Democracy and Its Alternative

What a firestorm of criticism Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu set off last week with his announcement that the Otzma Yehudit (literally “Jewish Power”) party will be part of Israel’s next government, assuming he needs to form a coalition to govern if he is re-elected as Prime Minister on April 9! (The actual situation is slightly more complicated than that, however: what the PM actually did was to agree to include the so-called Union of the Right in his new government should he be elected and need to form a coalition to govern without caring—or at least without apparently caring—that the Union of the Right now includes under its right-wing umbrella the radical-right Otzma Yehudit party, under the leadership of Michael Ben-Ari and Itamar Ben-Gvir, as well the (slightly) less extreme Jewish Home party under the leadership of Naftali Bennett and the Tekuma party under the leadership of Betzalel Smotrich.) On the surface, this was business as usual: governments in parliamentary democracies, and particularly in Israel, form coalitions to govern all the time. But it was the specific decision to open the door to the possibility of Otzma Yehudit being part of a new government that served as the catalyst for the firestorm mentioned above: widely condemned as ultra-nationalist, anti-Arab, and unacceptably extremist, the party openly identifies with the philosophy of the later Meir Kahane, whose 1980 murder at age 58 in the Marriott East Side hotel on Lexington Avenue many readers will recall easily.

The responses were, to say the least, forceful. The Rabbinical Assembly, my own professional organization, joined with another dozen organizations (including my alma mater, the Jewish Theological Seminary) in issuing the following statement:

The Conservative/Masorti Movement condemns the decision to include Otzma Yehudit, a racist Israeli political party with roots in the extremist ideology of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and his Kach party, in a list that might be a legitimate coalition member after the elections. For decades, this movement has been widely recognized in Israel and throughout the United States as dangerously radical, including the Kach party being designated by the U.S. Department of State as a terrorist organization since 1997. Otzma Yehudit should not be further legitimized in any sense and we hope and pray that the party returns to a place of irrelevance.

Condemnation to irrelevance doesn’t strike me as being all that biting a curse and, indeed, other reactions were far more strongly put. Rabbi Benny Lau, for example, likened Israelis supporting Otzma Yehudit in 2019 to Germans in the 1930’s supporting the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws. (Lau is the spiritual leader of the Ramban Synagogue in Jerusalem and the head of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Human Rights and Judaism program.) Nor was this mere hyperbole: in context, Lau made it clear that he was of the opinion that the most bizarre Kahanist proposals—making sex between Jews and non-Jews a criminal offense and revoking the Israeli citizenship of Arab Israelis—were in his mind no less racist and shameful than the Nazi laws of 1935 that criminalized sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans and revoked the citizenship of Jews living in Germany, reducing them to the class of “state subjects” without any of the rights of privileges of citizenship. The Otzma Yehudit people did not take this analogy kindly, I hardly have to add, and are currently demanding NIS 100,000 (about $27,500) in damages from Rabbi Lau and are demanding a public apology if they are not to proceed with plans to sue the rabbi in court for defamation.

Even an organization like AIPAC that tries always to remain outside of inner-Israeli political disputes and works simply to lobby members of Congress on behalf of the State of Israel itself, decried Netanyahu’s decision not to exclude Otzma Yehudit categorically, labelling the latter’s policies “reprehensible” and vowing—slightly amazingly, given who they are and what they do—to have no contact at all with any Otzma Yehudit leader even if they somehow do become part of the next Israeli government. This was the first time in AIPAC’s sixty-eight-year history that the organization spoke out in this particular way.

I could quote more and more angry voices, but I would like to turn to a different, thornier issue today in this space, one that I raised tentatively from the bimah at Shelter Rock last week and would like to consider in more detail here.

