The Fourth Word in the Equation

Throughout Jewish education, reductionist versions of the fundamental debate about the nature of the modern state of Israel are hashed out, at differing levels of (reductionist) nuance. The most basic question (rehashed to no end at Ramah in Wisconsin last summer, to my great annoyance) pits Judaism against democracy, actually a false dichotomy, but we'll leave that aside for the moment. The more complicated question, acknowledging our c. 5 million non-Jewish fellow inhabitants of the land that stretches מהלבנון עד מדבר מצרים ומן הים הגדול עד לבוא הערבה, adds a third factor: the land. This triangle of "Jewish," "democratic," and "the (whole) land" results in a situation (as pointed out recently at an Encounter debriefing) whereby two out of three are pretty easy to achieve, but to include the third factor? Aye, there's the rub.

I'd like to suggest that we too often conflate two different ideas when we use the word "democracy" in referring to the Jewish state. One of the great geniuses of the post-Enlightenment nation-state is that democracy itself - rule of the people - is not enough to guarantee a liberal state. Liberal states - and here Israel falls far short of accepted Western norms - possess legal acknowledgments of basic human rights and have a constitutional structure that protects citizens from themselves. Such is the brilliance of a political environment where Madison had to fear the "tyranny of the majority" becomes something to be reckoned with - the creation of stopgap measures to prevent democracy from destroying itself.

This editorial, which appeared on the Haaretz website yesterday, introduces in somewhat inflammatory language the obvious facts: it is not a "democratic" state which is in direct tension with a "Jewish" state, but a "liberal" one. And, as Gideon Levy points out, the fault lies not with the minority who take advantage of the states anti-liberalism, but with the majority who allow it to happen, cowed by I-don't-know-what. An Israel I would want to live in would be a democratic one infused by a liberal Judaism (not the liberal Jewish movements, though that might be a start) - that is a synthesis worth striving for.

The mere chopping-off of certain non-Jewish areas of the state for the sake of maintaining the so-called "democratic" state that now exists (where a misguided, immoral, and strategically moronic settlement policy has thrived for 35 years; where cutting off your nose to spite your face has become the hallmark of a litmus test for "true believers" of a religion that has survived by its adaptability and pragmatism; and where the governmental system calls into fundamental question the absolute values of so-called "representative democracies," and "public servants," [not to mention a judiciary that must be fundamentally activist and liberal]) is not a sacrifice worth making. That Israel is not one I could be proud of either.

And so I (we) are faced with a double-problem, the conflation of the occupation with the anti-liberalism of the country. That dual status quo is what the settler movement seeks to preserve and what, frankly, the organized political institutions are also trying to preserve. Can we attack one without the other? Is one worth defusing if the other still exists? Morally, the plight of the living Palestinians is more compelling a cause than the abstract ideals and relatively insignificant advances in standard-of-living that a liberal state would bring with it. But at the same time, the creation of a truly liberal culture in the Middle East (which, as Levy implies, would need to be truly a creation ex nihilo) might allow for us to live side-by-side with our (internal) neighbors, as opposed to fearing the "democratic" label being flipped on a majority-non-Jewish state, with all the anti-liberal bullshit that we now foist on each other and the Palestinians falling back, with a vengeance, squarely on our shoulders (not unlike that scene from Slumdog Millionaire).

Where's the reset leader this country needs?