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**NOVEMBER 7, 2022**
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Democracy in America and Israel
What will it take to hold onto it? The parallels and cross-influences
are ominous.
When formerly democratic countries descend into fascism, can they come
back? In the case of Germany and Italy, both of which had only weak
democratic institutions, it took the catastrophic loss of a war and an
occupation.
This chilling question has been haunting me as I contemplate two
momentous elections in two increasingly beleaguered democracies, Israel
and the United States.
Tom Friedman, who often gets globalization wrong but is an astute
analyst of the Middle East, began his recent column
<[link removed]>,
"Imagine you woke up after the 2024 U.S. presidential election and found
that Donald Trump had been re-elected and chose Rudy Giuliani for
attorney general, Michael Flynn for defense secretary, Steve Bannon for
commerce secretary, evangelical leader James Dobson for education
secretary, Proud Boys former leader Enrique Tarrio for homeland security
head and Marjorie Taylor Greene for the White House spokeswoman."
This, Friedman goes on to say, is about what has just happened in
Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, who presided over relatively shifting
coalitions and frequent inconclusive elections between 2009 and 2021,
has at last managed to win a stable governing majority. And he has
achieved that by throwing in with people far to his own right-notably
Itamar Ben-Gvir, who talks and acts like a full-on fascist.
This coalition will try to destroy what remains of Israel as a liberal
democracy, including its independent courts and press; and if it has
four years of power, it could well succeed. Meanwhile, the voting base
of ultranationalists, anti-Arab racists, religious fanatics, and
settlers determined to destroy what remains of the Palestinian West Bank
could well grow at the expense of liberal secular Jews of the sort who
founded the State of Israel.
The U.S. bears heavy responsibility for the current Israeli realities in
several respects. Washington defends Israel with several billions of
dollars of support, but the kind of settler/apartheid state that Israel
has become could take root only because Washington did not challenge the
first settlements in the occupied territories in 1968-or their steady
expansion.
Though the Israeli far right is comprised of many groups, a core element
is made up of ultra-Orthodox and ultranationalist emigrants from the
United States. Ben-Gvir is a follower of Meir Kahane.
It's also the case that AIPAC and its related donor groups have
refused to criticize the Israeli government, no matter how outrageous
its acts, and have tried to brand critics as antisemitic. That in turn
has played into the hands of the American far right, which has taken to
arguing that Christian fundamentalists are more philosemitic than
American Jews, as if slavish support for Israel were tantamount to
religious tolerance. This is nothing but the flip side of the
dual-loyalty charge that is a favorite weapon of real antisemites. And
AIPAC's politics and related political spending continue to corrupt
the Democratic Party.
The Biden administration shows signs of distancing itself from the
extremism of Netanyahu's incoming government. But this will be harder
to do unless mainstream Jewish organizations break with their habit of
defending Israel right or wrong.
Both the U.S. and Israel have been described as promised lands. In both
countries, the deeper problem is that if fascists gain control of
governing institutions, and if we lose support for democracy in the
hearts of a majority of the people, getting it back takes something
close to a miracle.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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