The moment when a question mark hovers over Israeli democracy has probably arrived. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and French President Emmanuel Macron in 2018 (Photo: Amos Ben Gershom / L.A.M.)
“Why do our nations have such great allies?” Benjamin Netanyahu wondered in what he said to French President Emmanuel Macron during a visit to Paris in June 2018 in honor of the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding, “I think the answer can be summed up in three words: Libertè, egalitè, fraternitè (freedom, Equality, brotherhood, the slogans of the French Revolution; mr)… Like France, Israel is a proud democracy, proud of its record of defending freedom in the heart of the Middle East. This is indeed an extraordinary achievement because in seventy years there was not even one moment, one second, in which democracy in Israel was put into question.”
Well, this moment, this second, in which a question mark hovers over Israeli democracy, has probably arrived, at least in Macron’s eyes. According to the newspaper “Le Monde”, Macron told Netanyahu, during their meeting in Paris at the weekend, that if the legal reform he is promoting is realized as announced, France “will be forced to conclude that Israel has broken away from the popular concept of democracy”. That is, if Netanyahu marketed Israel as a bastion of “freedom in the Middle East” in order to prove to countries like France or Western countries that there is a “partnership of values” between them and Israel, now this product seems flawed. Netanyahu, as a marketing person, is surely aware of the meaning of the decrease in the value of the product he is marketing.
Of course, as far as the Palestinians are concerned, Israel was not a democracy, not even for one second. From the Nakba, through the military government, to the occupation in 1967, and the systematic violation of the rights of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, as documented in countless reports by human rights organizations and the United Nations, the latest of which is by the special rapporteur Francesca Albanza. Macron, like other world leaders, is surely aware of this. But as long as sovereign Israel operated more or less as a democracy, it was convenient for Macron and others to turn a blind eye to what was happening beyond the green line, and to see the occupation and apartheid in the territories as a sort of “car accident” that happened to Israeli democracy.
The image of Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East” served for decades as a strategic asset of Israel, not only during the Netanyahu era, one of the reasons – although of course not the only one – why Israel enjoyed international immunity in relation to the occupation. The relatively independent judicial system, the free press, the apparent liberality towards the LGBT community, the aggressive marketing of Tel Aviv as one of the coolest cities in the world – all served this image. Even the concept of the “start-up nation” helped paint Israel an image of a creative, free place , an integral part of the West.
Back to Netanyahu’s meeting with Macron. Immediately after the problematic headline in “Le Monde”, an Israeli “political source” hastened to clarify to Israeli journalists that Netanyahu “was under the impression that Macron was not familiar with all the details of the reform”. This is a dubious claim for two reasons. One is that this reform is not that complicated. It took Minister of Justice Yariv Levin exactly three and a half minutes (I measured, assuming that the fact that Menachem Begin was Levin’s godfather is not counted as part of the reform) to explain it when he launched it a month ago – an override clause with a majority of 61 MKs, an absolute majority for the government in the committee for appointing judges, the cancellation of a pretext The reasonableness, turning the legal advisers into personal appointments, whose advice is not binding. I am convinced that the reform could have been explained to Macron even in less than three and a half minutes: the government in Israel will do what it wants, and no court will stop it.
Second matter: although it is likely that Macron’s mastery of Hebrew does not exceed his mastery of Hungarian, Macron is one of the most prominent speakers in Europe against Viktor Orbán’s anti-democratic revolution in Hungary. Thus, for example, when a protester chanted slogans at him at an election rally in April 2022, Macron replied: “You can even shout ‘overthrow the republic,’ you’re allowed, but that’s the difference between living in France, in Strasbourg, and living in Hungary.”
When France became the acting president of the European Union in early 2022, Macron explained that promoting the “rule of law” in Europe would be his main task. “We are a generation that is rediscovering how democracy and the rule of law can be made fragile,” he said, this time without specifically naming Hungary or Poland. The rule of law, Macron added, is not an “invention of Brussels”, but part of European history. “The end of the rule of law is the beginning of totalitarianism.”
Although, as mentioned, the name of Hungary was not mentioned, in Budapest they understood very well who these things were aimed at. “Macron points to Hungary and Poland regarding the rule of law,” said the headline of the “Hungary Today” website. “We expect the conservative French presidency to stop using double standards and political blackmail,” the site quotes the response of Tamash Deutsch, a member of the European Parliament from Fidesz, Orban’s party.
When Deutsch spoke of “political blackmail”, he was referring to a very specific matter. In 2020, the European Union froze the transfer of grants to Hungary in the amount of 5.8 billion euros, until it completes anti-corruption measures and stops anti-democratic measures. Another 18 billion euros of compensation for the damages caused by the corona are also frozen, for the same reasons. In December 2022, the EU agreed to release some of the money, but these payments are still conditional on democratic reforms in Hungary.
