[ Israeli democracy is in danger, demonstrations include very few
Palestinians. It’s not a movement for equal rights. It’s a
movement to preserve the political system that existed before the
coalition took power - to save liberal democracy for Jews.]
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YOU CAN’T SAVE DEMOCRACY IN A JEWISH STATE  
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Peter Beinart
February 19, 2023
New York Times
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_ Israeli democracy is in danger, demonstrations include very few
Palestinians. It’s not a movement for equal rights. It’s a
movement to preserve the political system that existed before the
coalition took power - to save liberal democracy for Jews. _

Protesters in Tel Aviv hold placards that say “Israeli students
fighting for democracy” and “Without democracy there is no
academy.”, Credit: Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse (AFP) / New York
Times

 

Since Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government announced
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to undermine the independence of Israel’s Supreme Court, hundreds
of thousands
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Israelis have demonstrated in the streets. All of Israel’s living
former attorneys general, in a joint statement
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have warned that Mr. Netanyahu’s proposal imperils efforts to
“preserve Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” Liberal
American Jewish leaders are cheering on the protests. Earlier this
month, Alan Solow, the former head of the Conference of Presidents of
Major American Jewish Organizations, said
[[link removed]] he
and other American Jewish notables “share the concerns of tens of
thousands of Israelis determined to protect their democracy.” In a
public declaration
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Mr. Solow and 168 other influential American Jews
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that “the new government’s direction mirrors anti-democratic
trends that we see arising elsewhere.”

On the surface, the battle between Mr. Netanyahu and his critics does
indeed look familiar. In recent years, from Brazil to Hungary to India
to the United States, anti-government protesters have accused
authoritarian-minded populists of threatening liberal democracy. But
look closer at Israel’s political drama and you notice something
striking: The people most threatened by Mr. Netanyahu’s
authoritarianism aren’t part of the movement against it.

The demonstrations include very few Palestinians
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In fact, Palestinian politicians have criticized
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for having, in the words of former Knesset member Sami Abu Shehadeh,
“nothing to do with the main problem in the region — justice and
equality for all the people living here.”

The reason is that the movement against Mr. Netanyahu is not like the
pro-democracy opposition movements in Turkey, India or Brazil — or
the movement against Trumpism in the United States. It’s not a
movement for equal rights. It’s a movement to preserve the political
system that existed before Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition took
power, which was not, for Palestinians, a genuine liberal democracy in
the first place. It’s a movement to save liberal democracy for Jews.

The principle that Mr. Netanyahu’s liberal Zionist critics say he
threatens — a Jewish and democratic state — is in reality a
contradiction. Democracy means government by the people. Jewish
statehood means government by Jews. In a country where Jews comprise
only half of the people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean
Sea, the second imperative devours the first.

To understand just how illiberal the liberal Zionism championed by Mr.
Netanyahu’s leading opponents is, consider the actions of Yair
Lapid, his predecessor as prime minister. Last month, Mr. Lapid penned
a nearly 2,000-word essay
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which he wrote, “If this Netanyahu government does not fall, Israel
will cease to be a liberal democracy.” It didn’t include the word
“Palestinian.”

That becomes less surprising when you realize that as foreign
minister, in 2021, Mr. Lapid implored
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Knesset to renew a law that denies
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from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who are married to Palestinian
citizens the right to live with their spouses inside Israel proper.
The law is blatantly discriminatory; Jews can immigrate to Israel and
gain immediate citizenship whether they have relatives in the country
or not. And far from denying the legislation’s discriminatory
nature, Mr. Lapid celebrated it. The law, he explained
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a tweet in July 2021, “is one of the tools meant to ensure the
Jewish majority in the State of Israel.”

When Tucker Carlson and Viktor Orban employ this kind of logic —
when they promote policies designed to ensure that the percentage of
white Christians in their countries doesn’t dip too low — American
Jewish liberals recognize it as anathema to the principle of equal
citizenship on which liberal democracy rests. Yet many now see Mr.
Lapid as liberal democracy’s champion because he opposes Mr.
Netanyahu’s judicial changes.

Another major figure in the anti-Netanyahu movement is former defense
minister Benny Gantz, who last month urged
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“to protest for safeguarding Israeli democracy.” But as defense
minister in 2021, Mr. Gantz designated
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leading Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations in
what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem called
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act characteristic of totalitarian regimes.” Israeli troops
later forced
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way into the organizations’ offices, seized documents and then
welded shut the doors. Do those sound like the actions of someone
interested in “safeguarding” democracy?

The problem runs deeper than just these politicians. When American
Jewish leaders like Mr. Solow express
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with those “Israelis determined to protect their democracy,” they
are not only deluding themselves about Mr. Netanyahu’s leading
opponents. They are deluding themselves about Jewish statehood itself.

