Israeli politics provides what American democracy desperately needs.

Israelis vote primarily based on which party best represents their priorities and beliefs, making the election process a direct expression of policy preference, as opposed to a contest of personality.

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In the United States, presidential elections have become deeply personal.

Voters are drawn to individuals whose charisma, personal lives, and/or character traits resonate with them.

Across the ocean in Israel, the focus is quite different. Israelis predominantly vote with political parties in mind, rather than individual candidates — and this approach shapes a unique democratic landscape that can offer valuable lessons for American voters. (To be clear, some Israelis vote with individual candidates in mind, but they are the exception, not the rule.)

Within Israeli politics, the psychological and emotional emphasis on parties instead of individual candidates changes the dynamic of elections. Each party on the ballot represents a set of policies and philosophies, not just the face of a leader. Israelis vote primarily based on which party best represents their priorities and beliefs, making the election process a direct expression of policy preference, as opposed to a contest of personality.

While it is true that the U.S. and Israel’s electoral systems are noticeably dissimilar, even though both are forms of democracy, parallels can still be drawn. In Israel’s case, the system features numerous (sometimes too many) parties, the one receiving the most votes tasked with forming a governing coalition with other parties.

Many Israelis vote for a different party each time around based on whether they think a certain party has a better chance of crossing the electoral threshold with their vote. In the last election, this threshold was 3.25 percent, meaning a political party must receive at least 3.25 percent of the popular vote in order to gain at least one seat in the Knesset (legislature) and be considered for participation in the governing coalition.

Again, the emphasis here is on party, not person — even though each of Israel’s many political parties has a chairperson who heads the faction, such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for Likud. In addition, each party presents a ranked list of all their candidates for the Knesset, indicating which candidates will receive a legislative seat according to the percentage of votes the party receives relative to the total popular vote (presuming this given party crosses the aforementioned threshold).

For example, let’s say Likud has a list of 40 people and wins 27 percent of the popular vote and therefore 27 seats in the next Knesset; the first 27 people on Likud’s list would then receive a legislative seat.

American voters, by contrast, often weigh a candidate’s charisma and personal story more heavily than their party’s broader platform. This focus can obscure the pragmatism of a vote, leading to emotional and short-sighted voting.

For instance, while it is true that the U.S. president has final word on the country’s most important matters, it is also true that the president and vice president, upon being inaugurated into office, work with the Office of Presidential Personnel to nominate more than 4,000 political appointees throughout the federal (national) government, 1,200 of which require Senate confirmation.¹ For comparison, other developed democracies have between a few dozen and a few hundred political appointees.²

According to David E. Lewis, a distinguished professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, the U.S. has an unusually large number of leadership positions filled by political appointees. To add insult to injury, presidents and their parties have few incentives to reduce the number of political appointees and in many cases have incentives to increase the number.

While civil servants are hired, managed, and fired based on merit rather than other criteria — like personal connections or party loyalty — there are few restrictions on who can be selected as a political appointee. Political appointees serve as agency leaders and political staff, working at the top of the organizational hierarchy. The U.S. president selects the most prominent appointees directly and agency heads select others.

What’s more, a U.S. president’s concern for policy, governance, and patronage leads to a predictable pattern in the numbers of appointments. First, the president’s need to control the policymaking apparatus means that presidents will often prefer higher numbers of appointees in agencies that do not naturally share the president’s views about policy.³ This explains why President Joe Biden is relatively pro-Israel while certain federal agencies have become so obviously anti-Israel.

These agencies have views about how they should behave and what agency policies should be according to their policy commitments in law and regulation, the partisan composition of their employees, and their unique histories. Over time, agencies develop their own “institutional cultures” that shape how they approach various policies — often distinct from public sentiment or the presidential administration’s stated goals.

Within the Department of State (the U.S. version of a foreign ministry), for example, certain factions have prioritized broader regional strategies that emphasize appeasement of Middle Eastern powers like Qatar and the Islamic Republic of Iran, both of which are openly hostile toward longtime U.S. ally Israel. This is why it was no surprise that, two weeks ago, Ariane Tabatabai, an Iranian-American senior policy advisor to the U.S. Department of Defense, leaked highly classified American intelligence about Israel’s plans for retaliation against Iran.

And this was not the first time that Tabatabai has acted nefariously against American interests in an official U.S. federal government role.

According to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails which came to light last year (before October 7th), a guy by the name of Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the U.S. and allied governments. They showed that Malley had helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named, you guessed it, Ariane Tabatabai into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government — first at the State Department and now the Pentagon.

“The contents of the emails are damning, showing a group of Iranian American academics being recruited by the Iranian regime, meeting together in foreign countries to receive instructions from top regime officials, and pledging their personal loyalty to the regime,” wrote author Lee Smith. “They also show how these operatives used their Iranian heritage and Western academic positions to influence U.S. policy toward Iran, first as outside ‘experts’ and then from high-level U.S. government posts. Both inside and outside of government, the efforts of members of this circle were repeatedly supported and advanced by Malley.”⁴

Malley, you may recall, was appointed by the Obama Administration as its “point man” on the Middle East, leading the Middle East desk of the National Security Council. He eventually became lead negotiator for the Iranian nuclear deal brokered by the U.S.-led West in 2015.

