Democracy Is a Courtesy

Israeli public discourse is impressively democratic. Every few days, someone announces that democracy is in danger: the courts are attacked, the attorney general is targeted, ministers question institutional limits, and independent offices are treated as irritating remnants of a state the coalition has not yet fully acquired. The repetition is reassuring. Whatever is being dismantled, we still know what to call it.

The phrase assumes that a coherent object called “Israeli democracy” existed before the present government damaged it. Remove the extremists, protect the courts, restore professional administration, and democracy will presumably return from medical leave. But perhaps the problem is not merely that Israeli democracy is being deformed. Perhaps “Israeli democracy” was never an adequate description of the entire political formation.

Israel has elections. Parties compete, governments fall, and citizens vote, protest, publish, litigate, and accuse one another of destroying the country with admirable stamina. None of this is imaginary, but elections distribute authority only among those already admitted to the electoral field. They do not determine who belongs to the demos, where political responsibility ends, whose participation in government is considered legitimate, or whether the winner may appropriate the institutions intended to restrain it.

In Israel, none of these questions has a stable answer. Palestinian citizens may vote, but their participation in government is still often treated as a constitutional embarrassment rather than an ordinary democratic possibility. Their ballots are valid, while their political authorship remains negotiable. Haredi parties, by contrast, participate fully and use their coalition indispensability to obtain exceptions from obligations imposed on others. This is generally described as pluralism, because “asymmetry secured by parliamentary leverage” lacks the necessary warmth.

Millions of Palestinians live under decisive Israeli power without participating in the election of the central institutions exercising it. They remain outside the Israeli demos but not outside Israeli sovereignty. Fortunately, political language has learned to place them somewhere else without moving the institutions that govern them. Diaspora Jews, meanwhile, do not vote in Israeli elections, yet the state presents itself as the realization of their national self-determination. A non-Jewish citizen may therefore possess a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)