Dem-o-krat-yah now!

The egregious erosion of democracy in Israel

by David N. Myers

The recent pause announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in pushing a controversial legislative package through the Knesset marks a temporary respite from a concerted plan to challenge and overturn the system of government that has been in place since the state of Israel was created in 1948.

After Netanyahu’s re-election on 1 November 2022, he forged a new coalition in which his own conservative Likud party stood in the unfamiliar position of representing the left end of the coalition’s political spectrum. The coalition includes the Likud, two Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties, the rabidly homophobic Noam party, the Otzma Yehudit (‘Jewish Strength’) party, and the Religious Zionist party. The leaders of Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism (also rivals) are among the most radical people ever to hold positions of governmental authority in Israel’s history.

Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionists and Finance Minister (with an additional portfolio as minister in charge of Israeli settlements in the Ministry of Defense) has publicly expressed his regret that ‘Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job’ of expelling Palestinians from Israel in 1948. In the wake of the settler-mounted pogrom against the Palestinian town of Huwara, he declared that the state should wipe it off the map.

The second figure, Itamar Ben-Gvir of Otzma Yehudit, may be even more extreme. He is a proud disciple of the racist American-born rabbi Meir Kahane and an admirer of another American export to Israel, Baruch Goldstein, who massacred twenty-nine Muslim worshippers in cold blood in Hebron in 1994. Ben-Gvir shares with Kahane and Goldstein a radical agenda to rid Israel of its Arab population. In what may be the single most irresponsible act in his long political career (and one reflecting his desperate desire to stay in power), Netanyahu appointed BenGvir as minister of national security with control over the police and border patrol.

These developments don’t even take stock of the main impetus behind the extraordinary protest movement that has taken rise over the past four months: the proposals by Justice Minister Yariv Levin to grant the Knesset the authority to override decisions of Israel’s Supreme Court, and to alter the process by which judges and government lawyers are appointed by granting ruling coalition politicians the decisive hand. Israel’s system of checks and balances is already a delicate one. In its parliamentary order, the prime minister is the leader of the governing coalition in the Knesset, which effectively collapses executive and legislative power into the hands of one person. To erode the authority of the courts risks transforming Israel into a polity without any effective restraint on the prime minister’s power.

It is hard to gauge who or what constitutes the greatest threat to the remaining institutions of democracy in Israel. Is it Levin and his parliamentary ally, Simcha Rothman? Or is it Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who will use whatever means they have at their disposal to achieve their goal of securing control over as much territory (especially in the occupied West Bank) with the smallest number of Palestinians on it as possible – by encouraging flight, intimidation, the annexation of territory, or, if the opportune moment arises, the expulsion of people)? It oddly seems not to be Netanyahu, who has lost a good deal of his magic as grand puppet-master that allowed him to outmanoeuvre and eliminate his rivals as well as any politician in recent memory.

A key piece of evidence that Netanyahu has lost his touch –and plunged Israel deeper into a dive towards outright fascism – is the agreement he signed with Ben-Gvir on 27 March that was approved by the Cabinet a week later. In exchange for BenGvir’s willingness to accept a pause in the legislation regarding the judicial system, Netanyahu consented to allow for the creation of a new ‘national guard’ under Ben-Gvir’s direct control. Israel already possesses a formidable array of military and law enforcement mechanisms, including the army, security services, border patrol, and national police. What Netanyahu is offering

Ben-Gvir is a private militia, composed of members who would be subject to his whim. Despite the opposition of senior police and intelligence leadership, the government approved the plan. Under Ben-Gvir’s command, the militia could act with impunity against demonstrators, opponents of the government, and, above all, Palestinians.

Since the November election, Israel’s democratic implosion has accelerated at such a rate that one might forget that it is the result of longer-term trends. Its features include the government’s tidal wave of radical legislative initiatives, the large and peaceful uprising of Israeli (Jewish) citizens for fourteen consecutive weeks, the sacking and then reinstatement of the defence minister (former general Yoav Gallant), who suggested a delay in the new legislation, the spontaneous outpouring of hundreds of thousands of Israelis in opposition to his firing, Netanyahu’s decision to push the pause button, and his ongoing vilification of the opposition as the source of Israel’s woes.

But Netanyahu was not elected yesterday. He has been prime minister for much of the past fifteen years. He was elected to the job in 2009, a decade after he completed his first three-year term following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, itself the result of a toxic political culture in which Rabin was cast as a traitor for his role in the Oslo peace process – and to which Netanyahu and his rhetoric contributed amply.

During his career, Netanyahu has developed a formidable record as an eroder of democracy. The 2010s, the long Netanyahu Decade in Israeli politics, witnessed new government efforts to restrict free expression – of cultural figures who were required to sign a loyalty oath, of human rights activists and organisations, of supporters of BDS (the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement), and of Muslims seeking to issue and heed the Islamic call to prayer. Even more importantly, it saw the rise of a new idea of what the state of Israel should be. Right-wing think tanks such as the Kohelet Forum and the Institute for Zionist Strategies worked closely with politicians such as Netanyahu to formulate an alternative to the Knesset’s 1992 Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty, which proposed a guiding vision of Israel as a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state. The competing idea that took rise was enshrined in 2018 in the Nation State Law, which declared that Israel is ‘the nation state of the Jewish people’ and that ‘the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People’. The law makes no reference to Arab citizens of the state, who represent about twenty per cent of Israel’s population.

This erasure stands in contrast to the thirteenth paragraph of Israel’s founding document from 1948, the Declaration of Independence, which calls for ‘the complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex’. By acknowledging the diversity of Israel’s inhabitants and calling for equality, the Declaration, or at least that clause, would seem to be the antithesis of Netanyahu’s ethnonationalist vision. But as with everything regarding Israel, it is more complicated.

