I'm overwhelmed with sadness about what's happening in Israel. And I don't see a way out.
The current wave of protests are a small spark of hope. But even if they work -- which doesn't seem likely -- the problems are so much deeper.
My friend Rabbi Dr. Reverend Haviva Ner David seems to have an endless wellspring of hope. If you follow her on FB or anywhere else, you’ll notice how much joy and faith she exudes. She manages to share happy stories even during these dark times in Israel — that is, when the radical-right wing government led by a Prime Minister on trial for corruption is doing exactly what they promised they would do and crushing the justice system, and along with it any pretense of maintaining checks and balance, protections for individual rights, Palestinian rights, or women’s freedom.
Yesterday, Haviva posted a beautiful story about how she organized a last-minute protest with Jews and Palestinians in the Galilee where she lives, an island of collaboration around a vision of shared society — a vision that is fading in this country, if it ever truly existed. This event was the latest in a series of joint Arab-Jewish protests she’s been participating in up north since the government was sworn in, and all of our work in general as a joint group. They have trying to get the big protests to “include more Arab voices and broaden the message and cause to include problems that already existed with our democracy,” she told me. All this on the actual day when — despite hundreds of thousands of protesters out on the streets for the fifth week in row — the government voted on the so-called “judicial reform” bill which really means the “judicial destruction” bill, which many people see as the beginning of the end of Israeli democracy.
Haviva keeps sharing these moments of vision and collaboration, despite what our larger reality is looking like. Our current elected officials seem to have abandoned any concept of what “democracy” even means. MK Simcha Rothman, who as chair of the justice committee is leading this charge, said, “The Knesset should be able to do whatever it wants” — completely ignoring what checks and balances are meant for. Justice Minister Yariv Levin said, “We are not going to let protesters stop us”, as if his job as a public servant is completely detached from a huge swath of the voting public. And Netanyahu, in his inimitable trumpesque toxic way, tried to switch around the entire story by saying, “These protesters are killing democracy”. Actually, Bibi, protests are a core aspect of democracy, despite your attempt to spin it backwards. What is NOT a core aspect of democracy, is denouncing a huge chunk of the voting public, or, as MK Tali Gotliv did, which is to call the protesters “animals” and “anarchists”. What is killing democracy is a Prime Minister coopting the entire system just keep his own tush out of jail. THAT is killing democracy.
It’s bad. Not just the legislation but also the legislators. We are being led by people whose one goal is to protect their own seat and their own power. Citizens be damned.
I love Haviva deeply. She has been my friend and teacher for decades and she has always inspired me with her clear vision of humanity, and the way in which she lives out her ideals of compassion on the day-to-day — matching the macro and the micro in her life. That is very rare. And these days, I am truly in awe by her ability to hang on to hope. Her novel about women and shared society in Israel is literally titled, Hope Valley. My middle name is Hope, and I often use that name at moments when I, too, try to connect with hope and optimism.
But it’s getting very hard. Very, very hard. Because the problem is deeper than the protests. And a moral society, which is the dream, seems completely out of reach.
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I’m having flashbacks to 2007 when Ehud Olmert was Prime Minister and was believed to be corrupt and incompetent. (Corrupt turned out to be true, as he ended up doing time in prison. But incompetence has become a relative concept so who’s to say, really…) I remember going to massive protests in Rabin Square Tel Aviv calling for his resignation. At the time, the newspapers were calling them the largest protests in Israel’s history.
It didn’t matter. Olmert didn’t resign. (It took the justice system — tellingly — to actually convict him on corruption to get him out of the picture….) There it is. 300,000 people in Rabin Square had zero power to affect change in Israel.
I remember that feeling of complete powerlessness in the Israeli system of democracy. Coming from America, where everyone had at least one direct representative who needed their vote to get elected, the sense was that citizens in Israel have nobody representing them and no way of getting their voices into governance. (Not that America is a model for democracy these days. But at least that sense of being part of an electorate mattered. Or at least it used to…. What a quagmire…)
Anyway, that same feeling returned this week, as hundreds of thousands of protesters right outside the Knesset had zero impact on the vote. None.
