Is Israel on the road to a theocracy?

‘Every civilisation begins in theocracy and ends in democracy’, wrote Victor Hugo. Appealing though it is, this aphorism starts to fall apart when the terms ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’ are unpacked. Theocracies and democracies in different parts of the world have been ebbing and flowing like the tide and now other elements have joined the swirling cross-currents, movements like fascism and communism, forms of dictatorship not known in Hugo’s time.

Hugo was writing in the 1830s, when the struggle for dominance between two types of power – religious and secular – had been settled in favour of the latter, the landscape he was preoccupied with was Europe. The conflicts in Africa and the East had yet to become known in the West and there was no room in his scheme of things for the rise of fascism and communism. Even now, the tide is still ebbing and flowing, bringing to the shore hitherto unrecognised creatures from the deep and washing away the skeletons of old ones.

Jewish civilisation began thousands of years ago as a monotheistic religion. It passed through a theocratic phase and entered the twentieth century as both a worldwide religion and a democracy in the shape of a nation-state.

Today, Israel’s culture is richly embroidered with religious customs, observances and traditions permeating every aspect of public life. But as yet, despite the steady rise of religious political parties, the country has steered clear of becoming a theocracy in the classical sense of the term.

The term ‘theocracy’ has retrogressive connotations in the twenty first century. It clashes with the concept of enlightenment and implies a power structure which places leaders of a particular religion in positions of dominance over the entire community. It displaces democratically arrived at secular laws and replaces them with antiquated religious laws designed to control every aspect of social and political life. In short, it signals re-entry into a dark age of unreason, with all the paraphernalia of prejudice, superstition and intolerance in tow.

Since I don’t live in Israel, I am only able to watch the growing power of the country’s religious parties from afar but I hear enough Israeli voices of dismay to convince me that the drive towards theocracy is real enough to warrant genuine concern.

In Britain, we have a stable democracy which has evolved with relatively little input from religious elements and is working as well as any democratic system can. Britain has retained its monarchy, which is largely decorative and it is gradually coming to terms with its recent imperialistic past. Its clerics, meanwhile, have remained in the background of cultural life, with no pretensions to political power.

Perhaps there is scope for Israelis to examine a political structure which has stood Britain in good stead for over five hundred years and is still going strong.