Posts Tagged ‘east of democracy’
How democracy fair in theocratic States? Such as Iran and Israel?
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 6, 2012
How democracy fair in theocratic States? Such as Iran and Israel?
David Remnick published on March 12, 2012 a piece titled “Threatened“. I decided to post it with minor editing since I had posted several articles on that topic.
The 21st century began with a fraudulent Presidential election (Bush Junior). And this is maybe in the luckiest of nations. Elsewhere—in Russia, in Hungary, in Zimbabwe—the fragility of democratic aspiration is a brutal fact of history.
To revisit the Arab Spring, one year later, is to celebrate popular awakening but also to acknowledge the distance between the ecstasy of rebellion and the realization of democratic institutions.
For example, in Egypt, autocratic military officers vie for power with varying shades of Islamists. In the Persian Gulf, absolute monarchs and emirs stifle potential protest with petro-lush money, and massive incarceration of protesters.
There is another State in the region that is embroiled in a crisis of democratic becoming. This is the State of Israel.
For decades, its Jewish citizens have described their country as the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel, as imagined by Theodor Herzl and built by the generation of David Ben-Gurion, was not intended to be a replica of the Anglo-American model—its political culture, even now, is closer to that of the European social democracies. Israel structures of governance are points of pride.
And yet, as an experiment in Jewish power, unique after two millennia of persecution and exile, Israel has reached an impasse. An intensifying conflict of values has put its democratic nature under tremendous stress.
When Israel government speaks daily about the existential threat from Iran, and urges an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, it ignores the existential threat that looms within. Reactionary elements lurk in many democracies. Ask the Dutch, the British, the Austrians, the French. The Republican Party has flirted with several in this election cycle.
But in Israel the threat is especially acute. And the concern comes not only from its most persistent critics. The former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert have both warned of a descent into apartheid, xenophobia, and isolation.
The political corrosion begins with the occupation of the Palestinian territories—the subjugation of Palestinian men, women, and children—that has lasted for 65 years.
Peter Beinart, in a forthcoming polemic, “The Crisis of Zionism,” is just the latest critic to point out that a profoundly anti-democratic, racist political culture has become endemic among much of the Jewish population in the West Bank, and jeopardizes Israel proper.
The explosion of settlements, encouraged and subsidized by both Labor and Likud governments, has led to a large and established ethnocracy (theocracy?) that thinks of itself as a permanent frontier. In 1980, twelve thousand Jews lived in the West Bank, “east of democracy,” as termed by Beinart. Currently, they number more than 300,000, and include Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s wildly xenophobic Foreign Minister.
Lieberman has advocated the execution of Arab members of parliament who dare to meet with leaders of Hamas. His McCarthyite allies call for citizens to swear loyalty oaths to the Jewish State, for restrictions on human-rights organizations, like the New Israel Fund, and for laws constricting freedom of expression.
A visitor to Tel Aviv and other freethinking precincts might overlook the reactionary currents in the country, but poll after poll reveals that many younger Israelis are losing touch with the liberal, democratic principles of the state. Many of them did their military duty in the Occupied Territories; some learned to despise the Occupation they saw firsthand, but others learned to accept the official narratives justifying what they were made to do.
Last year, a poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 51% of Israelis believed that people “should be prohibited from harshly criticizing the State of Israel in public.” (see note) Netanyahu encourages the notion that any such criticism is the work of enemies. Even the country’s staunchest ally, the United States, is not above suspicion.
The current US Administration has cooperated with Israeli intelligence to an unprecedented extent and has led a crippling sanctions effort against Iran. And yet, Netanyahu on visit to Washington this week, has shown imperious disdain for Barack Obama.
In fact, President Obama is a philo-Semite, whose earliest political supporters were Chicago Jews: Abner Mikva, Newton and Martha Minow, Bettylu Saltzman, David Axelrod. He was close to a rabbi on the South Side, the late Arnold Jacob Wolf. But to Netanyahu these men and women are the wrong kind of Jew.
Arnold Jacob Wolf, for example, had worked for Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi most closely associated with the civil-rights movement and other social-justice causes. Wolf brought Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak in his synagogue, marched in Selma, and, in 1973, helped found Breira (Alternative), one of the first American Jewish groups to endorse a Palestinian State in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu has distaste for such associations; his gestures toward Palestinian statehood are less than half-hearted. For example, after Netanyahu spoke of giving Palestinians their own state, his father, the right-wing historian Benzion Netanyahu, shrewdly observed: “My son supports it under conditions that they will never accept.”
To Netanyahu, the proper kind of ally is exemplified by AIPAC and Sheldon Adelson who owns a newspaper in Israel, a longtime casino tycoon, and recent bankroller of Newt Gingrich and Sheldon daily devoted to supporting him.
Netanyahu knows that young American Jews are split, with the growing Orthodox community solidly in his corner, and the less observant and secular majority—a majority that is increasingly assimilated and uninterested in Jewish learning—losing their attachment to Israel. The Prime Minister clearly feels that the fervor of the few offers him more than the disillusion and drift of the many.
Obama said: “The dream of a Jewish and democratic State cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation.” Netanyahu and many of his supporters believe otherwise: too often, they consider the tenets of liberal democracy to be negotiable in a game of coalition politics. Such short-term expedience cannot but exact a long-term price: this dream, and the process of democratic becoming, may be painfully, even fatally, deferred”. End of quote
Is Iran democratic? “Citizens” go to the poll and elect the “qualified” candidates as selected by the highest Shari3a council. So what if in Iran there is a unique Wali Fakih (supreme guide, religiously and civil)? Would several wali fakihs, such as witnessed in Israel within each Jewish sect, a better alternative theocratic institution? Is democracy conducted within wali fakihs circles?
Adonis Diaries 