 2023, the government’s proposed judicial overhaul — which sought to limit the Supreme Court’s power, give the government more control over judicial appointments, and allow the Knesset to override court decisions — triggered massive protests and a constitutional crisis. The debate exposed deep divisions over the nature of Israeli democracy: Is the Supreme Court a vital check on majority tyranny, or an unelected elite overriding the will of the people?

Why So Many Elections?

Between 2019 and 2022, Israel held five national elections in under four years — a record that bewildered even Israelis. The reasons were structural: a deeply divided electorate, roughly evenly split between right and center-left blocs, with small parties holding the balance of power and no leader able to assemble a stable coalition.

This is not unusual in Israel’s history. Coalitions are inherently fragile, and a single party’s defection can bring down a government. The system produces democratic accountability — no leader can govern without broad support — but also chronic instability.

The Religion-State Divide

One of the most persistent fault lines in Israeli politics is the relationship between religion and state. Israel has no separation of church and state in the American sense. The Orthodox rabbinate controls marriage, divorce, and conversion for Jewish citizens. Public transportation largely shuts down on Shabbat. Kashrut (kosher food) certification is a government function.

These arrangements, rooted in agreements made at the state’s founding between Ben-Gurion and the ultra-Orthodox leadership (the “status quo” agreement), are increasingly contested by secular Israelis who resent religious authority over their personal lives, and by Reform and Conservative Jews who feel excluded by Orthodox monopoly.

The denominational divide that is relatively peaceful in North America — Orthodox, Conservative, Reform coexisting — becomes a political battle in Israel, where state resources, legal authority, and national identity are at stake.

Democracy Under Pressure

Israeli democracy is real, robust, and under stress. The country faces challenges familiar to democracies worldwide — populism, polarization, media fragmentation — as well as challenges unique to its situation: a military occupation in the West Bank, the integration of a large ultra-Orthodox population that is growing rapidly, tensions between Jewish and Arab citizens, and security threats that create pressure for emergency powers.

Yet the system endures. Israelis vote in high numbers, protest with gusto, argue about politics at every meal, and maintain a civic culture in which disagreement is not just tolerated but practically mandatory.

As the old saying goes: two Jews, three opinions. In the Knesset, it’s 120 Jews and at least 240.