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HOW ISRAEL’S ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY BECAME A MODEL FOR THE RIGHT  
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Suzanne Schneider
June 1, 2024
Dissent
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_ Israel maintains a system of unequal citizenship system for Jewish
and Palestinian Israelis. This version of democracy has long
prevailed in Israel, and the Jewish state’s supporters now offer it
as a blueprint for the right around the world. _

Conservative legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich testifies at the House
Oversight and Government Reform Committee on moving the U.S. Embassy
in Israel to Jerusalem on November 8, 2017, Tasos Katopodis // Dissent
Magazine

 

Amid the mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, it is
easy to forget the political drama that gripped Israel only one year
ago. After assuming power in December 2022, a new far-right government
led by Benjamin Netanyahu had proposed a slate of judicial and
administrative reforms that prompted a wave of anti-government
protests. Concerned journalists, former U.S. and Israeli government
officials, and major American Jewish organizations issued ominous
warnings
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democratic backsliding. Israel, it seemed, was heading in the
direction of illiberal Hungary.

This framing was never quite convincing. While hundreds of thousands
of Israelis marched to save democracy, most refused to address, or
even acknowledge, the occupation. A country that maintains an unequal
citizenship system for Jewish and Palestinian Israelis—and
disenfranchises approximately 35 percent of the population in
territory it controls on account of their ethnic identity—does not
match the conventional definition of democracy. But there is an
alternative idea of democracy in vogue among partisans of the global
right, one built around the right to discriminate and to privilege the
needs of the nation over those of individuals in general and
minorities in particular. It is _this _version of democracy that has
long prevailed in Israel, and which the Jewish state’s supporters
now offer as a blueprint for illiberal leaders around the world.

Aided by new institutional networks that spur the circulation of
right-wing ideas and practices among Israeli, Hungarian, and American
conservatives, the Zionist right has acquired ideological heft and
global recognition by joining the legal right to discriminate to a
defense of national particularism, tradition, and other
“conservative values.” The champions of illiberal democracy claim
to represent a venerable alternative to both liberalism and fascism;
their political vision is more accurately described as
ethno-authoritarian. One problem, as Israelis began to experience
during last year’s crackdown
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anti-government protests, is that states built around eliminating
enemies of the people eventually tend to devour their own.

In the wake of Hamas’s gruesome attacks on October 7, Israel’s
scorched-earth retaliatory campaign managed to turn widespread
international sympathy into condemnation in record time. With over
32,000 Palestinians killed at the time of writing—the majority of
them women and children—and hundreds of thousands more on the brink
of starvation, Israel’s siege has neither eliminated Hamas nor freed
all the hostages held in Gaza. Even stalwart supporters of Israel like
New York Senator Chuck Schumer have begun to waver
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calling from the Senate floor for new elections to oust Benjamin
Netanyahu.

In this context, the cozy relationship that Likud, Israel’s premier
right-wing party, has long cultivated with conservative parties
worldwide has proven critically important. These are not official
interstate relations—though they do often involve heads of state,
like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán—but inter-factional ones between the
Israeli right and its counterparts in the United States, the United
Kingdom, Central Europe, and even countries in the Global South like
India and the Philippines. To respond to Schumer’s rebuke, for
instance, Netanyahu spoke directly
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Senate Republicans, an echo of his 2015 address
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Congress at the behest of former House Speaker John Boehner.

While Likud’s efforts to cultivate ties with foreign activists and
intellectuals go back decades—arguably beginning with the mutually
advantageous relationship
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Menachem Begin and televangelist Jerry Falwell in the 1980s—the
Israeli right has only recently offered the Jewish state’s
particular brand of illiberalism as a global model
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and activists have put a new spin on Israel’s discriminatory
political and legal system—born out of state-building via conquest
and dispossession—by elevating it as an alternative to the liberal
constitutional model centered around individual rights and freedoms.
As Yoram Hazony, author of _The Virtue of Nationalism_ and chairman
of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which convenes the National
Conservatism Conference, wrote in a 2015 essay
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“The universal constitution of Rousseau and Kant is the one
‘politically correct’ constitution permitted by a certain strand
of radical Western political thought that has currently become
fashionable in the West.” This dangerous tradition, he continued,
“made deep inroads in Israel. And with it the suspicion that the
Israeli regime is not a ‘true democracy’ and will not be
legitimate until it is reshaped into a ‘state of its citizens.’”
For Hazony, Israel’s democratic deficit is a feature, not a bug—an
alternative constitutional model that defies liberal universalism.

