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4/6/2016 The end of Israeli democracy? | The Times of Israel
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timesofisrael.com http://www.timesofisrael.com/theendofisraelidemocracy/
By Haviv Rettig Gur
The end of Israeli democracy?
In a recent oped in the Forward, Daniel Sokatch, CEO of the leftleaning USbased New Israel Fund, laid outhis widely shared aspiration to rehabilitate the Israeli left from afar by flooding it with cash.
“The attacks on civil society and other democratic institutions continue from year to year,” he wrote, “with somerightwing victories such as passage of the boycott law [which allows civil suits to be brought against WestBank settlement boycotts], and some defeats at the hands of Israel’s underestimated and underfunded left.”
Sokatch retold the narrative now commonly accepted overseas that sees Israeli democracy in decline, if not infullblown collapse, as oncevictorious Israeli progressives are pushed back in the face of a surging chauvinistright.
The evidence most often cited for this purported decline in Israeli liberty is the raft of rightwing bills proposedin recent years in the Knesset, including the boycott law mentioned by Sokatch.
Do the bills in question – the NGO bill, the MK suspension bill, etc. – prove that there is an assault on Israelidemocracy?
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Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, right, and thenattorney generalYehudah Weinstein, Jerusalem, May 19, 2015. (Marc Israel
Sellem/Flash90)
And is this assault, as Sokatch claims, held back by the heroic efforts of an “underestimated and underfundedleft?”
The debate over the wisdom or perfidy of the billsthemselves is a hopelessly partisan one. But this lastpart of the left’s narrative — the claim that the bills arebeing stopped by the left — is eminently testable, andsheds a great deal of light on the meaning andpurpose of the bills.
Much ink has been spilled on Justice Minister AyeletShaked’s NGO bill, which dramatically (and critics sayunfairly) ups the public disclosure requirements fornongovernmental organizations that receive amajority of their funding from foreign governments.Just about all the groups that fit that descriptionbelong to the political left.
Whether the controversial bill is good or bad, democratic or anti, it is undeniably a far milder attempt to dealwith the issue than previous proposals. In the 18th Knesset (20092013), Likud MK Ofir Akunis (now theminister of science) proposed a bill that would have outlawed such funding altogether, all but shuttering manyfarleft groups.
What happened to Akunis’s proposal? Was it defeated, as Sokatch suggests, by the left?
A similar question might be asked of the rightist versions of the “nationstate bill” that drew so much opprobriumin 2013 and 2014, the ones that contained muchcriticized stipulations demoting the de facto status of Arabicas an official language and granting West Bank settlements constitutional protections.
Where did they go?
The answer would surprise many who have opined on these bills in recent years. For it wasn’t the left thatstopped Akunis’s bill. How could it have? The bill never made it to a vote in the Knesset where leftwinglawmakers might have had the opportunity to take a stand. It was killed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuand fellow coalition leaders, and not in any dramatic parliamentary showdown. It was simply excluded from theagenda because it lacked the minimum support it would have needed to even hazard a vote.
The story is much the same with the two nationstate bills, but this time the left’s haplessness is shown by thefact that the bills did make it to a plenum vote – where they passed.
They did not become law, to be sure. They only passed a preliminary vote, and only after Netanyahu struck acompromise with their authors, including three currently serving cabinet ministers (Shaked, Ze’ev Elkin andYariv Levin), that saw the bills killed after the vote. Under this compromise, the authors were handed thesymbolic victory of a successful vote on the condition that they then cancel their bills in favor of a more liberalNetanyahuproposed version, one which described Israel as equally “Jewish” and “democratic,” left out anydemotion of Arabic’s status and avoided the settlement question altogether.
In these votes, the left had a rare opportunity to embarrass not only the bills’ farright proponents, but the primeminister himself. It tried to muster the votes — and failed. They were formally canceled in a vote inside theNetanyahu cabinet, on Netanyahu’s express instructions.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (flanked by ministers Miri Regevand Yisrael Katz) in the Knesset on February 8, 2016. (Yonatan
Sindel/Flash90)
The point of this intotheweeds journey into the fateof those bills is simple: it is the right, not the left, thatis holding back the proverbial tide.