 

A protester holding a Palestinian flag in Tel Aviv at a demonstration
against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government.  
(Credit  :Tsafrir Abayov/Associated Press  //  New York Times)
For most of the Palestinians under Israeli control — those in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip—Israel is not a democracy. It’s not a
democracy because Palestinians in the Occupied Territories can’t
vote for the government that dominates their lives. When Mr. Gantz
sends Israeli troops to shut down their human rights groups, West Bank
Palestinians can’t punish him at the ballot box. They can complain
to the Palestinian Authority. But the P.A. is a subcontractor, not a
state. Like other Palestinians, its officials need Israeli permission
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to leave the West Bank. In Gaza, too, Israel determines, with help
from Egypt, which people and products enter and exit. And Gaza’s
residents, who live in what Human Rights Watch calls
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open-air prison,” can’t vote out the Israeli officials who hold
the key.

This lack of democratic rights helps explain why Palestinians are less
motivated than Israeli Jews to defend Israel’s Supreme Court. As the
Israeli law professors David Kretzmer and Yael Ronen note in their
book, “The Occupation of Justice
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“in almost all of its judgments relating to the Occupied
Territories, especially those dealing with questions of principle, the
Court has decided in favor of the authorities.” Enfeebling the court
would undermine legal protections that Israeli Jews take for granted
but most Palestinians did not enjoy in the first place.

To be fair, roughly 20 percent of the Palestinians under Israeli
control enjoy Israeli citizenship and the right to vote in Israeli
elections. Yet it is often these Palestinians who protest most
vociferously against Israel’s democratic credentials. In 2009 the
Palestinian Knesset member Ahmad Tibi quipped
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Israel was indeed “Jewish and democratic: Democratic toward Jews and
Jewish toward Arabs.” To many liberal Zionists, that might sound
churlish. After all, Mr. Tibi has now served in Israel’s Parliament
for almost 25 years. But he understands that the Jewish state contains
a deep structure that systematically denies Palestinians legal
equality, whether they are citizens or not.

Consider how Israel allocates land. Most of the land
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Israel proper was seized from Palestinians during Israel’s war of
independence in the late 1940s, when more than half
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expelled or fled in fear. By the early 1950s, the Israeli government
controlled more than 90 percent
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Israel’s land. It still does. The government distributes that land
for development and leases it to citizens through the Israel Land
Authority. Almost half the seats on its governing council
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reserved for the Jewish National Fund, whose mission
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between the Jewish people and its homeland.”

This helps explain why Palestinians comprise more than 20 percent of
Israel’s citizens but Palestinian municipalities, according to a
2017 report
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a variety of Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups, encompass
less than 3 percent of Israel’s land. In 2003, an Israeli government
commission found
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“many Arab towns and villages were surrounded by land designated for
purposes such as security zones, Jewish regional councils, national
parks and nature reserves or highways, which prevent or impede the
possibility of their expansion.” Unable to gain permission, many
Palestinian citizens build homes illegally — which are therefore
subject to government demolition. Ninety-seven percent of the
demolition orders in Israel proper between 2012 and 2014, according to
the 2017 report, were against Palestinians.

This isn’t an accident. It’s the logical outgrowth of Israel’s
self-definition. Israel is not a “state for all its citizens,” a
concept Mr. Lapid said in 2019 that he has opposed
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entire life.” In 2018, when several Palestinian
lawmakers introduced
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“to anchor in constitutional law the principle of equal
citizenship,” the Knesset’s speaker ruled that it could not even
be discussed because it would “gnaw at the foundations of the
state.” That same year, the Knesset passed legislation reaffirming
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identity as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” which means
that the country belongs to Jews like me, who don’t live there, but
not to the Palestinians who live under its control, even the lucky few
who hold Israeli citizenship. All this happened before Mr.
Netanyahu’s new government took power. This is the vibrant liberal
democracy that liberal Zionists want to save.

Some Jews may worry that by advocating genuine liberal democracy —
and thus exposing themselves to accusations of anti-Zionism — Mr.
Netanyahu’s critics will marginalize themselves. But if they widen
their vision they’ll see that the opposite is true. By including
Palestinians as full partners, Israel’s democracy movement will
discover a vast reservoir of new allies and develop a far clearer
moral voice. Ultimately, a movement premised on ethnocracy cannot
successfully defend the rule of law. Only a movement for equality can.

_[PETER BEINART (@PeterBeinart [[link removed]]) is
a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School
of Journalism [[link removed]] at the City
University of New York. He is also editor at large of Jewish Currents
[[link removed]] and writes The Beinart Notebook
[[link removed]], a weekly newsletter.]_

* Israel
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* Palestinians
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* zionism
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* Religious Zionist Party
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* Right-wing governments
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* Israel's right-wing government
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* Israeli democracy
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* Occupied Territories
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