Notably, Israel is one of only four countries in the world that lacks
a written constitution. The Israeli Declaration of Independence stated
that a constitution would be adopted no later than October 1, 1948,
but neither the First Knesset nor any successor has ever done so,
despite dozens
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attempts. In fact, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister,
was staunchly opposed to adopting a constitution on both pragmatic and
theoretical grounds. “I knew that the state of Israel would arise in
special historical circumstances and that it had particular tasks that
nearly no other nation has,” he said in a July 1949 speech
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to the Knesset. “Consequently, I also came to the conclusion that in
the matter of the constitution and laws we cannot act according to
conventional practice.”

The only constitution Ben-Gurion would support was one limited to
detailing the procedural elements of the state (“how the
representatives of the nation are selected, what are their powers, how
the government is chosen, how the government is assembled,” and so
on). He stridently opposed the liberal-democratic constitutional
model, which lays out fundamental rights and legal protections that
cannot be overturned via ordinary majoritarian rule. He likewise
rejected the idea that a supreme judicial authority had the
prerogative to exercise judicial review, writing that “there’s no
logical reason that we should . . . delegate to the court the
authority to invalidate laws if these laws oppose the constitution.”
Finally, he alluded to legal equality only to dismiss it: “the
French constitution speaks of equality and fraternity, but without any
sanctions. If one man is not equal to the second in reality, a
statement to that effect means nothing. It’s only a beautiful
slogan.” Ben-Gurion knew and understood that constitutional
provisions regarding equality before the law were not the same as
actual equality, but his rhetorical slippage was effective. If liberal
democracies could not guarantee the latter, why bother with the
former?

Ben-Gurion never directly referenced the war for Palestine—which was
waged in varied forms from November 1947 until the spring of 1949 and
resulted not just in the establishment of Israel but also the
expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians—nor the 150,000
Palestinians who remained inside the boundaries of the new state after
the armistice. But it does not stretch the imagination to see how
these factors drove his rejection of liberal constitutional models.

In the fall of 1948, a German-born Zionist named Leo Kohn, who had
earlier published a study of the constitution adopted by the Irish
Free State, was putting the finishing touches on one such option. His
draft constitution would establish equal protection under the law; ban
discrimination on the basis of race, religion, language, or sex;
institute equal civic and political rights in employment and political
office; and forbid the expropriation of land or property “except for
public purposes” subject to full compensation. In short, it was a
liberal-democratic constitution—the precise thing that Ben-Gurion
rejected.

But in December of that year, the Israeli government enacted the
Emergency Regulations on Property of Absentees, creating a legal
mechanism to justify Palestinian dispossession. Designating as
“absentee” any non-Jewish person who had left their home and
entered enemy territory (which included much of Mandate Palestine)
between November 29, 1947 and September 1, 1948, the regulation
expropriated homes and properties at a massive scale—“more than
10,000 shops, 25,000 buildings (housing 57,000 family dwellings), and
nearly 60 percent of all fertile land in the country,” according to
historian Shira Robinson [[link removed]].
This came on the heels of Operation Hiram, a military campaign to
conquer the central and northern Galilee, which involved another round
of expulsions aided by roughly a dozen massacres in Palestinian
villages. The Arab inhabitants who managed to remain _in situ _were
soon subjected to martial law—a condition that would last until
1966.

How could a state located on confiscated Palestinian lands enshrine
the right to property? How could a state that viewed its Arab minority
as the enemy, and that subjected them to a strict system of martial
law, provide for equal protection under the law? These circles could
never be squared within a settler state that privileged nationalism
over democracy. Ben-Gurion made this point plainly: “I choose to be
under the rule of bad Jews rather than under the good rule of refined
non-Jews in a popular democracy or another kind of democracy.”

