Democracy Is a Courtesy
Democracy Is a Courtesy
Israeli public discourse is impressively democratic. Every few days, someone announces that democracy is in danger: the courts are attacked, the attorney general is targeted, ministers question institutional limits, and independent offices are treated as irritating remnants of a state the coalition has not yet fully acquired. The repetition is reassuring. Whatever is being dismantled, we still know what to call it.
The phrase assumes that a coherent object called “Israeli democracy” existed before the present government damaged it. Remove the extremists, protect the courts, restore professional administration, and democracy will presumably return from medical leave. But perhaps the problem is not merely that Israeli democracy is being deformed. Perhaps “Israeli democracy” was never an adequate description of the entire political formation.
Israel has elections. Parties compete, governments fall, and citizens vote, protest, publish, litigate, and accuse one another of destroying the country with admirable stamina. None of this is imaginary, but elections distribute authority only among those already admitted to the electoral field. They do not determine who belongs to the demos, where political responsibility ends, whose participation in government is considered legitimate, or whether the winner may appropriate the institutions intended to restrain it.
In Israel, none of these questions has a stable answer. Palestinian citizens may vote, but their participation in government is still often treated as a constitutional embarrassment rather than an ordinary democratic possibility. Their ballots are valid, while their political authorship remains negotiable. Haredi parties, by contrast, participate fully and use their coalition indispensability to obtain exceptions from obligations imposed on others. This is generally described as pluralism, because “asymmetry secured by parliamentary leverage” lacks the necessary warmth.
Millions of Palestinians live under decisive Israeli power without participating in the election of the central institutions exercising it. They remain outside the Israeli demos but not outside Israeli sovereignty. Fortunately, political language has learned to place them somewhere else without moving the institutions that govern them. Diaspora Jews, meanwhile, do not vote in Israeli elections, yet the state presents itself as the realization of their national self-determination. A non-Jewish citizen may therefore possess a ballot without equal constituent standing, while a Jew abroad may possess constituent belonging without a ballot.
Citizenship, national belonging, political authorship, and subjection do not coincide. Calling the resulting structure “democracy” does not explain it; it compresses several incompatible political relations into one flattering noun. The category succeeds precisely because it permits differences of status, jurisdiction, obligation, and representation to appear as imperfections within one coherent order rather than as the architecture of that order.
The current coalition did not create this arrangement. It has merely added a Trumpian refinement: electoral victory as a title deed. In a liberal democracy, winning an election grants temporary authority to govern within institutional limits. In the plebiscitary model, victory supposedly grants the right to redefine those limits, occupy the institutions that enforce them, and declare every surviving restraint an insult to the popular will.
A court is legitimate until it obstructs the government. The attorney general is independent until independence becomes inconvenient. The civil service is professional until it behaves professionally, and the media are free until they fail to recognize the historic importance of the leader. Every institution limiting the majority can then be declared undemocratic because it was not itself elected. Democracy is used against the institutional conditions that allow democracy to survive.
This is the Trumpian operation in its most efficient form. The leader does not merely represent citizens through institutions; he claims to represent the real people more directly than institutions ever could. Courts, officials, journalists, experts, and opposition parties become artificial barriers separating the nation from its own will. The election no longer grants an office. It grants the state, preferably with all inconvenient warranties removed.
In Israel, however, the “real people” are not identical with the population governed by the state, nor even with the entire citizenry. They are the allegedly authentic national core, surrounded by groups whose loyalty, usefulness, or harmlessness must be periodically certified. The plebiscitary model therefore does not destroy a previously neutral democracy. It intensifies an older hierarchy of political admissibility and places its administration in increasingly personal hands.
This is why the language of “saving Israeli democracy” has become evasive. It permits almost everything to be criticized while protecting the category that prevents the whole structure from being examined. One may attack Netanyahu, defend the Supreme Court, condemn corruption, oppose Haredi exemptions, criticize settler violence, and warn against Ben-Gvir. All of this remains within the accepted grammar, provided the conclusion promises a return to Israeli democracy.
The obvious question is: return to what, exactly? To a system in which Palestinian citizens could vote while their participation in government remained suspect? To a political order in which occupation was treated as geographically external to democracy while remaining institutionally central to Israeli power? To coalition politics in which obligations were distributed through sectoral bargaining rather than a common constitutional settlement? Or to a civic culture in which military service functioned as an unofficial certificate of political authenticity?
The language of restoration converts structural arrangements into the temporary pathology of one government. Netanyahu becomes the disease, and the earlier order becomes retrospectively healthy merely because its contradictions were administered more elegantly. The diagnosis protects the institutional memory of the center: the democracy was sound, the patient merely acquired unfortunate ministers.
The same operation appears in the language of Israel’s “social contract.” A contract is not a national legend, a memory of wartime solidarity, or an agreement reached by party leaders after midnight. It must be concluded by parties capable of participating in the definition of its terms. Israel possesses many arrangements — bargains, exemptions, military obligations, religious autonomies, emergency conventions, administrative classifications, and unequal legal positions — but it is less clear that it has ever possessed a social contract embracing everyone subjected to its durable power.
Historical Zionism was not such a contract because it performed a different operation. Before statehood, Zionism created migration routes, schools, medical networks, labor institutions, political representation, self-defense, publishing, and new forms of collective organization. It changed what individual Jews could do, refuse, learn, build, and survive. It responded to the revocability of Jewish existence and sought to ensure that Jewish life would no longer depend entirely on another sovereign’s goodwill.
That was a real expansion of political capacity, but it was not a jointly concluded order among all populations inhabiting the same space. The State of Israel became one actualization of this wider field, shaped by antisemitism, imperial rule, war, Palestinian dispossession, and the destruction of European Jewish worlds. It was an emergency political prosthesis: necessary to many, historically contingent, and never identical with the totality of Jewish existence.
The trouble began when the prosthesis declared itself the body. The state increasingly claimed the right to interpret Jewish history, memory, loyalty, and survival through its own continuity. Criticism of state policy could then be translated into hostility toward the Jewish people, opposition to occupation into opposition to Jewish existence, and diasporic disagreement into a comfortable pathology practiced from abroad.
The present mutation advances the compression further. The state identifies itself with the nation, the government identifies itself with the state, and the leader identifies himself with the government. At the end of this magnificent democratic process, one man may appear as the institutional form of collective survival, while every attempt to separate the layers is denounced as an attack on the whole.
The more precise question is therefore not simply whether democracy is in danger. It is whether “Israeli democracy” has become an alibi: a category that allows every malfunction to be criticized while concealing the structure that determines whose participation counts, whose obligations may be negotiated, whose rights remain conditional, and whose subjection is classified as external to the democratic order.
This argument offers no purified democracy waiting behind the present arrangement. It proposes no liberated demos, constitutional redemption, or final political design. It merely suspends the name and asks what political differences become invisible whenever several incompatible regimes are granted the courtesy of one democratic description.
Until political participation corresponds to the reach of durable power, until citizenship entails equal constituent standing, and until electoral victory ceases to function as a claim of ownership over the state, “Israeli democracy” remains less a description than an ideological courtesy. Israel may indeed be experiencing a crisis of democracy, but it is also experiencing something more embarrassing: a crisis of the category that has allowed it, for decades, to avoid describing itself.
