The Crown

Let us begin with the good news, which is also the most unsettling. Anyone afraid that Israel is turning into a dictatorship can rest easy, because it isn’t, and that is precisely the problem. A dictatorship, at least, has the decency to admit what it is. The dictator does not pretend that the state is his on a temporary lease; he simply takes it, and everyone knows he has taken it, and the thing carries the brutal clarity of a robbery committed in broad daylight. What has settled in among us is more polite, and for that reason far harder to name.

It is worth remembering that the word dictatorship was born almost respectable. In Rome, the dictator was an emergency magistrate, appointed for six months, under a written obligation to hand power back the moment the term ran out. Cincinnatus set down his plow, saved the republic, and returned to the plow before the season could change, and that is why we remember him still. The disgrace began when Sulla and later Caesar discovered that no one, in fact, compelled them to hand back anything, and that the only clause that mattered was the courage of whoever ought to enforce it. The honest dictator, if the phrase can bear the weight, was a man bound to a clock. The king was a man bound to a realm. He reigned, and in the finest version of the thing he did not govern alone, because the crown belonged to the land and not to the head that wore it, and a king who forgot this ceased to be a king and turned into a tyrant, a distinction the Greeks drew with a clarity we now lack.

Israel was dreamed neither as a kingdom nor as an emergency magistracy. It was dreamed as a republic of equals, a place where power is lent and later gathered back, where the vote works as a form of memory and also of revocation, the one instrument an ordinary person holds to remind the powerful that he is a tenant and not an owner. That was the harsh beauty of the project. A state that belongs to no one precisely so that it can belong to everyone, a country where the soldier, the teacher, the woman who prays and the one who does not each carry an equal share of the same sovereignty.

What has taken hold in the offices of Jerusalem is an arrangement that none of the old categories describes well, because it wants all three things at once and will not pay the price of any of them. It wants the permanence of the king without the ceremony that obliged the king to serve. It wants the impunity of the temporary dictator without the clock that at least promised an end. And it wants, on top of all that, the blessing of the vote, the legitimacy of the elected man, so that anyone who questions one of the three ambitions is accused of betraying the other two. The court, which exists to remind power that it has limits, comes to be described as the enemy. Permanence, which in a republic ought to be a source of shame, is sold as a mandate. And the bill, always, is paid by us. By the soldier sent to the border, by the hostage who waited in a tunnel while the political cost of rescuing him was being calculated, by the citizen asked to mistake the survival of one man for the survival of the country.

And here is the difference that truly matters, and it is not the one people tend to imagine. A king can abdicate. A dictator can be deposed, exiled, dragged off the balcony. But the man who governs a democracy as though it were his private property has invented a third creature, a reign that never ends because it never confesses to being a reign, and a tyranny that never falls because it never confesses to being a tyranny. Against it, barricades are of no use, and neither is a funeral. What works is the most ordinary thing in the world, and the easiest to underestimate. The ballot box is the only crown Israel ever agreed to wear, and because it is the only one it consented to put on, it is also the only one it can take off.