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How Liberals Lost in Israel - By Yehudah Mirsky, Foreign Policy

 

 

On Jan. 6, the president of the United States, arguing with zero evidence that his reelection was stolen, incited a violent mob to storm the Capitol, where the bravery and wits of outnumbered security officers staved off catastrophe. The same man is still the undisputed leader of one of the United States’ two main political parties.
 
The United States’ convulsions are dramatic but not unique. Liberalism’s crises predated Donald Trump and will outlast him in America and around the world. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has successfully swapped out independent press, judiciary, civil society, and parliamentary representatives with pliable functionaries of his own. In India, long a marvel of democracy, the Hindu nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has wreaked violence on the country’s Muslims and taken legislative steps toward undermining their citizenship, while cracking down on journalists and nongovernmental organizations. In all, according to Freedom House, democracy has deteriorated in countries where three-quarters of all humans live this past year.
 
Many countries hold elections, for sure—but without the guarantees of speech, assembly, or religion; the respect of individual dignity in government and law that is the hallmark of liberalism; and its promise of freedom. Liberalism’s global recession is real and is not going away.
 
Liberalism in Israel: Its History, Problems, and Futures (in Hebrew), Menachem Mautner, Tel Aviv University Press, 479 pp., 98 shekels, 2020
Liberalism in Israel: Its History, Problems, and Futures (in Hebrew), Menachem Mautner, Tel Aviv University Press, 479 pp., 98 shekels, 2019.
Like so many people, I’ve spent the last years reeling from the illiberalism sweeping the world. Yet the term “illiberal” is helpful only in a very limited way. It has no positive, affirmative content and is hardly something any group would call itself. It assumes anything non-liberal is a deviation from the norm.
 
The end of the Cold War made it easy to see things that way. But victory can blind you too, and the West’s seemingly miraculous victory over Soviet communism was as blinding as Israel’s own victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Both seemed to settle not only geopolitical disputes but also ideological arguments once and for all. Western-style liberalism was to be the wave of the future, and Israel’s existence as both a Jewish and democratic state seemed at long last secured.
 
In Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, one-fifth of the citizens are Arab—mostly, though not all, Muslim. It is a vibrant, raucous democracy in a largely undemocratic region; a military and technological power punching well above its weight, wracked by profound economic and social inequalities and burdened by generations of trauma; a state built by settlers who largely saw themselves not as colonizers but as stateless refugees coming home; a Western-style polity engaged in a decades-long occupation.
 
Liberalism’s recession in Israel can offer some lessons about liberalism’s crises elsewhere.
 
It has also been moving steadily in the direction of religious nationalism and authoritarian populism. The March 23 election propelled into parliament politicians belonging to the once-fringe Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”) party—a far-right group with roots in the late Rabbi Meir Kahane’s violent anti-Arab Kach movement that was once described by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as “racist and reprehensible.”
 
The half of the body politic opposed to Netanyahu’s combative right-wing populism has so far failed to dislodge him. Liberalism’s recession in Israel can offer some lessons about liberalism’s crises elsewhere—and show liberals in different countries that they are in this together and need urgently to learn from one another in order to preserve the ideals and institutions they hold dear.
 
In his deeply researched and ambitious book Liberalism in Israel: Its History, Problems, and Futures, Tel Aviv University’s Menachem Mautner—a leading Israeli constitutional scholar—sensitively and searchingly critiques his own, liberal camp, hoping to rescue it from oblivion. Doing so, he says, means rethinking liberal assumptions not only about law, but also about nationalism, economics, ethnicity, religion, and culture.
 
In a previous, illuminating work on Israel’s judiciary, Mautner demonstrated that Israel’s Supreme Court, under the presidency of Chief Justice Aharon Barak, developed a doctrine of liberal judicial activism going further than his avowed American role model. This was all the more remarkable given that Israel has no written constitution.
 
It does have a series of awkwardly named Basic Laws, mostly governing basic government structures. But 1992 saw a new one, passed jointly by the Labor and Likud parties: the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. This meta-statute incorporated international human rights principles into Israeli law and defined Israel as “a Jewish and democratic state.” Barak, in over a decade of remarkable and controversial judicial opinions, used this Basic Law to launch a constitutional revolution. By the time of his retirement, the Supreme Court had final say over vast swaths of parliamentary legislation and governmental policy—and it had hordes of new critics.
 
Mautner views this judicial revolution as the crusade of a once-dominant Labor Party establishment, based on socialist ideals and holding liberal views, to retain some of its steadily vanishing power. Failing to win votes, as new religious and nationalist groups became ascendant and core liberal values declined, the “former Labor hegemons” as he calls them looked to the courts to save what to them were the foundations of Israeli democracy, and to their critics and rivals symbolized elitist cosmopolitanism. Backlash was not long in coming, culminating in 2018’s Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, in which the word “democracy” tellingly does not appear.
 
The vitriol heaped on Israel’s court is excessive, but the former Labor hegemons’ religious and nationalist foes were not entirely wrong. Barak and his allies were indeed fighting a culture war against them—one with deep, complicated roots.
 
Israel’s secular elites had quite deliberately estranged themselves from, and weaned their children off, their own Jewish cultural resources, succumbing to the fate of revolutionaries who give their children an education as different as they can get from their own.
 
Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his peers, for all their secularist, socialist rebellion, were deeply tied to Jewish tradition, texts, and history. After independence, they had no trouble making the argument to Religious Zionists and to the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox both that the Labor Zionist ethos was not only the better defense of Jewish interests but also the better interpretation of its values. The successors of Ben-Gurion’s generation, however, could not make that argument, if for no other reason than that they no longer shared  with their religious interlocutors the same language or the same basic understanding of who they are and what they are doing in their own state.
 
 

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