By Zvi November
All Israeli politicians and most foreign supporters proudly proclaim that Israel ‘is the only democracy in the Middle East’. Actually Israel is a pseudo democracy because it is really a PARTYOCRACY. Israelis get to vote every few years for their favorite party. There are 14 parties now competing in the current election which will be held on the 9th of April. Most of the parties only represent a small sub-group of the populace. For instance, the hareidi parties represent the ultra orthodox. Shas represents religious Sephardim. The Jewish Home party represents modern, orthodox, nationalistic communities while several Arab parties supposedly promote Arab interests but expend most of their efforts supporting the Palestinian hot and cold wars against Israel. Indeed, Israeli Arabs invariably refer to themselves as ‘1948 Palestinians’. They, in effect, undermine Israel from within.
A voter may like his party’s leader but dislike one or more of the other candidates on the party’s list. Unfortunately, it is a lump sum, take it or leave it choice.
At every election a new savior appears. This year we have Benny Gantz who is a retired army Chief of Staff. Polls predict that Gantz could get 12 or 13 Knesset seats even though he has hardly said a word about who he is, what he believes in and what he intends to do. Actually, it does not really matter because it is exceptionally rare for a politician to fulfill his or her promises. Pre-election propaganda is simply promotional advertising. In fact, Israeli politicians often do the exact opposite of what was in their platforms. Arik Sharon’s “disengagement”/retreat from Gaza (2005) [for which Netanyahu voted] is an example. In Israel people vote for the RIGHT but get the LEFT’S agenda. Furthermore, all candidates except the Arab/Palestinians promise to protect and defend the country to the maximum. But the leftist parties emphasize “peace” which is a euphemism for withdrawal from Judea and Samaria which pretty much guarantees all out war and Israel’s likely demise. Since Israelis are not all that stupid, they tend to ignore left-wing parties and stick with Netanyahu’s Likud (which gets 1 of every 4 ballots).
There is a 3.25 percent vote threshold. If a party fails to get at least 3.25 % of the popular vote, then all those votes are worthless and lost. Current polls predict that several parties will not draw enough votes to get seats in the next (21st) Knesset. It is quite possible that Israel will follow in Turkey’s footsteps. Back in 2002 several secular parties failed to pass the threshold in Turkey. As a result 16 secular seats were lost and so we got Erdogan and all the problems he creates for Israel and the US.
In addition, this year there is a joker running wild; namely the distinct probability that the Attorney General will indict Netanyahu (in two of four cases) for corruption.
The real power in Israel is in the hands of the Supreme Court justices. They have allocated to themselves the right to nullify any and all Knesset legislation that they disapprove of. Even administrative decisions are subject to the justices’ values and concepts of what is or is not acceptable. The justices interpret the law arbitrarily and sometimes disregard the law altogether if it does not coincide with their predilections. When one reviews hundreds of important Supreme Court decisions one discovers that they closely match the positions held by the extreme left-wing MERETZ party (which wants to replace Jewish Israel with a secular regime).
Israel needs a constitution. An Israeli constitution must provide for a system of referendums similar to those extant in most European countries. The country is also in need of judiciary reform to break the stranglehold of the leftist elite. So long as the current dysfunctional system stays in place, effective popular democratic leadership is impossible.
Israel’s “democracy” is an illusion. Israelis think they are living in a democracy because thousands of commentators, pundits, publicists, pollsters and yours truly pour out tons of opinions every day in print, on TV and radio talk programs as well as in the social media. But it’s all a lot of hot air, practically meaningless.
Luckily, our high tech kids invent and sell mighty apps that big, rich, savvy, international companies appreciate and buy up. This raises the GDP. Otherwise we would be like any other Third World country. Except that no other nation has to live with the existential threats that Israel faces.
There has been yet another major instance of the tyrannical and thoroughly illegal abuse of power by Israeli’s lawyers’ oligarchy. The attorney generals’ deputies have profited Ariel University from establishing a Medical school, for nakedly political reasons. IN order to do this, they illegally prevented two members of Israel’s national board of education from voting on the issue, and insisted that the remaining members of the board hold a reote after the board initially approved the medical school. No other state with democcratic pretensions would allow government lawyers who have not been elected, nor appointed by elected officials, to interfere in this way with the normal and lawful conduct of public business by other government officers.
@ adamdalgliesh:
Unfortunately, you are 100% correct with regard to the behavior of elected officials. The ongoing activities by Shaked and co. may eventually bring a change, but on the other hand, that may be for show too.