And these are not cherrypicked examples. The list ofrightwing bills defeated by the right is a long one.
A bill proposed by the Yisrael Beytenu party thatwould have instituted a death penalty for terrorists –surely an easy win in terrorafflicted Israel – wasdefeated 946 (yes, 94 to 6) in a July 2015 Knessetvote. Even in its most indelicate fantasies the“underestimated” left cannot hope to summon 94votes in the 120seat Knesset.
Ironically, Sokatch’s own example of the controversial 2011 “boycott law,” which made the singling out of WestBank settlements a legally actionable act of discrimination under Israel’s antidiscrimination laws, underminesthe narrative just as comprehensively. Foreign pundits often point to it to sustain the democracyindeclineargument, if only because there are so few other examples of the successful passage of a distinctly rightwinglaw in seven years of emphatically rightwing rule.
Yet the boycott law was so defanged by the time it actually passed, with criminal sanctions excised from thefinal version and a high bar set for proving even civil damages, that it has yet to be enforced.
It is worth dwelling on that point for a moment: five years after its passage, the boycott law has not even beentested in court – and not for lack of Israelis who say they won’t conduct commerce with settlements.
And even after the teeth were pulled from this controversial bill, Netanyahu himself still refused to support it inthe final July 2011 Knesset vote that made it law, pointedly absenting himself from the plenum (together withthendefense minister Ehud Barak).
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The Knesset plenary during vote on the state budget for 20152016, November 18, 2015. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
The list grows tedious (and that’s the point). Ayelet Shaked’s longstanding proposal to add a “supersessionclause” in the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, which would have enabled the Knesset to overrule HighCourt of Justice decisions, was dropped last summer during her very first days on the job as justice minister.Her explanation: she lacked the votes to pass the measure, or to make it worth fighting for, even within therightwing coalition.
Just last month, Jewish Home MK Moti Yogev’s bill outlawing the broadcasting of the Muslim call to prayer onloudspeakers was withdrawn by its own author because he could not obtain the support of the MinisterialCommittee for Legislation, a cabinet committee overseen by avowed rightists (and, for good measure,outspoken West Bank annexationists) Shaked and Levin. A similar bill suffered an entirely similar fate in 2014.
Sokatch’s “underestimated left” is a mirage. The left is just as ineffectual as its critics contend.
And if it is the right, not the left, that holds the line against the supposed antidemocratic surge, does that meanIsraeli democracy is not, in fact, under threat?
Gimmicks
The right’s persistent habit of systematically toppling its own bills reveals the underlying gimmick that drives somuch discussion about Israel on both left and right.
It is easy to argue that the left overreacts to these bills, but it is harder to argue that this is entirely the left’sfault. After all, it is usually the rightist lawmakers themselves who declare that their bills are meant to solve thesupposed problem of “too much democracy,” or who say they prefer Israel’s “Jewish character” to its“democratic” one. To the left’s growing use of “democracy” as a catchword for its liberal politics, many on theright have responded by calling for “rebalancing” – i.e., weakening – that democracy.
In the end, this debate about Israel’s democracy, both at home and among those overseas who take their cues
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Hagai ElAd, Executive Director of B’Tselem, at a press conferencein Tel Aviv, February 5, 2016. (AFP/Jack Guez)
from Israel’s domestic politics, is mostly driven by the faux stridency of powerless demagogues — by rightistswho propose unpassable bills in undisguised bids to become the left’s latest bogeymen, and by leftists whosehandwringing ensures them both their foreign patrons and their mobilizing ethos of victimhood.
Or put another way, the frenetic rhetorical contest between left and right is essentially a media event, not apolicy debate. The bills would not be proposed if the lawmakers could not be assured they would not be heldresponsible for their passage.
