On Monday, the American Anthropological
Association approved a resolution boycotting Israeli academic institution. It
is the sort of illiberal and curiously targeted gesture — the association has
confirmed to The New York Times that it has no similar boycott against any
other country’s academic institutions, not even Russia’s — that on any other
day would have infuriated me.
اضافة اعلان
But there is worse
But why get worked up over the harms some
feckless anthropologists are trying to inflict on the Jewish state when that
state is doing so much worse to itself?
A true disaster for Israel
The group’s resolution coincided with
the Israeli Knesset’s vote to approve contentious legislation limiting the
power of the judiciary. This is a true disaster for Israel not because the bill
is “anti-democratic” — if anything, it is all too democratic, at least in the
purely majoritarian sense of the word — but because it risks depriving the
country of its most potent weapon: the fierce loyalty of its most productive
and civically engaged citizens.
With those citizens — the tech
entrepreneurs, the Air Force reservists, the world-famous novelists, and
doctors — Israel stands in a league with Switzerland and Singapore: a boutique
nation, small and imperfect but widely associated with excellence in dozens of
fields.
Without those citizens, Israel is in
the club with Hungary and Serbia: a little country, insular and pettily corrupt
and good mainly at nursing its grievances.
Netanyahu is a scion of the secular Ashkenazi elites, while many in the opposition, like former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, are religiously observant and right-wing.
That is
why the particulars of the legislation matter less than the way it was
carried out and the motives of those who championed it. For the most part, they
represent Israel’s least productive and engaged citizens —
ultra-Orthodox Jews who want military exemptions and welfare, settlers who want
to be a law unto themselves, ideologues in think tanks — abusing their
temporary majority to secure exemptions, entitlements, immunities and other
privileges that mock the idea of equality under law.
That is not to say that the idea of
judicial reform is meritless, at least in the abstract. Israel has an unusually
powerful judiciary that over several decades arrogated powers to itself that
were never democratically given and that elsewhere are considered strictly
political, such as adjudging the “reasonableness” of ministerial appointments
and actions. The doctrine of “reasonableness” was the subject of Monday’s
legislation.
Israel has no written constitution
At the same time, Israel has no written
constitution clearly delineating, as America’s does, the separation of powers.
And it has no meaningful institutional check on the executive and legislature
other than the Supreme Court. It is the court that guarantees that human,
civil, women’s and minority rights are respected and that parliamentary
majorities can’t simply do as they please.
Under a more scrupulous prime minister
than Benjamin Netanyahu, a grand compromise between the government and
opposition might have been worked out, one that could have reined in the
judiciary without gutting it, giving neither side total victory but preserving
a broad social consensus. Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, spent months with
legal advisers fashioning proposals that would have done exactly that.
A statesman sacrifices himself for his nation. A demagogue sacrifices his nation for himself.
But the point of the legislation isn
not reform, much less consensus.
Raw political power
It is an exercise in raw political power
carried out by legislators bent on trying to achieve legal impunity from a
court that has tried to hold them to account.
Israel would not be in this national
meltdown if Netanyahu weren’t trying to wangle out of his criminal indictment
by holding on to power in his coalition of the bigoted, the corrupt, the
dependent and the extreme.
A statesman sacrifices himself for his
nation. A demagogue sacrifices his nation for himself.
The crisis in Israel is sometimes
described as a battle of left against right, secular against religious,
Ashkenazi against Mizrahi Jews. This is a vast overgeneralization. Netanyahu is
a scion of the secular Ashkenazi elites, while many in the opposition, like
former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, are religiously observant and
right-wing.
What is true is that
the new dividing line in Israel, as in so many other democracies, is no longer
between liberals and conservatives. It’s between liberals and illiberals. It is
between those who believe that democracy encompasses a set of norms, values and
habits that respect and enforce sharp limits on power and those who will use
their majorities to do whatever they please in matters of politics so that they
may eventually do whatever they please in matters of law.
Perhaps because of the long history of
Jewish dispossession, many Israelis seem keenly attuned to the danger. A poll
last week of 734 Israeli founders and CEOs of startups and managing directors
of venture capital firms found that more than two-thirds were taking steps to
move their assets outside Israel in anticipation of the new law.
Israel would not be in this national meltdown if Netanyahu weren’t trying to wangle out of his criminal indictment by holding on to power in his coalition of the bigoted, the corrupt, the dependent and the extreme.
There is also been a reported surge in
Israelis seeking second passports. Israel’s demographic challenges are well
known, but there’s a challenge within the challenge: If the people who made Israel
the Startup Nation are heading for the exits, the long-term basis of Israel’s
power will erode. Prayers won’t save Israel if it lacks a world-class economy
to sustain a regionally dominant military.
Israelis have a penchant for hyperbole,
and this week has brought a lot of lamentations about the “end of Israeli
democracy.” That’s an unwarranted counsel of despair as well as an
overstatement: Israeli democracy has survived worse.
Still, as a friend in Jerusalem reminds
me, there’s an old Hasidic proverb: “Every fall begins with a lean.”
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