Has anyone watched Benny Ganz’s “coming out party” this afternoon? The event was so well organized by the PR types, so obviously well funded, and was so hyped by the Israeli press that it is obvious that he is the “anointed” successor to Bibi, appointed by the attorney general and the oligarchy. His failure to enunciate any program is part of this strategy, since his actual agenda–destroy the settlements, unilaterally withdraw from Judea-Samaria, tolerate terrorism, pay blackmail to the terrorists and Jordan– is anathema to all Israelis. If they elect him, they will be horrified–he will be even worse than Barak.
Even the decision to indict Bibi seems to have been carefully calcuated to allow Mandleblit to appoint as his successor a man that will be a completely malleable front for the Supremes, and who will never include Bennet or Shaked or Miri Regev in his cabinet. Bibi , for all his weakness and cowardice and groveling to the Oligarchy. is still not obedient enough to the oligarchy to be acceptable to them. He resists their pressure a little bit at times, as when he insisted on addressing Congress about Iran, and sometimes he says things in his speeches that displease them. Having seized all the other levers of power, the oligarchs want coomplete control of the political echelon as well, even though they have reduced it to impotence, so that no one representing Israel to the public evensays anything they disagree with. The one power that that the political echelon has retained is the ability to make speeches and public statements.
More mysterious than the oligarch’s anointment of Ganz, is his appaerently widespread public support. Why would anyone who is not an oligarch want him to be Prime Minister. It is true that he was once the army chief of staff, but his record as chief was completely undistinguished. The experts say he did nothing to prepare the country for war, and that the fighting qualities of the iDF deteriorated during his administration. Israel won no battles, and Hezbollah and Hamas were allowed to vastly expand and modernize their arsenals. Gantz has never held any civil office, and has no political experience. How could so many people possibly support him? Madness.
Zvi is also correct that the party leaders and politicians always ignore their campaign promises and usually do the opposite when elected. However, this is in part because the nationalist party candidates don’t have the power, or think they don’t have the power, to carry out their promises, since they know that the Supreme Court and the attorney general won’t let them, and that they will be prosecuted by the flagrantly politically motivated leftist attorney general and publci prosecutors if they do. The attorney general and the public prosecuters whom he appoints are the enforcement “muscle of the oligarchy, together with the equally partisan police.
However, it must allso be admitted that nearly all the elected politicians like Bibi amd President Rivlin do not put up a fight against the o;igarchy’s domination, and submit supinely and grovel to the “Suprems.” They lack the will and the courage to fight to regain their own rightful authority. They are miserable cowards.
In fairness to Zvi, he states later on in his article that real power rests with the Supreme Court. This is true, although there are also many former justices and other “retired” officials who share power with the “sitting” Supreme Court behind the scenes. However, this accurate statement, and his observation that the court only rules according to its “predilections” while ignoring the law–in other words, it is a lawless, arbitrary government of lawyers, not “the rule of law”-contrdicts his earlier assertion that Party bosses” run things. They are paper tigers.
Zvi is right that Israel is undemocratic, but he completely misunderstands the nature of its non-democracy. Israel is not ruled by political parties, but by an self-perpetuating oligarchy of judges, prosecutors, government lawyers and civil servants, “retired” judges, prosecutors and civil servants, and even some private lawyers who have never held public office. The elected officials and the legislature have no actual power, Neither do the Prime Minister, other cabinet members or the entire “political echelon.” Least of all do the voters have any power.
The party “bosses’ have no power, in part because power is lidged outside the national legislature, and in part because poliicains are free to start new parties when they are dissatisfied with the leaders of party on whose ticket they were elected. New parties are constantly being formed and old ones dissolved. We have already seen several new parties in the running since elections were called. Even before that, several new parties have been created since the last Knesset election by MKs who bolted the party on whose ticket they were elected. Very few of the present parties existed ten years ago, and very few of the parties that existed then are still around. So much for the power of “party bosses.” They don’t even exist.
The one party that has existed, more or less, since the founding of the state and even before then, is the Labor Party. Even that party changes its name every few years, groups split off from it, and then rejoin it. The reason for its resilience, however, is not the power of it s “bosses,” wo have often been fired and replaced, but its connections to the hidden, semi-secret lawyer-bureaucrat oligarchy, for which Labor serves as a mouthpiece. Like the Labor Party, the hidden “deep state” oligarchy is composed pf ‘leftists,” or more accurately anti-Zionists and supporters of the “Palestinian cause.” Israel is ruled by a hidden government which is opposed to Israel’s existence, at least as a Jewish state.