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The Idol of Israeli Democracy

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Boasting that Israel is a democracy once endowed its government with legitimacy and Israel's ruling elites with dignity. No more. Israel is now deemed a pariah. But the Idol of Israeli Democracy is still standing.

Even a courageous political analyst like Caroline Glick—who deserves the equivalent of many Pulitzer Prizes-- genuflects to this idol. I refer to her article "With friends like these" (Jerusalem Post, November 11, 2011), where she uses the idol of democracy to defend Benjamin Netanyahu against the vile accusations of French President Sarkozy and U.S. President Obama that Israel's Prime Minister is a liar. Of course, credit her with trying to uphold Israel's dignity, sullied by two poltroons that court paltry thugs like Mahmoud Abbas.

Could it be, asks Glick, that Sarkozy and Obama "don't like the way Netanyahu is managing their beloved 'peace process' with the Palestinians?" She knows this "peace process" is the biggest lie in the Middle East. But that makes Sarkozy and Obama as well as Netanyahu mischievous and mendacious politicians!

Glick boldly asserts the truth, " Israel never had a chance of achieving peace with the Palestinians. And the reason this has always been the case has nothing to do with Netanyahu or Israel. There was never any chance for peace because the Palestinians have no interest in making peace with Israel. As the West's favorite Palestinian 'moderate,' Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas said in an interview with Egypt's Dream TV on October 23, "I've said it before and I'll say it again. I will never recognize the 'Jewishness' of the state [of Israel] or a 'Jewish state.'"

But isn't this truth about Abbas, who exalts terrorists and even uses Arab children as human bombs—isn't this known to PM Netanyahu and his predecessors as Jew-killers? Shall we describe the Israeli prime ministers as ignoramuses? Isn't more realistic to conclude that these prime ministers have playing the "politics of peace" to attract Israeli voters on the one hand, and mollify American presidents on the other?

Returning to Sarkozy and Obama, Ms. Glick rightly suggests, or could reasonably conclude, that their denigration of Netanyahu is intended to alienate the people of Israel from their government, hence to topple Netanyahu.

Glick passionately insists, however, that Israel is a democracy, hence that the Netanyahu government represents the people. Does it?

Insofar as the government is based on the principle of one adult one vote, Israel appears to be a democracy. But anyone who has studied political science knows that universal suffrage is not a sufficient criterion for democracy. As political theorist Henry B. Mayo, has written, “A political system is democratic to the extent that the decision-makers are under public control.” This is not the case in Israel.

Surely Ms. Glick knows that the democratic principle of one adult one vote can be effectively nullified by designing an electoral system in which members of the Legislature are not individually accountable to the voters in constituency elections.

This lack of direct personal election in Israel enables Members of the Knesset—and therefore the Government—to ignore public opinion with impunity. This was clearly manifested in 2003 when Likud leader Ariel Sharon, with Netanyahu's support, adopted Labor's policy of retreat from Gaza. That policy, as Glick once reported, was rejected by a vast majority of the voters in the election of that year. Nevertheless, Sharon effectively nullified that election!

He was not alone in making a mockery of democracy. So did the 22 other Likud MKs who voted for disengagement. They, too, violated their campaign pledges, and they could readily do so because they were not individually accountable to their electors and would not have to run against a rival candidate for a seat in the next election.

Besides: since when has all the hoopla of Israeli democracy served the permanent strategic interests of this country? From 1967 to the present—from Secretary of State William Rogers to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—the American government has been committed to Israel's retreat to her "Auschwitz lines." But what other lines did Netanyahu have in mind when he endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state on June 14, 2009, and did so without Knesset or public debate. That strikes me as autocratic, not democratic.

Let's tell it as it is: The two-state solution is a bloody lie, and Ms. Glick, like most people in Israel, knows it's a lie. Yes, but Netanyahu has endorsed that lie.

Glick cannot defend Netanyahu on democratic grounds if only because Israel is not and never has been a genuine democracy—as one may even learn even from David Ben-Gurion's Memoirs. Need I also mention the dictum of former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, who had the arrogance to say "everything is justiciable"? This dictum has enabled a handful of unelected judges to usurp powers of the Legislative and Executive branches of government and even to classify Judea and Samaria as "belligerent occupied territory." Enter Netanyahu's two-state solution without Knesset or public debate! Debate is foreclosed by the ruling of Israel's "Courtocracy."

For whatever reasons Sarkozy and Obama called Netanyahu a liar, that is not the worst one can say of a prime minister that endorsed the creation of an Arab-Islamic state in the heartland of the Jewish people. Since it can be shown—as I have shown elsewhere—that this endorsement does not represent the will of the Jewish people, the people of Israel should wake up and recognize that the Idol of Democracy, like all idols, is deaf, dumb, and blind.