The lost honor of Israeli democracy

Just as regime changes never happen in a vacuum, like thunder in the middle of a clear day, Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial revolution is also not the simple whim of a jealous and a Prime Minister thirsty for revenge against a judicial system that had dared to put him in the dock.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
16 March 2023 Thursday 23:57
66 Reads
The lost honor of Israeli democracy

Just as regime changes never happen in a vacuum, like thunder in the middle of a clear day, Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial revolution is also not the simple whim of a jealous and a Prime Minister thirsty for revenge against a judicial system that had dared to put him in the dock. Unfortunately, the danger to Israeli democracy will not go away even if Netanyahu's judicial overhaul is torpedoed.

What he calls in Orwellian language "reform" (in reality, we are dealing with the elimination of the separation of powers and the submission of the judiciary and, therefore, the Supreme Court to the control of the parliamentary majority of a country which lacks a Constitution and does not have a second chamber to moderate extremism) is a consequence of the deep cultural fissures that characterize Israeli tribal society and, since 1967 mainly, of the occupation and repression of the Palestinian people.

Right-wing governments have chosen to hide the truth about the repercussions of the moral decay of long years of occupation in the fabric of the motherland. Netanyahu will go down in history as the architect of the integration of the monstrous distortion of the Zionist idea (with an expression characterized by the repression of the Palestinian people by a superior Jewish race) in the political system of Israel. If there is a dictatorship in the occupied Palestinian lands, there will also be one outside; if there is no rule of law or fundamental freedoms in those lands, there won't be any outside either. It is the iron law of communicating vessels.

Israel's ruling party today is a sect of believers indistinguishable from its allies in "religious Zionism," the outdated name adopted by disciples of the late Jewish supremacist Rabbi Kahana and the fundamentalist rabbis of Judea and Samaria. The aforementioned party is the most refined component of the theocratic fascism that dominates the Netanyahu government today; and judicial remodeling is an essential part of his journey to a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Netanyahu is, for them, the donkey of the Messiah; just as Donald Trump, the hedonistic atheist, was for the evangelical Christians of the United States.

And for the other allies, the ultra-Orthodox, who have always despised secular liberal Zionism but have in recent years become ultra-nationalist (after all, for the approximately 140,000 ultra-Orthodox settlers, the West Bank is the very Lebensraum that attracted hundreds of thousands of other Israelis), Netanyahu is the figure who, by tearing down the walls of the hated Supreme Court, will pave the way for their complete and final liberation from compulsory military service and any legal interference with their autonomy . How excessive! A judicial coup d'état executed by a dark alliance with a separatist Orthodox community that aims to annihilate the values ​​of liberal society, which taxes its destroyers and sends its children to protect them while they promote a theocratic view.

A real imperialist is one who is willing to sacrifice democracy in the name of empire. It is true that the imperial conquests of European countries overseas also unleashed waves of nationalism and racial supremacism, but nothing beats the expansion into a territory that is defined as "homeland" and is in territorial continuity with the motherland ( see Hitler in Austria and the Sudetenland, Putin in Crimea and Ukraine, as well as the West Bank of Israel) when strengthening the authoritarian state.

The one in charge of Netanyahu's government to institutionalize moral suicide like this is its main ideologue, Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the Religious Zionist Party. The regime of military occupation, which by definition constitutes a supposedly "temporary" affair, is what still protects Israel, albeit by a narrow margin, from the guilt of apartheid. However, the recent passage of the law canceling Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan in northern Samaria and the "nationalization" of the occupation by appointing Smotrich as head of the Civil Administration in the Palestinian territories take off the mask and show Israel's gallop towards an apartheid state.

The death of the two-state solution and Israel's insatiable agrarian hunger in the Palestinian lands are the deep reasons that condemned the fate of Israeli democracy to realize the title of Gabriel García Márquez's book Chronicle of a Death announced Those who still make predictions in the name of the solution of the two States are all men of honor, as Mark Antony said in his lament at the funeral of Julius Caesar; but, like him, they cry at the feet of a corpse.

