One might think from its name that the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) seeks to promote democracy in the Jewish State.

Instead they have been recently focusing their efforts to promote a profoundly anti-democratic change in the election process.

They have been spending a fortune on huge advertisements calling for the election law to be changed so that the leader of the largest party automatically becomes prime minister.

Why would such an arrangement necessarily reflect the will of the people?

Consider an example of 3 large parties – two from one camp while the other camp has only one large party.

Each of the two large parties from one camp have 25 seats for a total of 50 seats in the Knesset while the large party from the rival camp has 26 seats.

The IDI program would have the leader of the camp with 26 seats become prime minister.

That’s promoting democracy?

This week Yisrael Beiteinu called for changing the rules so that under certain circumstances the president of Israel (who is not elected by the public) would pick someone to be prime minister who would head a government of “experts” that would rule the country for a year with the Knesset effectively neutralized.

I have reached out repeatedly to the IDI to comment. Stone silence.

This isn’t the first time IDI failed.

When Ariel Sharon was elected on a platform NOT to leave the Gaza Strip and pulled out, the head of the IDI maintained that this was a democratic move since leaving the Gaza Strip was good for democracy.

Its unfortunate that IDI appears to favor a “the ends justify the means” approach.

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