Israel’s Jewish and democratic ideals are in harmony

Gil Troy

A new front in the relentless attacks on Israel is the attack on Israel’s democracy. The argument is perverse. Democracy remains MIA – missing in action – throughout the Arab world. Palestinians in Gaza suffer under a Hamas dictatorship. Palestinians in the West Bank endure an authoritarian regime with a president serving the 10th year of his four-year term. 

Israeli Arabs are among the few Arabs in the Middle East who enjoy basic civil liberties and a stable democratic government, exemplified by their 63.5 per cent turnout this past Israeli election. Palestinians in the territories are among the few Arabs (with their Israeli Arab cousins) who can petition a Supreme Court that occasionally limits the government. 

Nevertheless, critics magnify Israel’s occasional governmental missteps so much that many now believe Israeli democracy is imperiled, using that as an another excuse to question its right to exist.

Underlying this outrageous lie is a false assumption – echoed in Israeli domestic politics – that Israel’s “Jewish” and “democratic” characters are in constant conflict. While there are occasional tensions, remember that the Bible gave birth to democracy, meaning that Jewish and democratic ideals usually harmonize with each other.

Democracy begins by realizing that every individual is equal, has dignity, and has inherent rights. From that flows the need to protect civil liberties, maintain consent of the governed, and nurture a flourishing civil society.

The Bible was a revolutionary revelation because it appreciates each individual human being. The ideas of liberty and equality follow from that insight as naturally as summer follows spring. So many biblical verses celebrate the individual, the essential commitment to fairness, the mission to “proclaim liberty throughout the land.” 

That’s the easy sell. The great revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky loved to teach that “Every person’s a king,” crediting the Bible as the source of that notion, which clearly shaped his vision of how central democracy was in Jewish tradition and should be in a future Jewish state.

There was a broad Zionist consensus regarding the overlap and interplay between Jewish and democratic values. In his speech on “The Imperatives of the Jewish Revolution,” delivered in Haifa in 1944, David Ben-Gurion, across the ideological spectrum from Jabotinsky, proclaimed: “This people gave the world great and eternal moral truths and commandments. This people rose to prophetic visions of the unity of the Creator with His creation, of the dignity and infinite worth of the individual (because every man is created in the divine image), of social justice, universal peace, and love – ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’”

The harder challenge is looking at someone like Moses, clearly designated by God as leader and seeing the democratic lessons embedded in his leadership narrative. When God first dispatches Moses to lead the people out of Egypt, the young ex-prince says, “but, behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee.”  This reflects the classic democratic leader’s challenge of searching for legitimacy. 

Similarly, in the buildup to the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, God tells Moses that by making the revelation publicly, it will enhance his status with the people. A true dictator compels and controls, while a democratic leader invites and occasionally cajoles. Again, while Moses does not run for election, he does experience what we call in American politics the “permanent campaign,” the attempt to remain popular with the people, rooted in respect for them and their collective power.

All democracies are imperfect, and all reconcile various tensions. Rather than bemoaning Israel’s Jewish democracy, we should celebrate it as a miracle, that despite constant warlike conditions, it has preserved equality, liberty, consent of the governed, civil society and individual dignity, as both Jewish and democratic values.