Half a million settlers live in the occupied West Bank today, not counting the 240,000 in East Jerusalem. There is no need for Israel to announce an official annexation, the reality speaks for itself. Attempts at peace have come and gone, from the Oslo accords, to the Camp David summit and Clinton's peace plan, to the Annapolis process and its peace proposal ambitious It is likely that all proposals were imperfect. However, these things are always like that, "mutually unsatisfactory"; especially when there is no military victor. In reality, the supposed victor, Israel, was morally and politically defeated the moment it occupied the West Bank in 1967, just as Heinrich Mann referred to Germany's victory over France in 1870: Vae victoribus! (Woe to the victors!).

The tragedy is that the South African reality unfolding in Israel does not and cannot have a South African solution, as there is no scenario in which the Jewish minority will allow the Arab majority rule between it and Jordan . The dystopia materializing before our eyes will be a state of constant civil war with Jerusalem turned into a local version of Belfast. “You will look in vain for barbed wire fences. / You know that things like this / don't go away”, wrote Yehuda Amichai in his series of poems “Jerusalem in 1967”.

Those who advocate in good faith for a Judeo-Arab binational state with an egalitarian civil regime between the sea and the Jordan harbor an enviable optimism about human nature and the generosity of national movements. Sigmund Freud wrote about the “narcissism of small differences”, that same narcissism that has made multiethnic utopias small in so many places.

Here? In this region where minorities are gassed, where Sunnis and Shiites wage a war of domination and sometimes extinction and where the only multi-ethnic democracy in the region, Lebanon, collapses in on itself in a vision that induces the horror? What was not possible in Cyprus between Turks and Greeks or in the entire universe of the former Yugoslavia, which imploded in orgies of blood and genocide that Europe had not known since the Second World War, should be possible here by the hand of two nationalisms like the Judeo-Israeli and the Palestinian-Muslim, impregnated as they are with self-centered narratives and a righteous feeling of victimhood?

Perhaps just an Israeli-initiated disengagement from most of the West Bank (hopefully the political sense would prevail to carry it out in coordination with the Palestinians and the Kingdom of Jordan as a prelude to a future broader deal in the triangle Jordan-Palestine-Israel) is the last lifeline left for Israeli democracy. Netanyahu lacks historical grandeur for such an exceptional move, and indeed for any bold political move. Netanyahu only knows how to make the kind of peace that carries no political price; and, in the Palestinian area, there is none that is like that.

Unlike their predecessors, who did not see the perpetuation of power as a supreme goal and were therefore willing to risk their political lives fighting for peace in Palestine in an attempt to restore the healthy core of the Zionist idea (corrupt for the nationalist frenzy of the 1967 war), Netanyahu is the opportunist par excellence. For him, the highest consideration was always the preservation of his political base, even if that meant (as can be seen in his current government of fanatics) being reduced to being a hostage to his allies rather than being one of them. the guide.

"Sometimes, in politics", declared Charles de Gaulle on the eve of the French withdrawal from Algeria, "you have to choose between betraying the electorate or France. I choose France". Netanyahu always chooses the political base. Of course, there is no politics without a base, but clinging to a base in any situation is also the secret of failure in the art of governing.

Netanyahu maintains his political base by endlessly feeding the Kulturkampf incorporated into Israeli reality. In our country, electoral campaigns are not really developed around platforms and action plans, but as part of a continuous clash of values ​​and culture, divergent traditions and inter-ethnic divisions. The gap between the Israel embodied in Tel-Aviv, as a metaphor for a secular and liberal existence open to the world, and its mirror image, the Israel of Jerusalem (the religious and orthodox city, trapped in messianic delusions and alien to foreign values, by virtue of its universality, Tel-Aviv) is Netanyahu's playing field.