“The protesters will not stop us,” Yariv Levin declared, as if that is something to be proud of. Mussolini would be proud. Machiavelli would use him as a living model.
No citizen will get in the way of the people holding on to power. So they voted. And won. And that’s it. That’s the beginning of the end.
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The protests have highlighted many underlying problematic flaws in the Israeli democratic system:
There are only two branches of government not three, because the executive branch is effectively a big chunk of the legislative branch.
Minimal to no checks and balances. The justice system is the only real “check” on power — and it is now being cut down.
Only one house of parliament, not two, so that there are no internal checks and balances within the legislative branch.
No separation of religion and state, which means parties can maintain complete women’s exclusion and promote women’s exclusion in institutions and governmental events, religious schools have no obligation to learn core subjects, religious men who do not participate in society are funneled billions of shekels along with their institutions, no matter what kind of bullshit they teach (who even knows what goes on in those higher yeshivahs? There is no oversight) and effectively no way to rein in religious extremism,
No element of direct representation, as I said, and very little power to the people other than bringing a High Court petition, and zero power to the people in reality because half a million people can protest and the govt can still say, "We don't give a shit" and that totally works.....
These are all problems with the structure of Israeli democracy, which is very weak and vulnerable compared to most democracies of the world. These are facts that preceded the current administration.
As if that's not troubling enough....
The problem is worse. It’s not just the structure of democracy but the values of the country.
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Let's say the protests magically succeed in stopping this particular "judicial reform" thing. It’s 90% a done deal at this point, so that’s not really a possibility anymore. And anyway, if something changes at the 9th hour, it won’t be because of protests but either because of money — ie, hi-tech leaving en masse or the shekel weakening to a point of threatening the economy — or because of international pressure, especially from the US. Anyway, let’s say by some miracle, this particular reform does not pass. Does that actually save Israeli democracy? Would that make all our problems disappear and turn Israel into what it says it is, you know, a model of democracy in the Middle East?
No. The answer is no.
The problems with Israeli democracy are much deeper than this bill for judicial "reform".
The real issue here is that with all of this protest against the threat of authoritarianism, Israel has a much deeper flaw that is still very far from public discourse. Which is that we are still keeping an entire people under military law with almost no oversight.
Our great big "democratic" government "approves" things like bulldozing the houses of families of a person suspected of doing a particular crime. As soon as the crime is given the label "terror" or "a crime based on nationalistic motives", if the person who perpetrated it is Palestinian, their family loses all their rights and potentially their home. That is still happening -- no rule of law, no trial, just the bulldozer.
So much for democracy.
Our government tells its army that is okay to invade the homes of people in the middle of the night, to destroy everything in the home, to terrorize and torment the kids, to make the house completely unlivable again -- all because the family has the misfortune of being Palestinian and living in the no-man's land with no rule of law and someone somewhere said that someone in that family may perhaps maybe have a weapon. Whether that threat is even credible never matters.
Our government sends our kids who have no choice other than to serve in the army to carry out this violence and then tells them that they are heroes. That is what our government does. The government is using Jewish kids to carry out systemic violence against an entire people, packaging it as "duty" and "heroism" and "Jewish pride" and some kind of grandiose response to 2000 years of exile, as if that makes it okay. We are all being fed a narrative that makes this violence okay, and we send our kids to be agents in this very non-democratic activity.
Meanwhile, to be non-Jewish means to live in a country where your experience and your culture and your needs are unseen and untended to.
The list of injustices that Arab Israelis have to face is long. We haven't even gotten to the issue of the evictions of Arab families from places like Yaffo and elsewhere. We haven't gotten to the everyday discrimination, in which parents can say, "We don't want an Arab ganenet," or the wife of an MK can say, "I don't want an Arab woman sleeping next to me in the same hospital room." Everyday racism.
Or the fact that our cities are almost all segregated by religion or ethnicity. There are all of 7 mixed cities in Israel. The number of schools where Arabs and Jews learn together can fit on one hand. Our entire educational system does not consider the idea that Jews and Muslims could actually share a classroom. That we are all human beings and can live side by side -- REALLY live side by side. That concept doesn't really exist -- at least not until university, but by then, the schemas have been set. In everyday life, there is de facto segregation, with all that implied. Legal discrimination, language discrimination, economic discrimination, cultural discrimination.
