Of the 89 states classified by Freedom House (2005) as a democracy, only in Israel, Slovakia, Latvia, and Uruguay does the country form a single electoral district in which parties compete for parliamentary seats on the basis of proportional representation (PR). Only in Israel, however, is the voter compelled to vote for fixed party slates. Thus, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Israel is the only reputed democracy in which legislators are not individually elected by or accountable to the voters in constituency elections. (This is not the result of Israel’s diminutive size, since 48 democracies are smaller in population than Israel, while 26 are smaller in size.) In Israel, therefore, an incumbent Knesset member (MK) does not have to defend his voting record against a rival candidate in a local election. If the incumbent violated his pre vious campaign pledges, he need not worry about being exposed by a rival for his Knesset seat. This enables legislators and those who become Cabinet ministers to ignore public opinion with impunity. It thus appears that, despite proportional representation, Israel is susceptible to legislative tyranny—although this must be qualified because of the extraordinary power of Israel’s prime minister, as explained below. Such is the multiplicity of parties resulting from PR and a low electoral threshold (2%) that no party has ever come close to winning a majority of the seats in Israel’s 120-member Knesset. Hence, a coalition of rival parties is required to form a govern ment. The leaders of these parties become cabinet ministers, with the prime minister representing the largest party. An Israeli cabinet typically consists of more than 20 ministers, a plurality if not a majority of which is appointed by the prime minister. Since the ministers are party leaders, they occupy safe places at the top of their party’s electoral list, which makes them all the more impervious to public opinion. An MK’s overriding ambition, therefore, is to become a cabinet minister—the road to power and political longevity. This explains why so Knesset members oppose constituency elections on the one hand, and the exclusion of MKs from the cabinet on the other. Since the cabinet consists of party leaders, no Labor- or Likud-led government has ever been toppled by a Knesset vote of no confidence. Even Israel’s 1990 national unity government fell only because of an underhanded maneuver by Labor and Shas cabinet ministers. To fully understand this extraordinary situation, some repetition of previous remarks is necessary. In Israel, as in all parliamentary systems, the prime minister’s cabinet typically consists of members of the legislature (parliament). However, unlike other parliamentary regimes, where members of the legislature are individually elected by the voters in regional elections, in Israel MKs owe their position and perks to their party machines and leaders. Since the ministers of the cabinet are the leaders of the parties comprising the ruling coalition in the Knesset, the cabinet can readily prevent the Knesset from toppling the government. The relative impotence of the Knesset, and therefore the undemocratic character of Israeli government, may be illustrated as follows. In the January 2003 election, the nationalist and religious parties won 69 seats campaigning against the Labor Party’s policy of “unilateral disengagement.” Of these 69 seats, Prime Minister Sharon’s Likud party won 38, whereas Labor, winning only 19, suffered an unprecedented defeat. The public had overwhelmingly rejected unilateral disengagement. Since this was the paramount issue of the campaign, the election was equivalent to a national referendum. Nevertheless, in December 2003 Mr. Sharon adopted Labor’s policy, and in October 2004, unilateral disengagement was enacted by the Knesset by a vote of 67 to 45! How did this nullification of the 2003 election happen? By virtue of his power to dispense ministerial posts and influence committee chairmanships, Sharon induced 22 Likud Knesset members to betray their voters by supporting a bill to withdraw from Gaza and parts of northern Samaria. Surely few if any of these Mks would have violated their campaign pledges if they had to compete against a rival candidate in the next constituency election. It would thus be more accurate to say that Israel has a prime ministerial system of government, one that can readily lead to prime ministerial dictatorship. As mentioned, Mr. Sharon nullified the January 2003 election. He ignored the obvious will of the people with impunity. But if, as political theorist Henry B. Mayo, says, “A political system is democratic to the extent that the decision-makers are under public control,”[1] then Israel is not a democracy! Beneath the democratic veneer of periodic, multiparty elections—which has endowed Israel with legitimacy and its ruling elites with respectability—there lurks a democratically elected dictatorship or despotism. Since I find it difficult to believe that Israeli departments of political science departs are ignorant of this undemocratic state of affairs, I dare say that the people of Israel have been deliberately kept in a state of ignorance about this undemocratic state of affairs and therefore have been deliberately disempowered since the very founding of their so-called democratic state! Thus Likud Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could nullify the 2003 national election without a peep from Israeli departments political science! And this is was in October 2004 that Sharon, in complicity with 22 of his Likud collaborators, could violate their pledge to the nation and enact the “evacuation law” that made 10,000 Jewish men, women, and children homeless! In the words of Voltaire: écrasez l'infâme! [1] Cited in Claes G. Ryn, Democracy and the Ethical Life (Louisiana State University Press, 1978), p. 10.The Fraud of Israeli Democracy: écrasez l'infâme
Prof. Paul Eidelberg
A Case Study
Sunday, 25 March 2012
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