Thus it was that on a certain Wednesday night — that of September 2, 2015, to be exact — in a Knessetplenum nearly empty of lawmakers, MKs Akunis of Likud and Israel Eichler of United Torah Judaism managedto inject an amendment into the Broadcasting Authority Bill that would come up for a final vote that evening thatmade it illegal for journalists in stateowned media outlets to express personal views on political matters. Thelaw passed, and the amendment became the law of the land.
When they noticed it the following morning, horrified political reporters took to calling it “the silencing law.”
The new requirement caused a triumphant toldyouso uproar of victimization on the left and profoundembarrassment on the right. It passed by accident, coalition leaders explained. By Sunday, when lawmakersreturned from the weekend, it was Netanyahu himself who brought forward the amendment to reverse themeasure. It was overturned within the week.
Akunis and Eichler made weak attempts to defend the measure, but seemed more horrified at its successfulpassage into law than at its swift cancellation.
It is not an accident that these bills usually swell in number in the runup to rightwing primaries. They are notmeant to pass, only to be proposed. There is something profoundly unfair, Akunis and Eichler must havethought last September, in suddenly, by a trick of legislative timing, finding that their bill had become law andfinding themselves held responsible for the results.
Own goals
Israel’s farleft activists, who are often at the center of these leftright skirmishes, know all this.
In a statement sent to reporters in January, B’Tselemand Breaking the Silence, two groups funded primarilyby foreign governments and thus subject to thestipulations of Shaked’s NGO bill if it passes, calledthe bill “an own goal for the government.”
“The law won’t hurt our activities in practice,” Breakingthe Silence’s CEO Yuli Novak — whose group seeksout testimony from Israeli army veterans and servingsoldiers relating to human rights abuses againstPalestinians in the West Bank — boasted in theHebrewlanguage statement.
Hagai ElAd, Executive director of B’Tselem, whichalso works to document human rights abuses in the West Bank, added: “The campaign of incitement againstus…has had some positive results: we are finally talking about the occupation. Thousands of Israelis have
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joined the organizations [that stand to be affected by the bill] recently in order to learn, listen, volunteer andcontribute to the fight against the occupation.”
The bill’s “practical content is sparse,” the statement went on – apparently without coordinating its messagewith overseas supporters like Sokatch, who are arguing otherwise – “but its symbolic significance is farreaching. Mainly, it undermines the claims of the Israeli propaganda machine that Israel shares the values ofthe democratic world.”
One wonders if this last part about Israel’s values shouldn’t also have been coordinated with the likes ofSokatch, whose rhetoric speaks of protecting Israel’s values, while these advocates are telling the world (and,crucially, boasting to Israelis that they are doing so) that Israel lacks such values altogether.
There is a deeper message in these gaps between the rhetoric of these Israeli activists and that of theiroverseas supporters, between the left’s claim that it is upholding Israeli democracy and the less heroic facts onthe ground in the Knesset, between the right’s own feigned militancy and the reliability with which it then kills itsown bills.
In the rift between rhetoric and reality is revealed a strange truth about this debate on democracy: that it is notreally a debate about democracy, but about solidarity, kinship and the social compromises on which Israelisociety is constructed.
Statist, intrusive, free
Israel boasts many of the features of highly successful democracies: an open and contentious public square,free and egalitarian parliamentary elections, robust judicial recourse and oversight.
But no one quite knows why.
Built by East European and Muslimworld immigrants with no actual experience of democracy, the Israeli stateis, on paper at least, worryingly monolithic and intrusive. The local traffic cop, the school textbook, theneighborhood rabbi, even the local ritual mikveh bath, are all appointed and administered by watchfulbureaucrats in Jerusalem.
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New immigrants disembarking from the Theodor Herzl, near Haifa, Israel, 194950 (Robert Capa/International Center ofPhotography/Magnum Photos)
Nor did Israel’s early history favor democracy. For the first 29 years of the state’s existence, the centerleft,today called the Labor Party, never lost an election. This de facto oneparty regime controlled not only thecountry’s powerful security services, but much of the economy. Israel’s largest industries were stateowned andrun (and thus de facto Laborowned and run) in those decades.