I know that everyday discrimination is not part of the definitions of "democracy", but these are cultural indications that our country is far from an ideal of what civil society should look like.
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Tellingly, the Palestinian issue isn’t even mentioned anywhere in the protests, despite the real threat that the reform bill creates for Palestinians. Israeli analyst Ron Ben-Yishai explains that the judicial reforms would make Israel an apartheid state:
The Israeli public must understand that the proposed judicial reforms…will dramatically change the State of Israel and our lives…. [It] aims to annex the entire West Bank without giving citizenship to the Palestinians, and the detailed outline of this plan is found in a document called "The Ruling Plan." It was drafted back in 2017 by today's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich….
Through the Basic Law, [it also] aims to divide Israelis into three sectors, where only one - the secular-traditional (including Druze and other minorities) - carries the burden of security, labor and economic growth, which includes paying taxes. The other two sectors, the Arab and the Haredi, won't bear the burden of security at all, and won't fully contribute to the labor market or pay taxes, but they will draw a hefty chunk of the welfare budget for their own purposes. This process is led by Chairman of the Finance Committee MK Moshe Gafni, leader of the United Torah Judaism party.
The signs of these political processes - which in fact will turn Israel into an apartheid state - appear in the coalition agreement clauses. It should be mentioned that Gafni and his colleagues are not even trying to hide their intentions. Thus, for example, intention to grant the rabbinical courts jurisdiction almost similar to the civil courts that rule based on Knesset laws. This will allow rulings to be made according to the Halakhah (Jewish religious laws) - even on civil and economic matters…..
But what is even more dangerous is Smotrich's plans. He argues that the Palestinians are unwilling under any circumstances to agree to Jews fulfilling their national right to self-determination. Therefore, according to Smotrich, all outlines made for a solution based on territorial concessions are irrelevant. Instead of a two-state solution, Smotrich proposes a multi-stage plan to resolve the conflict without allowing the Jews to become a demographic minority. The price for such a plan - restricting the civil liberties of the Palestinians. This would be a blow to the democratic regime in Israel and the state's image around the world.
Even with all the protests, hundreds of thousands of people around Israel carrying Israeli flags to protect Israeli democracy, the issues that Ben-Yishai has outlined about Palestinian rights are not part of the public discourse anywhere.
So, you know, I'm glad to see so many people protesting, getting angry, and wanting change. Yeah, that's all good. But really, the problems are so much deeper.
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“We understand why the Arab sector is not joining in,” en masse to the larger protests, Haviva said to me. “The main symbols and messages don't speak to or include them. It's a big problem. But we go with our signs in Arabic and Hebrew (and some English) against the occupation and for partnership and equality, because that's better than doing nothing. And we organize our own protests that do not have flags and have equal representation of Arab and Jewish speakers.”
If we care about democracy in Israel, we really have to start asking the difficult questions that most people do not want to even talk about.
Which is, what about the Palestinians?
Can we ever, really call ourselves a democracy when we are holding nearly 3 million people hostage, with no basic rights, living under military rule in which we can do pretty much anything we want?
Can we really call ourselves a democracy?
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“If you want to be accurate about my state of mind, I am not optimistic necessarily, but I do have hope,” Haviva said to me. “And I agree with you that the problems are much deeper. If this protest movement succeeds (which is must, or we may all need to leave), it will be just a bandaid if it not also a wake up call to do deeper surgery to create a true democracy here. If we do not address the occupation and the Nation State Law,, for example, and create true Arab-Jewish partnership and equality, I doubt this place can survive, let alone thrive. And even if it does survive, but as a theocratic dictatorship, it is not a place worth fighting for in my opinion. Unless we fight to change it, but not support it as is just because it's a safe haven for Jews but Jews alone…..But there are people who share this vision. And that makes me hopeful.”
“So even if we lose the battle, at least we'll go down fighting.”
That pretty much sums it up.
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