The would-be destroyers of Israeli democracy don’t need a cover of darkness. They are carrying out their mission in broad daylight. They’re not going to liquidate democracy in on fell swoop, which could spark a rebellion, but patiently, in stages, as they lull public opinion into complacency. They are injecting Israeli democracy with small amounts of poison, which they then portray as vital medication. They continue to swear allegiance to democracy until they can safely announce its demise.
Their task is made easier because Israel never had the chance to develop into a healthy and immune democracy. In its first 19 years, it suffered from discriminating and doctrinaire one-party rule that kept the Arab minority under military control. Israel started to develop openness and transparency and to experience a healthy change of government in the first decades after the Six Day War, but it was hobbled by the denial of basic rights to millions of Palestinians that were now living in the territories it conquered. The combination of increasingly harsh security measures and political oppression of the Palestinians, together with the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers who now lived in the same place but in a starkly different reality, made Israeli democracy bleed, infecting it with dangerous viruses with long incubation periods but deadly effects nonetheless. [...]
The feebleness of the gatekeepers encouraged democracy’s enemies to expand and accelerate their assaults. The justice minister took aim at the High Court of Justice while her colleagues in the Knesset diminished its authority. The education minister deters teachers and cows academics as he elevates Judaism in curricula at the expense of civic studies, and promotes theocracy instead of democracy. The culture minister anointed herself as a political commissar who withholds funds from those who don’t adhere to her guidelines. And overseeing all is the prime minister who is waging a personal vendetta against the media while inciting against human rights organizations, portraying them to the Israeli public not as vital cornerstones of a vibrant democracy, but as internal enemies of a state under siege.
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