Lhe new government of Binyamin Netanyahu is rightly worried. The presence in the post of national security minister of a disciple of the racist rabbi Meir Kahane, Itamar Ben Gvir, an ally of Bezalel Smotrich, the no less racist and homophobic leader of the Religious Zionism party, raises fears for the future of democracy. in Israel and already groups are mobilizing to express their concern.
But it would be wrong to focus on these two characters. The evil is much deeper. Israel is governed by a majority of right-wing deputies, more than seventy out of the one hundred and twenty that make up the Knesset (including the elected opposition members gravitating around Avigdor Lieberman and Gideon Saar), who do not have only a limited respect for democracy, if not a total aversion. The tree must not hide the forest.
The ideological landscape is however clear. Let’s start with the ultra-Orthodox, the fiercest opponents of democracy. One of their great spiritual leaders, Rabbi Eliezer Menahem Shach (1898-2001), castigated the laity “who want a democratic state, a state of law and not a state of Halakha, therefore a state governed by idolatrous laws”. They loathe the Supreme Court, which has rolled back their influence, particularly on the issue of marriages and conversions. They now represent 12% of the electorate and, given their high birth rate, they could reach 32% in 2065 (according to the Central Bureau of Statistics). One can easily imagine what the face of Israeli society would then be.
Ultra-Orthodoxy and ultra-nationalism
Do not count on the Likud to defend democracy against extremists, as some hope. It would be ignoring the authoritarian transformation of this party, ignoring the twelve consecutive years (2009-2021) during which Benyamin Netanyahu led the country, relentlessly, with his far-right allies at the time, to weaken checks and balances and consolidate the supremacy of the Jewish majority over the Arab minority. This would be to gloss over the anti-liberal legislation aimed more particularly at left-wing organizations and Israeli Arabs, and to forget the law of the nation-state of the Jewish people, of July 2018, which grants the Jewish majority the exclusive right of ownership over the State of Israel. It would be to ignore, finally, the violent charge of “Bibi” against the judicial system which charged him with three counts. Netanyahu likes to gargle the word “democracy,” but he doesn’t care.
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