Some Underreported Aspects of Israel Worth Considering
A country is not just a war.
It’s hard to find any conversation about Israel right now that is not about the conflict in the Middle East — one which has multiple dimensions (and a full-blown regional war may soon be in the mix).
When our politicians talk about Israel, it’s almost always about the military relationship or shared interests in addressing adversaries like Iran.
But I think viewing an entire country through the prism of conflict is a mistake.
It’s a mistake for two reasons.
First, it means defining “pro-Israel” as supporting Israeli foreign policy — instead of endorsing aspects of Israeli culture, governance, music, arts, etc. That’s a pretty thin definition of support, like saying “pro-American” just means supporting the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Second, there are all kinds of admirable qualities about Israel — including policies and practices that maybe we should consider emulating here in the United States. By thinking about nothing but war, we blind ourselves to potential options for improving things at home.
Here are three aspects of Israel I think we should even consider emulating here in the United States.
Israeli universal health care
Israeli citizens and permanent residents alike qualify for guaranteed health care coverage.
Unlike much of Western Europe, which adopted universal health care systems coming out of the World War II period, Israel didn’t adopt universal health care until 1995.
The health care law set up a system that allows Israelis to choose from four nonprofit health care plans whose benefits are regulated by the government. There are no deductibles in this system.
The system is funded directly out of Israeli taxes — the income tax and a separate health tax. Meanwhile, Israelis are free to purchase additional private health insurance. There are some special categories of Israeli citizens who get health care through other means; soldiers, for instance, get health care from the army (sort of like in the United States).
The system seems to work fairly well. Israel has “low infant mortality, high life expectancy, effective chronic disease management and excellent primary care,” in the words of one health specialist.
While everything isn’t perfect it is generally considered an efficient system with costs that are manageable (unlike here in the United States).
One reason its health care system might be a better model for Americans than, say, the single-payer system in Canada, is that Israel makes things work by regulating private insurers.
America’s vast system of private health insurance companies would have to be consolidated in a single-payer system; the Israeli model would allow us to regulate them into nonprofit status with fixed benefits packages that would guarantee broad access. That might be an easier political lift.
Proportional representation in the legislature
Everybody’s heard the phrase “lesser of two evils” because we’ve all been forced to vote in elections where both the major party candidates range from mediocre to downright disturbing.
It would be easy to write this off as a feature of American culture, but there’s another explanation for it.
America uses what’s called a first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system. Candidates compete and whoever gets the most votes wins (in some cases, you have runoffs between the final two candidates where nobody gets a majority on the first try).
But a proportional system like Israel works differently. In Israel, as many parties run as you could possibly want. Then those parties get seats in the national legislature (called the Knesset) based on the percentage of votes they get. For that reason, Israel has about a dozen different parties represented in the current Knesset.
Does a system like this have drawbacks? Sure. Depending on where you set the threshold — say you have to get only 1 percent of the vote to get seats in the legislature — you might get a lot more fringe parties in there and make it difficult to form a coalition of parties that can take a majority. Israel has a ton of elections.
But that’s mostly a logistical issue; you can move the threshold up or down in order to make a more stable legislature. Germany has a proportional representation system that is fairly stable.
I’d argue that a proportional system would give Americans more choice and also reduce the us vs. them mentality that plagues the U.S. two-party system — with one party being the Good People and the other party being the Bad People. It would also encourage parties to work together to form coalitions to actually take power.
Moving to such a system in the U.S. would take a lot of change, but we could start small and reintroduce proportional representation into city or state governments (some used to use it in the distant past).
The kibbutzim
The Israeli network of Kibbutzim were highlighted by the events of Oct. 7, when some of these communities came under attack.
But such a unique system shouldn’t just be defined by their presence in a tragic event.
First founded in the early 20th century, the Kibbutzim represent communities where people work in communal settings. On many an early kibbutz, that meant farming. In modern day, the system includes other industries and even high-tech work.
For many early Israelis, living on a kibbutz represented a contribution towards building a socialist world.
“I would say they are considered one of the most successful experiments in voluntary socialism,” Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky told NPR last year. “Jewish immigrants who founded kibbutzim rejected capitalism and wanted to form a more socialist society.”
In modern-day Israel, these communal living arrangements are rare, with around 3% of Israelis living on a kibbutz. And life in these small towns today is often not as different from modern society as the early kibbutzim system was.
But they also represent a durable form of communal living that I think many Americans would find refreshing and maybe even charming.
Small town life plus communal values — how many people wouldn’t give up a big city (whether Tel Aviv or New York City) for that?
“The system is funded directly out of Israeli taxes”
Which is to say, American taxes.
An apartheid theocratic nation on stolen land can’t claim a culture. Benefits like universal health care when paid for by those who don’t have it isn’t an admirable feature. An economy based on selling high tech means of oppression and cowardly ways to murder isn’t a system to emulate. An army who shoots children in the head isn’t moral. You’re scraping the scum from the bottom of the barrel here.