There are almost no formal checks and balances between the branches of Israel’s government. The primeminister is not chosen directly by the people, but in a complicated process of parliamentary coalitionbuilding.He or she cannot govern without a parliamentary majority, and is thus not meaningfully constrained by anyAmericanstyle opposition legislature.
Nor does Israel possess any clearly articulated ideology of political liberty. There was no PhiladelphiaConvention at Israel’s founding, no Federalist Papers, no explicit public debate about the nature and shape ofthe country’s political institutions. The Declaration of Independence, which refers in broad terms to notions offreedom and equality, lacks the force of law.
Only in 1992 were some key rights delineated in two pseudoconstitutional “basic laws,” yet even these are inan important sense only halfheartedly constitutional. The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, whicharticulates fundamental rights such as bodily safety, privacy and freedom of movement, can be changed oroverturned by a simple majority of MKs present in the Knesset plenum.
Add to that Israel’s bitter history of nearconstant warfare that gave the military a central role in the formation ofnational identity, the heroicizing of military leaders that naturally flowed from this experience – indeed, add inthe enormous number of generals who moved seamlessly out of uniform and into the highest elected offices inthe land: Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak – and one begins to feel that it is not theallegedly looming collapse of Israeli democracy that should surprise us, but the fact that so robust a democracyever took root here in the first place.
Why did it take root?
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Prime minister Golda Meir and defense minister Moshe Dayanmeeting with troops on the Golan Heights, on November 21, 1973.
(Ron Frenkel/GPO)
Runnymede
In “The Origins of Political Order,” the political theoristFrancis Fukuyama offers a counterintuitive retelling ofthe story of the birth of English democracy. TheMagna Carta, signed by King John in 1215 after helost a battle with rebellious nobles at Runnymede, isusually depicted as the beginning of the end forabsolutist royal rule in England. By placing limits onthe powers of the king, the “great charter” is said tomark a dramatic first step in Britain’s inexorable andinevitable process of democratization.
But for Fukuyama, this version of English politicalhistory, this vision of history as inevitably arcingtoward presentday liberalism, misses the most salient factor in England’s democratic development. Britons arefree today not only because the king was weakened at Runnymede, but because he was also simultaneouslystrengthened.
The monarchy that emerged after 1215 was startlingly powerful, centralized and legitimated by its sharing ofpolitical power. By the 14th century, the English state was largely professionalized, controlled its territory to thepoint that it could tax it effectively, and had imposed royal courts across the land that could overturn thedecisions of local lords.
The extent of its strength is best shown by comparing it to Fukuyama’s counterexample: the French monarchy.For all their famed pageantry, French kings were never strong enough to meaningfully tax their nobility, and soresorted to conspiring with them against the peasantry. Unconstrained in any formal sense, but also lacking thelegitimacy of their English counterparts and only tenuously in control of the landowning classes of theircountry, the Bourbon monarchs gave up on ever imposing a uniform tax system in the country and resorted toselling taxcollection offices to local lords, all but exempting them from taxation while subjecting the lowerclasses to a double burden. In the end, the French monarchy was felled as an “enemy of the people” by thevery classes it had abused.
But in England, the very fact that he was forced to confer with Parliament over taxation and war gave theEnglish king the ability to do both effectively. In the eighteenth century, English state spending reached as highas 30% of GDP, while France’s, even in the two decades of nearly constant war with England from 1689 to1713, could not surpass 1215%. The English could double and triple the size of their navy when need arosewithout compromising the national finances; the French drove themselves repeatedly to the brink ofbankruptcy.
This empowering effect of powersharing lies at the heart of English liberty, and of Britain’s eventualpreeminence. For English democracy, Fukuyama explains, did not begin in the weakening of government, butin a more complex standoff, exemplified at Runnymede, that empowered all sides.
