The dictatorship that ran East Germany, with its notorious Stasi secret police — rumoured to have a spy in every apartment building — was a 41-year reign of terror that was notorious the world over. But though the Soviet-aligned German Democratic Republic (GDR) lasted from 1949 until 1990, that’s already 36 years ago. Memories fade. So, curious, on a recent visit to Berlin I visited the museum of the GDR, and some of what I read there, about that terrifyingly repressive dictatorship, stunned me. Because, in some respects, I might have been reading about Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel — or at least, about where Netanyahu is trying with all his might to take Israeli society, now, in this very week, fateful as it is with the raft of anti-democratic legislation being rammed though the Knesset. If you’d have been with me in that GDR museum, seeing what that society became, you’d be as unnerved as I am.

The museum had various exhibits, with various explanatory notes alongside. And note after note seemed eerily familiar. Take this one, next to a mock-up of a voting booth: “You could either vote for the candidates of the National Front, or not. Either way, nothing changed. Nevertheless, not going to vote was a dangerous choice. The model citizen was open in his acceptance of the candidates, only those with something to hide used [the confidentiality of entering] the polling booth. In this way, it was very easy to see who was voting ‘no’. Why take the risk, when the whole affair was rigged?”

Obviously we are not yet at a place where Israeli General Elections are “rigged”. But what did we see in the past month? The Knesset vote for the State Comptroller, stipulated by law to be a secret ballot, and in the second round Government MKs suddenly and mysteriously started photographing and filming themselves casting their vote in the polling booths. Rumours abounded that they had been pressured to make their votes public, and lo........

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