I imagine all my readers feel as fully devoted to the concept of democracy as I myself do, and so accept as self-evident the inalienable right of nations to self-govern according to their own lights and in whatever way they feel accords best with their own national interests. That is hardly a radical position to take, and yet it leaves unaddressed a deep, nagging flaw in the larger picture: the one that presents itself when a nation democratically embraces reprehensibly prejudiced, immoral, violent, or racist policies. Do we still insist that every nation has the right to self-govern, thus to decide what that nation’s policies should be and how to apply them? It sounds like such a bread-and-butter issue, signing onto the notion that nations that vote freely and fairly on a national course forward have no obligation to justify that course other than with reference to the referendum that set it as national policy. But is that really what we think when that course forward is wholly out of sync with the values we presume to inhere in the concept of democracy itself? In other words, how should people who profess to believe in the democratic ideal relate to nations that embrace policies we find, to use AIPAC’s own word, reprehensible?

Since Rabbi Lau mentioned the Nuremberg laws in remarks he may well end up being sued in court for having uttered aloud, I should point out in this regard that historians do not believe the German elections of 1932 to have been rigged. Paul von Hindenburg, running as an independent, won 53% of the votes in the second round of voting on April 10 of that year; the Nazis came in second with 36.8%. According to the rules in place at the time, then, Hindenberg assumed the presidency and, on January 30, 1933, duly appointed Hitler as chancellor. Then, when von Hindenburg unexpectedly died on August 2 of the following year, Hitler simply succeeded him as head of state. There was no coup d’état, no popular uprising, no putsch. The Nazis won the largest plurality of the vote. (Hindenberg ran as an independent.) The rules were followed. The Nazis came to power…but do we proponents of the democratic ideal have therefore to concede that they had the right to enact the Nuremberg laws, which were, after all, voted into law by the democratically-elected majority party in the Reichstag? Surely, no normal person would say such a thing seriously. But how do we respond when democracy goes agley and reprehensible people who pursue scurrilous agendas are legitimately elected to office? That’s the question that, in my opinion, underlies the whole brouhaha surrounding Otzma Yehudit.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded to the announcement that members of Otzma Yehudit were possibly going to be part of a new Netanyahu government this spring with reference to the nature of democratic choice-making. “We’re not going to get involved in an election, to interfere in the election of a democracy,” he said. And then he went on to note that American policy is going to be “to let the Israeli people to sort this out,” i.e., without Americans playing any sort of role at all. (If I wanted to be provocative, I would add, “…just as our nation also didn’t after the Nazis came to power, Germany being a democracy and all.”) And that, I think, goes directly to the heart of the matter and begs the question I’ve been pondering all week: whether we should feel obliged to leave other democracies to pursue their own paths forward in life because the notion of democracy itself implies accepting the will of the majority, or whether we should speak out forcefully when people who appear to be uncommitted to the democratic ideal seem poised to come into positions of power democratically?

I was influenced in my thinking in this regard by the work of Larry Diamond, a professor of sociology at Stanford, and particularly by his 2015 book In Search of Democracy, in which he analyzes the reasons that democracies thrive or fail to thrive. It’s a big book filled with interesting ideas, but the one I’d like to highlight here has to do with the author’s theory that the democracies that survive and thrive are the ones in which the basic principle of majority rule is tempered by three foundational ideas that inhere in the national culture so deeply that they simply cannot be ignored or sidestepped: the right of all citizens to participate in civic life and in politics, a devotion to human rights so deeply engrained in the national ethos that the legislation that enshrines those rights in law merely grants legal status to ideas that are universally accepted both by the governors and the governed, and the invariable application of all laws to all citizens regardless of status, wealth, gender, cultural or ethnic background, etc.  In other words, democracies that turn their back on human rights actually do lose the right to chart their own course forward without the interference of others. And, more to the point, it is not only permitted but requisite to interfere in the affairs of other nations when its elected officials—including those fairly elected in unrigged elections—justify human rights abuses of any sort…and particularly when they justify them with reference to their status as legitimately elected officials.

If Otzma Yehudit wishes to turn Israel into an ultra-conservative, Iran-style theocracy in which the rights of the individual are not considered sacrosanct, then it also stands for the end of democracy in the Jewish state. If that is not something all full-throated and unconflicted supporters of Israel can legitimately and unambiguously oppose, then what exactly would be?