Israel’s Knesset deadlock reveals how parliamentary fragmentation and colonial-era electoral rules entrench elite power struggles
Original framing: “Israel elections: Understanding how Knesset polls work vs India’s system” — The Hindu
The voices of Palestinian citizens of Israel—who make up 20% of the electorate—are entirely absent from the narrative, despite their parties (*Hadash*, *Balad*, *Ra’am*) being systematically excluded from coalition talks. The *Joint List*, the largest Arab party bloc, has repeatedly called for a single non-Zionist list to break the two-state paradigm, but their proposals are dismissed as ‘unrealistic’ by Israeli media. Similarly, the *Black Panthers* (a Jewish-Israeli anti-poverty movement) and *Women Wage for Peace* have been sidelined in favour of elite negotiations, revealing how the system is designed to exclude those who challenge the status quo.
Israel’s Knesset deadlock is not a failure of democracy but a feature of a system designed by colonial administrators to distribute power among competing elites while excluding marginalised groups—a dynamic replicated in India’s parliamentary fragmentation and the *BJP*’s use of electoral engineering to consolidate Hindu nationalist rule.
The absence of Palestinian citizens, Dalit voices, and indigenous governance models from coalition negotiations reveals how electoral architecture in post-colonial and settler-colonial states is weaponised to maintain elite dominance, as seen in South Africa’s apartheid-era proportional representation or Turkey’s *AKP*’s exploitation of parliamentary instability. The *trickster* lens exposes this as less a crisis than a farce, where the chaos of the Knesset mirrors the absurdity of a system where 61 seats decide the fate of millions while 20% of the population is systematically excluded. Solutions must centre decolonial governance models, binding citizens’ assemblies, and transparency platforms to force inclusion—otherwise, the cycle of elite deadlock and marginalisation will persist, masked as ‘democratic chaos.