To say the least, Malley has a head-scratching history. His father, who is of Syrian descent, edited a far-Left magazine in Paris, befriended longtime Palestinian leader (and mega-terrorist) Yasser Arafat, and was expelled from France because of his radicalism.

Renowned magazine publisher Martin Peretz famously described the elder Malley as “a rabid hater of Israel.” His son, Robert, even justified engaging with Hezbollah and Hamas, saying in a 2010 interview: “It’s a mistake to only think of [Hezbollah and Hamas] in their terrorist violence dimension ... [Hamas] has a charity organization, a social branch ... there’s so much misinformation about them.”

A list of the U.S. State Department’s anti-Israel measures goes on and on. I could offer many more examples, and not just in Obama and then Biden’s Democratic Party. The Republicans are also guilty of their fair share of political appointee transgressions. I simply gave Democratic examples because they are the party that has run the White House for the last four years.

The larger and main point is that we American voters, when vying to elect the next U.S. president, are not just voting for the two names on “the top of the ticket.” In effect, we are voting for thousands of people (political appointees) who run the federal government on a day-to-day basis and make weighty decisions (often without the White House’s review and approval).

This is why I have learned to focus not so much on which people are on “the top of the ticket” but more on the main agendas and goals of each party. As such, I am far less concerned about a president or vice president’s character — frankly, I think virtually all politicians are different shades of sh*t — and I am far more concerned about policies, not necessarily of the presidential candidate, but of the party he or she represents.

I developed this approach after moving to Israel in 2013, at age 24, and becoming a dual American-Israeli citizen. During the past 11 years, I have voted in all six of Israel’s legislative elections (which also determine the prime minister).

Each time I voted for a different political party — we have many to choose from — according to what I felt was best for the Jewish state at time of election. And as I said before, many Israelis do the same. Unlike in the U.S. where many people become shaken to their core upon hearing that someone jumped from Democrat to Republican (or Republican to Democrat), Israelis will not blink an eye when you tell them that you voted for a different party this time around.

This says a lot more about the U.S. political climate than it does about Israelis. Unfortunately, in the age of identity politics, many American voters would never consider voting for another party. It is as if political affiliation has become more than a preference or viewpoint; it has morphed into a cult-like personal identity marker, a tribe to which one belongs, and often uncritically.

Unfortunately, this undying allegiance (not to be confused with passion) creates exponential echo chambers and silences the nuances of debate. In this rigid alignment, voters become isolated from diverse perspectives, rendering the democratic process a repetitive ritual heavily infused with dogma, as opposed to a dynamic conversation of interdisciplinary ideas and visions.

Equally bewildering is how many Americans absolutely detest the presidential candidate for both the Democrats (Kamala Harris) and Republicans (Donald Trump) — arguing not about their policies, but rather about their personalities and character traits. Just like I do not really care about my favorite actor or athlete’s personality and character, I do not really care about my president’s personality and character. They are not my friend or romantic partner. They are there to do a specific job: be a politician and make political decisions.

Surely, in a perfect world, the president would have impeccable personality and character traits, but scholars have studied U.S. presidential candidates during the past 100 years and found that nearly all of them, regardless of their politics and the party they represented, had serious personality and character defects. I find the same to be true about both Harris and Trump, albeit for different reasons.

To excuse one candidate’s personality and/or character defects while harping about the other’s is like overlooking one athlete who illegally took steroids — because they play for your favorite team — but demanding that another athlete on another team, who took a different steroid, should be suspended.

Hence why I am far more interested in the programs, priorities, and policies of Harris and Trump’s parties, and not in them as individual candidates.

If you wonder why Benjamin Netanyahu keeps getting elected to lead Israel (there are no term limits in Israel for prime minister), it has much less to do with him personally and much more to do with the party he represents (Likud).

Many Israelis would agree that Netanyahu is not a “great guy” but they vote for the party he chairs because, among other reasons, its policies are very pragmatic in dealing with issue number-one for most Israelis: the nonstop national security threats posed by genocidal Arabs spanning decades (and even before the modern Jewish state was established in 1948). Plus, the Israeli economy has been incredibly stable and successful under Likud’s direction since the early-ish 2000s.

These are the things ultimately at stake — security, economy, social services, immigration, education, and so forth. That is why, to me, the U.S. would most benefit from voters who, first and foremost, focus on political parties and their policies and priorities, not on individual people.

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1. “Presidential Personnel Office.” The White House.

2. Makita, Jun. “A study of the functions of political appointees from a comparative perspective.” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics.

3. Lewis, David E. “The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

4. “High-Level Iranian Spy Ring Busted in Washington.” Tablet.