Math Education Reform Aims To Redefine 53/120 MKs As Majority

“Once the redefinition takes hold across schools, academia, and society at large, we can extract ourselves from the political deadlock.”

Jerusalem, September 28 – A new initiative by the Ministry of Education aims to alter materials for the 2024-2025 academic year to address Israel’s persistent electoral stalemates, in particular to implement a provision ordaining that fifty-three seats in a one-hundred-twenty-seat parliament constitute the “majority” necessary by law to form a governing coalition.

Minister of Education Yoav Kisch announced the initiative today at a press conference. “Our task force determined that the only workable solution to a perpetual deadlock in elections involves redefining ‘majority,'” he acknowledged. “The divisions within our fractured electorate doom, for the foreseeable future, any efforts to cobble a stable coalition of at least sixty-one lawmakers. The fundamental changes necessary to find our way out of the morass involves a total redefinition of assumptions, starting with the very notion that ‘majority’ necessarily refers to more than half of something. Once the redefinition takes hold across schools, academia, and society at large, we can extract ourselves from the political deadlock.”

Israel’s 120-member Knesset currently requires that 61 of its members form a coalition government, as no party in the country’s history has ever garnered an outright parliamentary majority. The horse-trading, power-brokering, brinkmanship, and naked extortion that characterize the formation and maintenance of such coalitions long offered a flawed, but workable, model for governance – provided that the shifting, rising, and falling fortunes of the various parties, factions, and alliances within the body produced a bloc of parties willing to cobble together a shared agenda for their several years in power. The model suffered repeated failures over the last decade; razor-thin majorities disappeared when one or more parties to the coalition decided it had more to gain from new elections than from continuing to sit in the coalition – or the leaders of the largest elected factions failed to secure the necessary majority, triggering further elections.

Public opinion polls forecast no significant impending shift in polity sensibilities: neither the “pro-Netanyahu” nor the “anti-Netanyahu” faction is slated to attain enough allies to form a majority coalition in any upcoming contests, barring some dramatic event that shifts voting one way or the other; neither side has the political will anymore to enlist the Arab parties, following the lackluster, tense outcome of just such an experiment under the short-lived 2021-2022 Bennett administration.

However, once the new definition of “majority” takes hold, securing one for a governing coalition will become significantly easier. “We also intend to suggest this approach to adherents of the ‘the 2020 election was stolen from Trump’ camp,” stated Kisch.

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