The key to the standoff was just that: that it was a standoff. The nobles could sometimes defeat the king, butnot topple the monarchy. The king could win battles against armies assembled against him, but never entirelycrush the regional lords when they banded together. The result was a tense equilibrium between more or lessmatched opponents — king vs. nobles, monarchy vs. Parliament — with no side able to comprehensivelyquash the other. The rights and obligations each eked out of the other were initially extracted by force — quite
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Political theorist Francis Fukuyama at the New World, NewCapitalism symposium in Paris, January 8, 2009. (Andrew
Newton/Wikimedia/CC BYSA 2.0)
literally at swordpoint at Runnymede — then byimplicit agreement, and eventually, over the centuries,by the institutionalization of these arrangements in thepeculiar unwritten traditions of Britain’s monarchicdemocracy.
And it would not have happened without a strongking, one to whom commoners could turn throughregional “king’s courts” for redress of grievancesagainst the nobility, one who could unite the country inwar, one who could serve as an embodiment of ashared national identity in peacetime.
American Bar Association tribute to Magna Carta at Runnymede, England. (WyrdLight.com/Wikimedia/CC BYSA 4.0)
Unbeknownst to foreigners, the British love for their unelected royals, that odd phenomenon of a robustlyliberal democracy apparently pretending to be a theocratic dictatorship, is in an important sense a reenactmentof the origins of English liberty. When they celebrate their monarchy, the British are not celebrating kings andqueens as such, but the rulebound, peculiarly English sort of royalty that formed onehalf of that primordialpolitical balancing act from which their presentday freedoms, and those of so many others who learned fromtheir example, originally flowed.
The accident
From its earliest moments, the Jewish polity in Israel was divided not merely into political camps but intodistinct social, ideological and ethnic groups that usually lived apart from each other and carried on separatecultural lives.
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To this day, these divides play an outsize role in Israelis’ identities and voting habits. Israelis are more likely tovote according to their ethnic origins or religious observance than any clear economic or political interest. Inpolitical terms, Haredim live apart from secular Israelis even when they live among them, such as the manyHaredi families who reside in the heart of secular Tel Aviv but vote as though they lived in Bnei Brak. Villagesfounded by Labor socialists fifty and even a hundred years ago continue to vote Labor, even when the villagein question is a West Bank settlement that presentday Labor seeks to displace. The AshkenaziSephardidivide returns in force each time Israelis go to the ballot box, and continues to serve as a key predictor ofvoting patterns in communities throughout the country.
Yemenite Jews walking to Aden, the site of a reception camp, ahead of their emigration to Israel, 1949. (Kluger Zoltan/IsraeliNational Photo Archive/public domain)
Yet the centrifugal pull of these identity politics is kept in check by an overpowering belief among Israeli Jews,forged in the stillliving memory of the brutalities of the 20th century, that they share a common fate. MostIsraeli Jews are the grandchildren of refugees, and for most of them the state serves even today as a vehiclefor fulfilling the original Zionist promise of a selfreliant refuge in a cruel world.
This ethos of refuge lies at the heart of Israeli solidarity. It is responsible for the deepseated taboo againstintraJewish violence. Amid countless wars and terror attacks, bordered on all sides by an imploding, warravaged Arab world, Israelis usually say they find the rare instances of JewonJew violence more unsettlingand traumatic than even the largest and most frightening of the wars they have fought with outsiders. Thesinking of the Altalena in 1948, the 1983 killing of Peace Now activist Emil Grunzweig or the assassination ofYitzhak Rabin in 1995 — all instances when Jews killed other Jews — are better known to most Israeli highschoolers than the fullblown wars that took place in those years. They are studied as watersheds of the Israeliexperience because they are seen by so many Israelis as events that violated the premise of collectiveresponsibility at the heart of the Israeli Jewish narrative.