Israel is not a member of the European Union, and therefore Macron cannot exert on Netanyahu the levers that the EU exerts on Orban. But this ongoing confrontation between Macron in particular, and the European Union in general, and between Hungary, shows the importance given today in relations between countries to matters that were once considered distinct internal affairs – such as the rule of law or the quality of democracy in a particular country. Certainly between countries that supposedly share “common values”. The countries of the European Union, of course, but also Israel and Western countries such as France, and of course the United States.
Importance to matters that were once considered distinct internal affairs. Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban (Photo: Annika Haas EU2017EE, CC BY 2.0)
A crack in immunity
Like many settler societies – the United States, Canada and even South Africa – Zionism boasted that it had established a “masterpiece society” here. For the settlers, of course, not for the natives. One of the manifestations of this “masterpiece society” was the internal democracy that the Zionist movement established here almost from its first day. Democracy within the parties, elections for the “Assembly of the Elected” that represented the Jews in the Land of Israel during the British Mandate, elections in the Zionist Organization, and of course elections for the Knesset since the establishment of the state in 1948. The “rule of law” and the independence of the court were and are part of this democratic “package”.
This “model company” was an extremely important instrument for creating cohesion among the Jews in the Land of Israel under the Mandate, and later in independent Israel. But from the first moment, this was also of enormous importance to the relations between the Jewish community in Israel and the “West”. The fact that Zionism established a free and democratic society in the Land of Israel served as proof that it is part of the West, that it represents the West, the bearer of the idea of ”freedom, equality, brotherhood” in the wild Middle East, as Netanyahu explained to Macron.
For the Netanyahu family, this perception is particularly deep. “Zionism has always been the front line of the West in the East,” said Benzion Netanyahu, the prime minister’s father, in an interview with time in 1998. “It is the same today: it stood against the natural tendencies of the East to penetrate the West and enslave it.” His son Benjamin said strikingly similar things at a meeting in 2017 with the heads of the “Vishigrad states” – Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. “Europe ends in Israel. East of Israel, there is no more Europe,” Netanyahu was quoted from a closed conversation at the same meeting.
One of the main claims of the opponents of Levin and Netanyahu’s reform is that the business world cannot operate in a country where the government is strong and the courts are weak, therefore capital and high-tech companies will leave Israel, if the reform is approved. Supporters of the reform claim, on the other hand, that the reform will actually encourage “economic freedom”. They are not necessarily wrong. In Chile capitalism flourished after democracy was shot dead, in China capitalism thrives without a drop of democracy. sounds logical. When the government has no limits, it can suppress labor unions and let capital thrive without nonsense like human rights or the freedom to strike getting in the way.
But the “shared values” – in the name of countries like France, not to mention the United States – turn a blind eye to the Israeli occupation and the systematic violation of Palestinian rights that has accompanied it for almost 56 years, go far beyond economic liberalism. They concern the very ability of countries in the West to see Israel as one of their own. In the public words that US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told Netanyahu during his visit a little over a week ago, he explained what the “shared interests and values” of Israel and the United States are. “Support for core principles and basic democratic institutions, respect for human rights, equal distribution of justice for all people, minority rights, rule of law, free press.”
True, all these things, both Blinken’s and Macron’s, should be taken with a very heaping teaspoon of salt. The US continued and continues its “special relationship” with Israel even though there was hardly a single day in Israel’s history when it respected the rights of the Palestinians. So did France and the European Union. Netanyahu was also quoted after the meeting with Macron that now the complaints about the lack of democracy in Israel, will become a “mantra” like the complaints about the occupation.
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Still, we seem to be in a new situation now. Prof. David Kretsmer sketched a scenario here in which the High Court rejects Netanyahu’s and Levin’s reform, Levin announces that the ruling is invalid, and police are sent to shut down the court hearing Netanyahu’s case. In the state of affairs today – when Levin, Netanyahu and Simcha Rothman are determined to pass the reform in all Price, and the hundreds of thousands of protesters, the legal advisor to the government and the High Court are determined to oppose it – such a scenario or similar to it is not impossible.
And then, if this happens, if the government implements a kind of “decision plan” that will be applied not only to the Palestinians – as Bezalel Smotrich wishes – but also to the courts and the system of liberal values that still exists in Israel, the asset called “the shared values” between Israel and the West may absorb Extreme depreciation. Then, perhaps, the immunity from criticism of the occupation, which Israel has enjoyed for decades, may also crack.