For the first several decades of its existence, Israel’s democratic
deficit could be brushed off as circumstantial. The Jewish state, the
story went, lived in a violent neighborhood and had to deal with
problems that other democracies did not. According to this logic,
human rights violations like administrative detention and house
demolitions were necessitated by a permanent state of emergency. But
this justification began to wear thin as Israel signed peace treaties
with Egypt and Jordan, launched negotiations with Syria, and earned
recognition from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Moreover, the Begin government’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in
1982 and the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987 served to
galvanize liberal groups like Peace Now and spur intellectual
discussions about whether it was time to retire Zionist ideology and
embrace social and legal equity. After the series of negotiations with
the PLO that culminated in the Oslo Accords, there were abundant hopes
that Israel might finally escape the state of emergency and become the
liberal democracy Kohn envisioned decades prior.

But this aspiration spurred a reactionary mobilization. By the
mid-1990s Israeli society was split into two broad political camps:
those who found the status quo untenable, and who supported not only
the Oslo process but Israel’s “constitutional revolution
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pair of 1992 Basic Laws that used the judiciary to strengthen
individual rights and protections—and those who, following an
ascendant Netanyahu, doubled down on nationalism, settlement, and
permanent inequality as the essence of the Jewish state.

The liberal-democratic camp came to be closely identified with the
jurisprudence of Aharon Barak, who served on the Supreme Court from
1978 to 2006 and was chief justice from 1995 onward. Barak argued that
Israel’s Basic Laws—fourteen key provisions that detailed state
procedures and guaranteed certain individual rights, some of which can
only be overturned with a supermajority—should be regarded as a de
facto constitution. In the wake of the 1992 Basic Laws, Barak argued
that the Supreme Court had the right to practice judicial review and
strike down laws that violated the principle of equality.

For instance, in _Ka’adan v. Israel Land Authority
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the court held that it was illegal for the state to discriminate
between Jewish and Arab citizens in the allocation of state land.
Appealing repeatedly to the principle of equality, Justice Barak
cited _Brown v. Board of Education_ to assert “that a ‘separate
but equal policy’ is ‘inherently unequal.’” In practice
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the Court has served as a rather weak restraint on state power, but
high-profile cases like _Ka_’_adan _contributed to the right’s
depiction of the court as the enemy of the Jewish people.

In 2015 Hazony wrote that the aim of the constitutional revolution
“was to obscure, attenuate or displace the traditional concept of
Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people in order to bring the
country into conformity with the theory of the universal
constitution.” In his telling, the roots of this split were already
forming in the 1970s when “prominent Israeli academics and
jurists” began to argue there was a contradiction between Jewish
nationalism and democracy. “Such arguments began making headway
among Israeli political leaders—some of whom, like former Education
Minister Shulamit Aloni, were willing explicitly to argue that the
idea of Israel as the state of the Jewish people is
‘anti-democratic, if not racist.’”

Seen from this perspective, the 1992 Basic Laws represented a rupture
in the Zionist political tradition: “A Supreme Court ruling stating
explicitly that equality (and not also security, liberty, the
well-being of the Jewish people, and other values) is the general
purpose of Israeli law, and explicitly invoking American cases such as
Brown vs. Board of Education to rule inequality illegal in Israel, is
an announcement of a new constitutional order.” If taken seriously
as a constitutional provision, he noted, the ruling would invalidate a
whole host of laws—from Israel’s segregated school system to the
Law of Return and “security policies aimed at protecting Jews around
the world.”

Powered by the claim that the courts were undermining the work of the
IDF and other security forces during the Second Intifada, assaults on
the judiciary accelerated in 2007, when former Minister of Justice
Daniel Friedmann launched several initiatives to curb the court’s
power. Key to this effort has been transforming the nature of court
appointees—most of whom have come from the state’s secular
Ashkenazi elite—through careful vetting of the sort that will be
familiar to Federalist Society watchers. In 2019 former Minister of
Justice Ayelet Shaked—who appointed four conservative justices to
the Supreme Court during her tenure—boasted
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practices had led to a “conservative revolution” on both the upper
and lower courts (today, commentators debate the exact number of
liberals justices on the Supreme Court but agree it ranges from five
to seven of the fifteen total). Far from representing a Hungarian
import, the 2023 judicial “reform” package was the culmination of
this decades-long struggle against Israel’s stillborn liberal
democracy.