Much of the Declaration narrates the heroic and exclusive journey of the Jewish people from its ancestral homeland to the far reaches of the Diaspora and then, with the advent of Zionism in the late nineteenth century, back to the homeland. The Declaration is, in this regard, a kind of historical deed attesting to the right of Jews to settle and establish a state in Palestine.

In some fundamental sense, Israel’s crisis of democracy has its roots not just in the November 2022 election or the Netanyahu era of the 2010s, but in 1948, as reflected in the fledgling state’s deeply conflicted sense of identity. An exclusive sense of historical right for the Jews stood alongside a call for equality to all. The question of whether the two could be reconciled has often been posed but never fully answered. The phrase that became popular in the 1990s – ‘Jewish and democratic’ – was more a profession of will than a coherent political theory.

A key part of the problem is that there never really was a well-grounded vision of democracy. Classical Zionist discourse, from Theodor Herzl to David Ben-Gurion, was not preoccupied with the question of democracy. A curious exception is the Revisionist Zionist party, whose charismatic leader, Zev Jabotinsky, was the mentor of Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu. Jabotinsky paired his articulate commit- insist, must be on the assault on the democratic institutions of the Jewish state. ment to both individual and minority rights with a keen interest, born of his time in Italy, in the methods and spectacle of fascist politics. Meanwhile, Ben-Gurion, the towering founding father of the Israeli state, removed the word ‘democracy’ from the final version of the Declaration of Independence, in which the word was included. This may be because he regarded the main internal challenge of the day in 1948 as overcoming fractious intraZionist divisions, the antidote to which was the concentration of power in the new state under the banner of mamlakhtiut, usually translated as ‘statism’.

The absence of a full-bodied discourse on democracy did not mean that democracy failed altogether to develop in the new state. Institutions imbued with democratic attributes – a lively multi-party parliamentary system, a functioning judiciary, a professional civil service – did emerge, drawing from a diverse array of sources including traditional Jewish communal norms, the imported practices of the British Mandatory regime (which operated from 1922 to 1948), and Continental theories. These state institutions accompanied, enabled, and, at times, hindered the remarkable growth of Israel and the unleashing of the extraordinary talents of its people over the past seventyfive years.

It is the attack on these institutions – and especially on the principle of a balance of power between branches of government – that has brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets week after week. Theirs is a simple one-word demand: ‘Dem-o-krat-yah’. Now, in the latest version of his grip on power, Netanyahu has joined forces with the likes of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, whose disdain for the rights and practices linked to democracy verges on fascism. Together they are tearing down the democratic institutions that were forged in Israel by lived experience rather than nuanced theoretical precepts

But there is an important caveat to the story just told. It goes back to the formula of ‘Jewish and democratic’. Arab Knesset member Dr Ahmad Tibi offered a memorable gloss on this turn of phrase: ‘Democratic toward Jews, Jewish toward Arabs’. In other words, Israel has been a robust, if imperfect, democracy for its Jewish citizens, but not for its Arab citizens. It is no surprise that the overwhelming majority of the demonstrators calling for democracy are Jewish; nor is it a surprise that demonstration organisers do not want speakers to focus on the deep inequity that exists between Jews and Arabs (nor, for that matter, on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank). Rather, the focus, they

This is understandable in tactical terms. But in order to seize the genuine opportunity that dwells in the heart of the crisis, it is necessary to go much further. The needs of the hour call to mind a concept from the Jewish mystical tradition. The mystics believed that the world was created by the ‘breaking of the vessels’ that contained the all-powerful beams of light emanating from God. That process of shattering brought evil into the world –and impelled a constant process to engage in ‘tikkun’, to repair the broken world. The vessels of Israeli democracy have cracked. But perhaps they need to be shattered further in order to engage in truly transformational repair. It is not enough to accept a compromise, as Israeli President Isaac Herzog is attempting to broker, that keeps in place some of Netanyahu’s legislative proposals. Nor is it enough to go back to the status quo before 1 November 2022, to a government led by the likes of current opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz. While they are a vast improvement over Netanyahu, they are not agents of transformational change who are prepared to challenge the deep inequality embedded in the Israeli state. To effect that change means that the language of ‘Jewish and democratic’ must be set aside. Thinkers and activists have begun to speak of ‘Arab-Jewish partnership’ as the centrepiece of a more just and equitable Israel.

What would this look like? In the first instance, Arabs must be enfranchised as co-equal partners in the evolving experiment of Israeli democracy. The recently revived taboo preventing Arab parties from being members of government coalitions, which was briefly broken in 2021, must be altogether consigned to the dustbin of history as a legacy of a discriminatory and racist regime. The alternative vision is a regime of genuine equality, in which neither Jews nor Arabs have an exclusive right to self-determination. To achieve that equality also requires a serious commitment to reparative justice, especially acknowledging and accepting responsibility for the Nakba, the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948.

We are far from that ideal today. There is an increasingly autocratic and erratic government in power in Israel; it seeks to tear down the remaining pillars of democracy. But there is also an unprecedented degree of people power at work every day in the country. It is unlikely that this power can be transformed into a real movement of ‘tikkun’ that shifts the paradigm of Israeli governance from a majoritarian ethno-democracy to a genuine participatory democracy for Arabs and Jews alike. But there has never been a better chance to do so. The moment should not be lost. g

David N. Myers is Distinguished Professor and Kahn Chair of Jewish History at UCLA. He is the author or editor of more than fifteen books in the field of Jewish history, including most recently, with Nomi Stolzenberg, American Shtetl: The making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic village in Upstate New York (Princeton, 2022). From 2018 to 2023 he was the President of the New Israel Fund.

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