The impact of this ethos of solidarity cannot be exaggerated. If one cannot violently repress fellow Jews, one isleft with an exceedingly limited number of options for political regimes. If Prime Minister David Ben Gurioncould not order Israel’s security agencies to rid him of the troublesome opposition leader Menachem Begin –
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David Ben Gurion works on a farm settlement shortly before his1955 recall as minister of defense. (Screenshot of newsreel footage
from YouTube)
not only because he didn’t want to do so, but alsobecause he didn’t believe the security services wouldhave obeyed such an order – that fact alone meansIsrael could not help but develop an open, selfcriticalpolitical discourse, open competition between rivalpolitical camps, and the free elections that enable thatcompetition to take place fairly and withoutbloodshed.
The essential elements at the root of AngloSaxonliberties, then, were all present at the dawn of theIsraeli Jewish polity: an unwinnable competitionamong mutually antagonistic groups shackled to eachother in a unifying ethos of solidarity, a simultaneouspush and pull that forces on Israel’s Jews thecompromises that make up what Israelis call “democracy.”
Israel’s democracy, like Britain’s, is thus in a deep sense accidental, organic, rooted as much in the collectivistinstincts of this refugee nation as in any selfconscious notions of individualism or political liberty.
These compromises are evident everywhere in Israeli society and politics.
When it comes to religion and family law, for example, Israeli Jews are subject to an explicitly illiberal rabbiniccourt system that unapologetically denies the right to marry to hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Yet the vastmajority of Israeli Jews live free and unfettered family lives, marry whoever they wish and even enjoy judiciallyrecognized cohabitation rights for gays. They are able to do those things through the simple expedient ofcompletely ignoring the rabbinate. There is an unspoken contract between Israel’s competing Jewish tribes thatpermits the rabbinate to be as stifling as it wishes on paper as long as it does not make the mistake ofattempting to impose itself on Israelis’ lives in reality. The most illiberal family law system in the free world thusrests tenuously atop an essentially liberal and accepting society.
Similarly, when asked to produce a detailed analysis of the “nationstate” proposals of 2014, one of Israel’smost renowned public intellectuals, the law scholar Ruth Gavison, recommended shelving the various bills andbluntly warned Israeli leaders against engaging so explicitly with the question of Israel’s national identity. Herreason: Israelis inherited from their founders a powerful vision for their country, but its power “lies in itsvagueness. A Jewish nationstate law may upset the balance between elements crucial for maintaining thevision as a whole.”
Israel’s identity, Gavison effectively argued, should not be articulated too clearly or in too much detail. Suchspecificity and decisiveness risked collapsing the innate social tensions from which the nation’s libertiesultimately flow.
This analysis of the roots of Israeli democracy also sheds new light on the nature of the country’s politicalsystem. It is true that there is no meaningful balance of power between the executive and legislative branches.But within the Knesset itself, nationally elected party lists, each representing a particular and usually welldefined subgroup of Israeli society, have proven incredibly effective at holding each other in check, a skillhelped by the fact that no group is large enough to wield power alone.
While it is true, as noted above, that the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty can be overturned by a simple
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Israeli legal scholar Ruth Gavison at the Hebrew University inJerusalem, February 22, 2016. (Nati Shohat/Flash90)
majority in the Knesset plenum, that fragility on papercan blind us to the remarkable resilience of Israelis’rights: at the end of the day, the basic law has notbeen overturned. Too many camps in this fraughttapestry of a society see in the law a defense of theirown rights, and so will not join any coalition that seeksto overturn it.
Israel’s is a pragmatic democratic tradition, wheredemocracy is seen as a solution to a specific andlongstanding problem of social division and mutualdependence. It is more often viewed by Israelis as amechanism for ensuring Jewish solidarity and survivalthan as a moral imperative in its own right.
The missing left
Beneath the demagoguery of the right’s purposefully offensive bills and the left’s selfrighteous howls ofoppression there is a second conversation as profound as any in Israel’s history.
Many of the activists in groups such as Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem are engaged in an explicit challengeto this Israeli notion of democracy. For them, and for many others on the editorial pages of Haaretz or therallies of the Hadash or Meretz parties, “democracy” has come to mean almost exactly the opposite of whatmost Israelis understand by the term: it is the act of defying the Israeli Jewish ethos of solidarity.