The Orbán–Netanyahu mutual admiration society began in 2005, when
the two met for the first time in Jerusalem. Orbán, then the
opposition leader in Hungary, and Netanyahu, in the role of finance
minister, bonded over their shared antipathy toward their left and
liberal critics. Orbán reportedly viewed the defiant Netanyahu not
only as an ideological partner but an example. In the words
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Andras Dezso, “When Orbán and Netanyahu lost the 2006 parliamentary
elections, Fidesz and Likud were already seen as sister parties.”

As Szabolcs Panyi has charted in a report
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by Hungarian investigative journalism center _Direkt36_, the
partnership is both ideological and strategic, and it has yielded
considerable advantages for both parties. Hungary has radically
shifted its Middle East policy and become Israel’s staunchest
European ally
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repeatedly vetoing EU ceasefire resolutions and sanctions (most
recently
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the case of West Bank settlers). Orbán has also helped strengthen
Israel’s ties with the broader Visegrad Group, which includes
Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, all of whom have become
dependable allies. For his part, Netanyahu has helped Orbán make
inroads into the Republican establishment in the United States—he
played a role in arranging the Hungarian leader’s 2019 meeting with
Donald Trump—and fend off accusations of antisemitism. Likud has
also helped the ideologically aligned Chabad-Lubavitch movement
establish a foothold in Hungary and serve as a regime-friendly
counterweight to the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities
(Mazsihisz), which has stridently opposed the Orbán government.

Perhaps most tellingly, Likud officials have materially supported
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smear campaign against George Soros, whom the Israeli right has long
disdained on account of the Open Society Foundations’ funding of
left-leaning NGOs like Breaking the Silence, Adalah, and the New
Israel Fund. It was notably the Jewish-American conservative political
strategists Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum who served as key
architects
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Hungary’s anti-Soros campaign. Finkelstein had made a name for
himself advising Republican presidential candidates before helping to
engineer Netanyahu’s first electoral victory in 1996. Birnbaum later
became Netanyahu’s chief of staff. In 2008, when Orbán decided to
seek reelection, Netanyahu introduced him to Finkelstein, who
developed the conspiratorial idea of Soros as the enemy puppet master.
When Israel’s ambassador to Hungary criticized that campaign in
2017—a move that seems to have taken Likud by surprise—he was
forced to retract
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statement.

In 2015 Likud dispatched party activist Tamir Wertzberger to better
coordinate between the two countries. In the midst of the refugee
crisis stemming from the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic
State, shared Islamophobia helped cement the Hungary–Israel bond. In
Wertzberger’s telling,

on the one hand, Europeans are finally beginning to understand Israel,
how it is for a Western country to live together with Muslims. On the
other hand, migration has created a serious debate between Hungary and
the European Union. Israel has long been in conflict with the EU, and
when the two countries suddenly found themselves on the same page, it
became much easier for Hungary to support Israeli positions.

Hungary reportedly even looked
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Israel for advice on building a border fence to keep out migrants.

At the heart of the ideological convergence between Hungary and Israel
is an obsession with ethnic homogeneity as the basis of the state. As
Gadi Taub, a right-wing Israeli commentator and former visiting fellow
at Orbán’s pet university, Mathias Corvinus Collegium
(MCC), tweeted
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year, “today, Eastern Europe bears the real spirit of European
culture” because “migration has made Western Europe’s situation
irreversible. Mixing populations—Muslim culture and European
culture—won’t work.” Such statements carry obvious implications
for border policy and migration, but they also strike a blow at the
possibility of multi-ethnic states bound together by something other
than common blood. Such states are, per nationalism’s contemporary
champions, inherently unstable—civic identity being no replacement
for belonging to the racialized national unit. Indeed, it is this
argument that has made Zionism attractive to reactionaries
worldwide—from self-described “white Zionist” Richard Spencer
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India’s Hindutva ideologues
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A new crop of institutions has been key to linking the local Israeli
story to the global right. These include the Israel Law and Liberty
Forum
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in 2020 by the Tikvah Fund and in cooperation with the Federalist
Society), the Kohelet Policy Forum [[link removed]], the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and of course Hazony’s Edmund
Burke Foundation. Such institutions partner regularly on conferences,
publications, and lobbying efforts
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more established conservative players abroad like the rebooted
Heritage Foundation and the Fidesz-funded Danube Institute and MCC,
while their staff and fellows engage in a global game of musical
chairs.

