What Idi Amin has to do with Israel’s elections

Everyone has their most important issue going into this election. For me it is what I have no doubt is the most important issue — the  so-called “judicial overhaul,” that is in fact a full-on assault on Israeli democracy (just to make clear, again, had Justice Minister Yariv Levin proposed establishing other checks and balances to compensate for the neutering of the only one we have, it wouldn’t be an assault on democracy; but he didn’t, and it is). And the reason it is the most important issue can be illustrated by a horrifying story, told to me by a friend, who grew up in Idi Amin’s Uganda.

For most Israelis, Uganda means precisely one thing. Entebbe. We know they had a murderous dictator, Amin, who sheltered the terrorists when they hijacked an Air France flight from Athens to Tel Aviv, separated out the Jewish passengers and used them to threaten Israel. Any of us who have seen the footage of Amin’s visits to the booby-trapped airport terminal, remember the paradox of his friendly smiles for the cameras, even encouraging the hostages to applaud his every utterance.

But this friend of mine, who now lives in the UK, told me a few things about Uganda pre- and post-Amin. He told me how the country, a British protectorate until 1962, had been largely safe, the economy had been strong and, after the British left, democratic. Idi Amin was a very popular general in many quarters, had been a sports hero before his army career, and, after his predecessor Milton Obote had closed down the country’s young democracy, Amin came to power promising to restore free and fair, multi-party elections.

Of course, he never did, and instead established a feared and horrific tyranny. My friend told me of the fear in which everyone lived and, which never really gets discussed when people talk about Idi Amin, the way in which corruption and violent oppression spread into every corner of Ugandan society. “We had thought Amin was this pro-democracy, friendly guy,” said my friend, “and then suddenly everything was bad. Even the police were so corrupt.”

What did that mean, in practice? Fiddling parking tickets? Not quite. One day, when my friend was a child, he watched from his bedroom window as police officers marched a neighbour out of his house, threw him into the boot of their police car, took out shotguns, and fired into the boot. That was traumatic, but he was to gain an even closer understanding.

Another time, the corruption came to his own home. Police entered his house, he told me, pushed his father down onto his knees and held a gun to his father’s head, instructing his mother to bring them money. He remembered his mother running hysterically through the house, trying desperately to find cash, jewellery, anything to appease them and save her husband. Eventually, they were satisfied, temporarily. As they left, they warned her they would return the following day and she had better have more to give them.

That night, my friend and his family fled Uganda. By the time Idi Amin was ousted in 1979, it is estimated that he may have executed as many as 500,000 people. But that figure doesn’t account for the way tyranny and the corruption it invariably breeds spread like a cancer through Ugandan society, nor how many died at the hands of those infected by the system he enabled. Nor for the bloody civil war that followed.

How is this relevant to Israel, and to our elections?

“Democracy,” said my friend, “is never really valued until it is lost.”

Israel has had democracy for longer than Uganda ever had it. And while the Israeli Declaration of Independence doesn’t mention the word itself, it explicitly promises the protections and equal representation that comprise it. And yet Israel has only one meaningful check and balance on government tyranny, and that is the legal system, meaning the Attorney General (whom the government has illegally tried to fire) and the courts (which the government is working to neuter). Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul removes that balancing power, and since he doesn’t propose any others, that would turn Israel into a non-democracy. He could even keep the pretense of elections but take direct political control of the body that runs them (this government have tried at least three times, but were blocked by the still-functioning courts) and skew the rules so that the governing party need never lose.

It’s what Erdogan has done in Turkey, allowing the ruling party to spend far more on election advertising than others, and throwing his nearest would-be rival into prison. In Russia, which also ostensibly has elections, Putin’s rival mysteriously died behind bars.

And sure, Netanyahu even unchecked might not turn into Idi Amin. He’s more extreme than he used to be, but would he go full mad-dog, or satisfy himself with finding a way out of his own criminal trials? It hardly matters. Once we’re a non-democracy we’re a non-democracy. Netanyahu may not turn into Idi Amin, but are you so sure a future Prime Minister Ben Gvir would be stable? Or some equally extreme leader who may emerge from the far left? Are you really certain that all leaders from here on out will resist the urges to which so many dictators across history have succumbed?

At the very least, destroying Israel’s democracy will provoke vast civil strife (dangerous in itself in a perpetually-threatened country), spread massive corruption (we’ve already seen plenty of that) and could remove our ability to shape our own futures. It will turn us from the employers of those who lead us, into their subjects (and as the Passover Haggadah reminds us every year, we Jews don’t tend to like that kind of thing).

At worst, well, Uganda is far from the only place in the world to have trusted a popular leader who promised democracy, only to have experienced a very different, and more terrifying, future. Indeed, across the Middle East, this is a very common story and little, democratic Israel is a shining beacon, an outlier.

For now.

I urge anyone reading this to think about this, and to cast their vote for one of the Opposition parties, who have promised to put meaningful safeguards in place to make sure (whether or not the judiciary is weakened) to protect our democracy. It’s the only way to guarantee that, well, that we have any more free and fair elections at all.

As my friend said, people don’t appreciate democracy until it’s gone. And once it’s gone, it’s gone.