Opinion | Suddenly, Everyone Fears for Israeli Democracy

Palestinians watch as Israeli machinery demolishes a Palestinian house in Masafer Yatta, July 25, 2022.Credit: MUSSA ISSA QAWASMA / REUTERS

"Now you wake up? Where were you up to now? “Liberal and democratic” Israel is in danger? It hasn’t been liberal or democratic for a long time now, in part because you shut your eyes. In fact, it never was. A country where there has always been military rule (with the exception of a few months preceding the June 1967 Six-Day War) cannot be considered a democracy by any measure."

A wave of democratic awakening has hit Israel ahead of the election – everyone fears for democracy.

The danger lurks only on the right, of course. The center-left is agitated and flustered. Pathos is working overtime, as are dramatic exaggerations. Nehemia Shtrasler warns of the assassination of democracy (Haaretz, October 21); former Shin Bet security service head Yuval Diskin cautions against civil war. Journalist Ben Caspit shouts: “A hair’s breadth separates liberal and democratic Israel from a government of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.”

Some people are already talking about leaving the country after the election. Suddenly, everyone fears for democracy.

               Suddenly, everyone fears for democracy.

               Suddenly, everyone fears for democracy in a country about half of whose subjects live under a military tyranny that is among the cruelest in the world.

               Suddenly, everyone worries about the future of the justice system, in a country where that system legitimizes almost any war crime and crime against humanity and openly defies international law.

               Suddenly, everyone is upset over the possibility of decriminalizing the offense of fraud and breach of trust, in a country where the crime of murder has been nearly entirely eliminated when the murderer is a soldier or a settler and the victim is Palestinian.

               Suddenly, everyone is horrified by religious extremism, in the most religiously coercive country in the Western world today.

And people are shocked at the possibility that the trial of Benjamin Netanyahu could be canceled, in a country where Avigdor Lieberman was never even tried, although the suspicions against him were more serious than those against Netanyahu.

Most of the people doing the shouting were silent until now.

               They were silent in the face of the occupation’s crimes and the threat to democracy that these crimes pose.

               They were silent over the shameful legitimization of crimes by the Supreme Court and the military courts, as if being involved with the events in the territories is not part of the justice system in Israel.

                They were silent when murderers and other criminals were not brought to justice nor even interrogated; and they were silent in the face of the settlement enterprise, the root of the Israeli apartheid regime – and the greatest danger to the democracy about which people are so worried now.

Most of them are too cowardly to call it what it is, an apartheid state, lest this be detrimental to them, but they fight courageously to preserve the law against bribery; to them, removing this law from the criminal code is more dangerous than all of the apartheid laws put together.

Staunch and determined democrats, now they wake up to the struggle over the regime. This happens only when Netanyahu threatens to return to power and when Itamar Ben-Gvir is his partner. This happens only when the fire of the danger to democracy licks at their clothing. As long as the anti-democratic elements hurt only the Palestinians, the liberal and enlightened camp isn’t really interested. But when the fire nears them and threatens their personal freedoms, and when Netanyahu is the one who lights it, they jump up to fight as if bitten by a snake.

Now you wake up? Where were you up to now? “Liberal and democratic” Israel is in danger? It hasn’t been liberal or democratic for a long time now, in part because you shut your eyes. In fact, it never was. A country where there has always been military rule (with the exception of a few months preceding the June 1967 Six-Day War) cannot be considered a democracy by any measure.

The difference is that now it’s about Netanyahu, and the danger could also reach privileged Israeli Jews, who have so far enjoyed impressive liberal democracy. The fight for this, and this alone, is a double standard. When you talk about the existential danger to democracy from Ben-Gvir, after all the years of ignoring the much more serious dangers, you lie to yourself. But what won’t we do to spark more fear of Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich, to feel like the guardians of enlightenment against those who seek to destroy it and to forget who is responsible for the real harm to democracy, and the real dangers that lie in wait for it.

Ask yourselves what is more dangerous to democracy: abrogation of the law against breach of trust, or the military’s absolute support for the settlers’ pogroms? What threatens more to destroy it? And whose fault is it? Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir? Really, them alone?