The farleft blames that ethos for the paralysis of Israeli politics on the most painful issues the country faces,from the continued denial of religious liberty to the continued occupation of the Palestinians. Faced with theseinjustices, some of them only on paper and some of them very real indeed, these activists have little patiencefor “accidental” Israeli freedoms that flow from inchoate social compromises.
They want explicit legal protections, constitutionally articulated liberalism and a universalist civic politics toreplace the nationalist sensibilities that today drive the Israeli body politic.
It is not hard to understand why they cause such furor in Israel, or why they are so reviled. For their opponents,especially on the right, this effort to dismantle Jewish solidarity amounts to criticizing the very fact of Jewishsurvival and the deepest wellspring of Israeli democracy. Solidarity, not liberalism, saved the Jews of Israelfrom the murderous vicissitudes of the 20th century. Solidarity, not liberalism, lies at the root of both Jewishnational independence and Israeli domestic liberties. For many Israelis, those who would shift the foundationsof Israeli politics away from that solidarity are in an important sense dislodged from the Israeli experience.
That their NGOs are mostly funded by foreign governments, that so much of their advocacy is focused abroad— indeed, that they are so influential overseas despite being so utterly marginal at home — only reinforces thisview. It is no accident that the right, via the NGO bill and other measures, focuses its energies on thisestrangement, and not on the content of these activists’ criticism.
This branch of the left cannot win this fight, not because it is wrong – there is no claim being made here aboutwhich side is morally superior – but because its defiance of the underlying ethos of Israeli Jewish solidaritydrives it inevitably away from the very body politic it seeks to change.
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Yuli Novak of Breaking the Silence. (Channel 2 screenshot)
Retired IDF maj. gen. Amiram Levin’s ad in Haaretz in support ofBreaking the Silence. (courtesy)
This is why so many on the left find it so hard todefend groups such as Breaking the Silence, and thusare unable to mount an effective countercampaignagainst the right.
In December, retired IDF major general Amiram Levintook out an ad in Haaretz defending Breaking theSilence, in which he insisted that soldiers must beencouraged “to speak out without fear” about theirexperiences in the West Bank, and to do so both “inthe IDF and in Israeli society.”
He then added in parentheses – the very presence ofparentheses in such an ad speaks volumes – “(andonly in the IDF and Israeli society).”
Former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin expressed similarsentiments in a Facebook post that month, praisingsoldiers who come forward with their moral qualms,and praising Breaking the Silence, “even if they canmake us angry, even if they are sometimes inaccurateor not doing their jobs correctly,” as providing “animportant mirror to our actions.”
He then took the trouble to note: “I don’t like theiractivity abroad.”
Neither Levin nor Diskin was defending Breaking theSilence. They were defending the act of dissent. Theyfelt it important to note in their defenses of the groupthat they actually shared the right’s criticism of it. That they nevertheless chose to publish those defensesspeaks to a larger fear: that what Breaking the Silence is doing right — encouraging IDF combat veterans totell their experiences — could become conflated with what they believe Breaking the Silence is doing wrong —its abandonment of Israeli solidarity for foreign shores. It is hard to think of a more damning critique of Israel’sfarleft than these purported defenses.
And here lies the danger for Sokatch, for opposition leader Isaac Herzog, and for anyone else who seeks torehabilitate an Israeli left that has not won an election in 17 years. As a matter of political strategy, not merelyof ethics, they cannot change Israel by scorning it. The left’s political prospects — and with it, perhaps, Israelidemocracy, for what is a democracy in which only one side can win elections? — may be far more threatenedby being identified with the farleft’s rejection of Israeli Jewish solidarity than by the grandstanding of anyrightist lawmaker.
Israeli democracy cannot be taken for granted. But those who would slander it as weak and tottering, or seekto reshape it in their own image, owe it – and us – the courtesy of first judging it on its own terms.