The camp of the Left(out) in Israel – and their supporters and funders from abroad – subverting Israeli democracy, you know, the old one-man one-vote theory, for years, for sure since Yitzhak ben-Aharon suggested on the morrow of the Likud’s 1977 victory that the solution to the results was to switch the people, always harp on a supposed “illegalism” intrinsic to the enterprise of Zionsim and on the danger posed to Israel’s democracy in the pursuit of the Land of Israel, the security it can bring, the vision it can posit as an encouraging direction for the future, the assurance it provides for the solidifying of a Jewish national consciousness.
Recently, Haaretz’s Ari Shavit took up the attack writing of
"the new occupation: over-representation for the settlers, the settlers'' agents and those beholden to the settlers in the upcoming 19th Knesset"
In other words, democracy belongs only to those who oppose residing in those portions of the Jewish national home not under full Israel sovereignty. It is non-democratic to hold other opinions. And it is prohibited to have “over-representation” is my understanding.
He continues dividing his concept into the "old occupation in Hebron, Sebastia and Ofra", and the
"...the new occupation...in the current election campaign. First the settlers succeeded in settling inside the Likud...Finally, the settlers ran a party with an image of high-tech, but whose essence is extremism...conquering the central power structure of Israel in a well-planned pincer movement...what is now happening is impossible to view as anything but the takeover by a colonial province of its mother country...[the settlers] are marching on the capital and conquering it, and turning the mother country into a nation under the control of the colony it gave birth to.
Has Shavit a solution?
... there will finally arise a liberation movement worthy of the name, and the uprising it leads will end the second occupation. The great fear is that until then a lot of blood will be shed, and the first occupation, that of the West Bank, could become irreversible
Blood? How much blood? Whose blood? Who shoots first?
And close behind is Dr. Sara Hirschhorn, whose dissertation is "City on a Hilltop: The Participation of Jewish-American Immigrants Within the Israeli Settler Movement, 1967-1987." She has an article in Haaretz, "No law in these parts".
She bemoans the current ideological situation in the political arena, claiming
The question of this election then, is not whether Naftali Bennett, Moshe Feiglin, Benjamin Netanyahu, or any of the other right-leaning politicians in this election contest are “good democrats” — or whether religious aspects or aspirations of their political platforms will attenuate their attitudes toward democracy — but rather whether any candidate across the political spectrum will confront the challenge of illegalism in Israeli political culture.
There it is, the “illegalism”. As if the nationalist camp is stained, impure. With all the drug-lords, gang-killings, prostitution, white-collar crime and what not, that Israel itself could find justification for existence in the eyes of such analysts. And, considering that, if that view is true, how does anyone support the Arab cause to establish a Palestinian state, anywhere in the area of the Jewish homeland, based on their illegalism? But that problem with liberals will be dealt with in another post.
And with that theme, Hirschhorn points to ‘settler terrorism...in the Wild West Bank’ although she spreads responsibility around
There has been something rotten in the State of Israel since its inception regarding the sanctity of the law and now, with the settlers'' violence and civil disobedience, the Israeli establishment is only reaping what was sowed many decades ago.
Oh, the rotten rotten Israel.
Latching on to Professor Ehud Sprinzak and what he dubbed “Israeli illegalism,” she attacks
...both ideological illegalism – the kind of Zionist theology that asserts that rules are meant to be broken - and operational illegalism - the tactical strategies that enshrined these beliefs [which] became entrenched in Israeli political life, evolving from the “functional illegalism” of the Yishuv period that brought the State of Israel into existence to both an open and obscured illegalism of law-bending, ad-hoc decision-making, and corruption endemic since 1948.
I really do not think that is fair and surely it is incorrect. It was the British laws that were illegal as the British regime reneged and betrayed the Mandate decision of the League of Nations. Is that so complicated to grasp? The state of Israel, from pre-state to post-67, is maligned in a decidedly non-academic manner.
And, I suggest, she becomes derogatory, referring to
“good Jewish democrats”...[who] derived their justification for resisting any political authority that challenged their Zionist-Jewish doctrines from precisely the same principles of “what is good for the Jews” upon which their Israeli forefathers founded the state itself.Derogatory? I’d alter my term to maligning.
She ends off hoping
...that Netanyahu, Bennett, and the other candidates of the 2013 election will live up to the challenge of being the lone democracy in the Middle East — but by being more than just “good Jewish democrats” this time around.
Well, for my thinking, anyone who, given the history of the conflict, the behavior of the Arabs, local and regional, the practices of the US and other European countries, like France now in Mali, Hirschhorn’s hope, while laudable and very Jewish, is disengaged from the reality of what it takes to maintain freedom and independence as a nation-state in the Middle East.
So, we have Hirschhorn''s charge of "illegalism" which seems to brand us as outlaws and Shavit charging us with a putsch while defining that as undemocratic when it isn’t. Would that be very much like a pincer movement conquering public opinion by these two commentators?
Is that being democratic?
I think I may hear an echo of what Ben Stein has written in this book, Bullies: How the Left''s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans:
the left is the greatest purveyor of bullying...Bullying has morphed into the left’s go-to tactic, as they attempt to quash their opponents through fear, threat of force, violence, and rhetorical intimidation on every major issue... ...the simple strategy used by liberals and their friends in the media [is]: bully the living hell out of conservatives. Play the race card, the class card, the sexism card. Use any and every means at your disposal to demonize your opposition—to shut them up. Then pretend that such bullying is justified, because, after all, conservatives are the true bullies, and need to be taught a lesson for their intolerance.
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