I will admit here that my assumption has usually been that Israelis, when they finally realize the choice before them (many have already, of course, but many more haven't, it seems), will choose democracy, and somehow extract themselves from the management of the lives of West Bank Palestinians. But I've had a couple of conversations this week with people, in Jerusalem and out of Jerusalem, that suggest to me that democracy is something less than a religious value for wide swaths of Israeli Jewish society. I'm speaking here of four groups, each ascendant to varying degrees:The haredim, the ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose community continues to grow at a rapid clip; the working-class religious Sephardim -- Jews from Arab countries, mainly -- whose interests are represented in the Knesset by the obscurantist rabbis of the Shas Party; the settler movement, which still seems to get whatever it needs in order to grow; and the million or so recent immigrants from Russia, who support, in distressing numbers, the Putin-like Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister and leader of the "Israel is Our Home" party.Rabbi Meir Kahane HY"D (may God avenge his blood) predicted all along that the day would come when Israel would have to choose between being a Jewish state and being a democracy. And indeed it could happen.
Let's just say, as a hypothetical, that one day in the near future, Prime Minister Lieberman's government (don't laugh, it's not funny) proposes a bill that echoes the recent call by some rabbis to discourage Jews from selling their homes to Arabs. Or let's say that Lieberman's government annexes swaths of the West Bank in order to take in Jewish settlements, but announces summarily that the Arabs in the annexed territory are in fact citizens of Jordan, and can vote there if they want to, but they won't be voting in Israel. What happens then? Do the courts come to the rescue? I hope so. Do the Israeli people come to the rescue? I'm not entirely sure. There are many Israelis who value democracy, but they might not possess the strength to fight. Does American Jewry come to the rescue? Well, most of American Jewry would be so disgusted by Israel's abandonment of democratic principles that I think the majority would simply write off Israel as a tragic, failed experiment.
Am I being apocalyptic? Yes. Am I exaggerating the depth of the problem? I certainly hope so. Israel is still a remarkably vibrant democracy, with a free press and an independent judiciary. But on the other hand, the Israel that I see today is not the Israel I was introduced to more than twenty years ago. The rise to power of the four groups I mentioned above has changed, in some very serious ways (which I will write about later) the nature and character of the Jewish state.
But a couple of points need to be kept in mind. First, Israel can be a democracy without being identical to either the United States or Western Europe. We can be a democracy in our own style - indeed, we must be our own style of democracy in order to preserve our Jewish character. Neither the United States nor the Europeans (with the nominal exception of the Church of England) has an established religion. Most other democracies have nothing like the Law of Return, which clearly discriminates in favor of Jews. Does that make us not a democracy? Not at all. It just means that in some less-than-absolute sense, we have already chosen to put the State's Jewish character ahead of Western notions of democracy.
Second, Goldberg assumes that we can push a button and be rid of 'the territories.' We can't even if we wanted to. We can't because it would make us militarily vulnerable. We can't because it wouldn't bring peace and it would encourage war. We can't because it's not what the Arabs are after. What Goldberg and those who 'worry' about Israel's democracy don't or won't understand is that Israel's war isn't a war about territory. It's existential. Once you accept that, you can more easily accept necessary limitations on democracy to cope with that reality.
