On July 28, the council of Meretz convened to approve the left-wing party's merger with Democratic Israel, led by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Labor Party Knesset member Stav Shaffir. The writer David Grossman, addressing the Meretz delegates, endorsed the deal. “Sometimes,” he said, “marriages of convenience hold together better than marriages of love.” Perhaps, but not all is rosy in this political marriage.

Over the years, the political meanderings of Meretz's happy “groom,” Barak, had taken him from the Israel Ahat alliance to Labor to Atzmaut, and today the extent of his love for his new bride, the political left, was obvious at their engagement ceremony. Announcing the formation of the Democratic Camp on July 25, Barak pointed to himself, declaring that as number 10 on the alliance’s slate of Knesset candidates, along with the number 2 on the list, Shaffir, he would lead the “sharpest, most biting, most between-the-eyes campaign.” He “forgot” to mention Nitzan Horowitz, Meretz chief and the leader of the new alliance.

The motivation of seemingly incompatible brides and grooms from the political right and left to walk down the aisle ahead of the Sept. 17 elections stems from one particular feature of Israel's election system — the electoral threshold. The threshold of having to win four seats to enter the Knesset keeps some small parties out of the parliament due to their winning an insufficient percentage of votes. This vector sometimes erases ideological differences on the right and the left, among Jewish parties and Arab parties, and turns the Knesset into just another workplace. Ideologies are sidelined for the sake of mergers as alliances that guarantee, at least in theory, the small parties an above-the-threshold electoral result.

Hardest hit by this phenomenon are the prospects for negotiations with the Palestinians on a permanent arrangement as part of a regional peace deal. Electoral threshold trauma has led the flag-bearers of a diplomatic solution — as opposed to those advocating management of the conflict — to sideline the issue to the point of almost burying it.