With his judicial reshuffle, Netanyahu has launched Israel into its own Brexit moment. In Britain, Boris Johnson and his sect of zealous Tories took advantage of the inherent rift in urban England and the conservative periphery imbued with nostalgia for the values ​​of Little England to lead the country to collective suicide with the 'aided by fallacious propaganda about the wonders of leaving the European Union. As in the case of the judicial coup in Israel, it was a rebellion against reality and common sense. And, as in Israel, the sect of fanatics who caused the disaster did so with absolute disregard for the opinion of the "experts". Netanyahu has yet to find a serious economist who hasn't warned him of the impending economic decline if he persists in his judicial overhaul.

Israel is heading towards the abyss as a result of an act of fanatical adventurer similar to Brexit; and not only in the economic field, in which the miracle provided by high technology is put in danger and the flow of investments is diverted to other places.

Elite unit reservists and fighter pilots have also spoken out against Netanyahu's attack on democracy. It is an encouraging and dangerous thing at the same time, because Netanyahu's judicial madness has forced the army to assume the guardianship of democracy, a role that does not belong to it.

How fanatically stupid judicial reform can be if it denies its army, engaged as it is in a state of permanent war at the mercy of complex combat scenarios, the protection offered by an independent judiciary against possible prosecution by the International Court of Justice.

Israeli democracy is a strategic asset and the cornerstone of its national security. This is the message that the United States is trying to convey with increasing impatience to the government of fanatics in Jerusalem and it is also what French President Emmanuel Macron wanted to point out when he warned Netanyahu of the danger of separating from the family of democratic countries.

If the continued repression of the Palestinian people and the confiscation of their lands have not yet led to international sanctions against Israel, this is due above all to our membership in the family of democratic States.

The United States is another example of a political system operating in the midst of an ongoing culture war between the liberal US of the East and West Coasts and the deep US, which helped Donald Trump to the White House in 2016. The difference is that America's democracy is held together by the foundational cement of a Constitution that enshrines human and minority rights, and by the ability of its leaders to reinvent the American Dream even when it seems like it's about to run out.

However, today's Israelis have neither a Constitution nor a common dream capable of uniting their tribal society. Netanyahu has even divided the welfare state by building breakaway social welfare autonomies for his constituencies between settlers, ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazis and their Sephardic counterparts.

Netanyahu, they say, has a historical awareness, and he himself even boasts of being the Winston Churchill of the Israeli situation. However, as Netanyahu's idol wrote in 1937 in his article "The Age of Government by Great Dictators", the government cannot remain subject to the changing whims of the rulers, "sometimes Pericles or Augustus and sometimes Draco or ", because "a formidable propaganda apparatus, slogans and slogans" is able to alter the opinion of the crowd and thus pave the way for dictatorships that often "hide behind the mask of a constitutional structure".

American historian Charles Beard took it for granted that America's democracy would survive because "it has no Rome or Berlin to march on." Now, if Trump almost managed to turn Washington into Rome in the United States when he sent a frenzied crowd to storm the Capitol to declare him the winner of an election he had lost, the same can happen to Israel. In Israel, an entire people and the state budget were held hostage for three consecutive election cycles until Netanyahu got the result he wanted. Which Western democracy can be given such a situation? Protection against government arbitrariness was precisely what the UK Supreme Court offered when, in September 2019, it forced Prime Minister Boris Johnson to cancel a suspension of Parliament that sought to leave the European Union even without the need for agreement.

We are at a decisive moment for the future of Israel, and also before an opportunity for important political realignments. Unless Israel has decided to tie its fate to the international darkness of authoritarian regimes (it is advisable to follow Freedom House's reports on the decline of democracy around the world), its liberal forces must create new political structures and a renewed political direction with a vision of the future. The narcissistic nuances that supposedly distinguish the current parliamentary opposition parties have no real meaning today. If its leaders do not bring a message of hope and a horizon of change to the mass protests in the streets (by creating, for example, a large Democratic Party that offers a broad space and that tackles the Israeli crisis with determination of an emergency and the treatment of its communicating vessels of society, employment and constitutional regime) can miss the hour of truth that history has offered them.