To get a sense of how ideas and practices traverse the conservative
circuitry, consider the case of Eugene Kontorovich, professor at
George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law and Director
of International Law for Kohelet Policy Forum. Kontorovich has
long campaigned
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International Criminal Court, opposed
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trade restrictions on Israeli goods from the occupied territories,
and argued
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West Bank settlements do not violate the Geneva Convention. More
recently, he has spoken both at MCC and the 2022 CPAC conference in
Budapest. In 2023 he filed
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amici curiae opinion with the Polish Constitutional Tribunal critical
of the Istanbul Convention, a European Council policy intended to
counter violence against women and other forms of domestic abuse; he
also crafted the legal arguments against the convention in Israel (the
Netanyahu government has announced
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will not ratify it). Not content to only play on two continents,
Kontorovich has helped draft
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and federal legislation criminalizing the Boycott, Divestment,
Sanctions movement in the United States.

This global web of institutions, politicians, and intellectuals
underscores a central irony about twenty-first century nationalists:
they are the new internationalists, far outpacing the left in terms of
political coordination across borders.

In 2019 Orbán hosted Hazony in Budapest. According to the summary
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by the prime minister’s office, the “world famous conservative
author” had shown that “nationalism is a reasonable fundamental
principle according to which the best possible form of government for
the world is where nations are free to determine their own directions
independently, to preserve their traditions and to aspire to the
enforcement of their national interests without any external
interference.”

Hazony’s work is perhaps best interpreted as a retroactive attempt
to construct a respectable theoretical pedigree for practices that
were already established by right-wing politicians and governments.
His model of conservative democracy
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unmistakably lifted from the Israeli context, challenges “the
supposed universal reason of judges” and rejects the judgments of
international organizations” with “no loyalty to particular
national populations that might restrain their spurious theorizing
about universal rights.” Israel has long ignored the judgements of
international bodies like the United Nations, the European Union, and
the International Criminal Court; Hazony endows this defiance with
ideological substance by identifying such institutions with
imperialist forces trying to undermine the cultures and traditions of
nation-states. The problem is no longer that universal human rights
are hopelessly abstract (per Edmund Burke’s critique) or practically
impotent (per Hannah Arendt’s), but that they have become something
far more sinister: the enemy of the people.

Israel’s horrific assault on Gaza has shown that “enemies of the
state” is a capacious category, which for many now includes newborn
babies, foreign aid workers, and journalists alongside thousands of
other victims. Within Israel proper, the Supreme Court upheld
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law forbidding demonstrations against the war. “Despite the high
status accorded to the right to demonstrate and assemble,” the
decision reads, “there is a complex reality in which we find
ourselves, which affects the way balances are drawn in this regard.”
From Ben-Gurion’s “special historical circumstances” to
today’s “complex reality,” Israeli leaders have long argued that
the usual rules of democracy do not apply.

October 7 underscored the limits of living within this constant state
of emergency—a conclusion not lost on Israeli leftists
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it will take an almost unimaginable political reorientation to realize
a genuinely democratic Israel. The liberal-democratic model that was
briefly within range hinged on the implementation of a two-state
solution, which at this point is more akin to zombie diplomacy
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a workable plan for peace. Solidifying the one-state reality via
continued settlement and implementation of something like
the autonomy plan [[link removed]] proposed a
half century ago by Menachem Begin—which would provide some
mechanism for local self-rule, but neither extend Israeli citizenship
to Palestinians nor allow for a sovereign Palestinian state—seems
the far more likely outcome at this juncture. Should this innovation
in illiberalism come to pass, there is no doubt that the world will be
watching—some of us in horror, still others in awe.

_SUZANNE SCHNEIDER is a deputy director and core faculty at the
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a Visiting Fellow at
Kellogg College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Mandatory
Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine
[[link removed]] and The Apocalypse and
the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism
[[link removed]]._

_Dissent is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
times a year. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it
quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual
journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. Dissent has
published articles by Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, A.
Philip Randolph, Michael Harrington, Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin,
Czesław Miłosz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chinua
Achebe, Ellen Willis, Octavio Paz, Martha Nussbaum, Roxane Gay, and
many others. Sign up for the Dissent newsletter
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* Israel
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* Hungary
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* democracy
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* illiberalism
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* Victor Orban
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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