The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in Israel

Liberal democratic order is collapsing as an element in the gradual disintegration of the crisis ridden global capitalist system. This is occurring throughout the world – in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, many Latin American countries, even in the United States.

But this process of liberal democratic implosion is most advanced in two countries – Bharat and Israel, key exponents of liberal imperialism. Understanding the process of the deconstruction of liberal democratic order is of importance to Islamic revolutionaries who are committed to an overthrow of the rule of law of capital.

In this paper we seek to analyze the process of liberal democratic collapse in Israel as a case study. Is this Israeli episode typical or atypical of the general process of liberal democratic collapse?

The Israeli Case:

Israel is a settler state, like America, Canada, Australia etc. established by the slaughter and expulsion of millions of original inhabitants of a country. It is not a colony and like all non-colonial settler states justifies its conquests and its existence with reference to Enlightenment humanitarian values.

Liberal democracy is embedded in humanitarian ideology. Hence, as in other settler states, abandoning the liberal democratic paradigm is a matter of anxiety and frustration for the Israeli elites.

Nevertheless, liberal democracy has had vulnerable roots in Israeli policy from the time of the Nakba (1948) when Palestinian Muslims were slaughtered and expelled en masse. Up to 1966, Muslims were under military rule, effectively denied all liberal rights. From 1966 to 2000 military rule over the Muslims was relaxed in fits and starts. Since 2000 – and especially under the pressure of Netanyahu’s rule – there has been sustained rollback of these concessions. Of course these concessions were not given to the inhabitants of the occupied West Bank and liberal democratic rights extended to Muslims remained confined to those who were regarded as Israeli citizens residing in the territory behind the so-called “Green line” and in 2022 equaling about 22 percent of the total Israeli citizenry.

This limitation of liberal democratic rights – its denial to Muslim Israeli citizens – is overwhelmingly popular among Israeli Jews. According to a 2016 Pew survey 79 percent of Israeli Jews approve of existing legal discrimination against the Muslims and 48 percent support the expulsion of all Muslims from Israel. Hatred of the Muslims is ingrained in Israel’s national ideology which proclaims the essential Jewishness of the Israel state and Jewishness is by its nature incompatible with liberal democracy.
Islamic uprisings – the Intifada movements – against Israeli occupation, oppression and expulsion – and their relative effectiveness since 2002 – have strengthened the commitment to non-liberal values of the Jews.

Liberal democratic treatment is legitimately confined to Israeli Jewish citizens. As Ahmad Tibi, a member of the Knesset said in 2009, “This country is democratic towards Jews and Jewish towards Muslims”.
Denial of liberal rights to Muslims is manifested in every aspect of Israeli public policy from infrastructure construction to the provision of education and employment and the institutionalization of policing areas and segments. The legal and bureaucratic system is especially designed to “Judise” the land” – to wrest land from Muslim possession for the benefit of the Jews. In 90 percent of Israeli (non-occupied area) territory Muslims are legally debarred from owning or leasing land. In 2021, Muslims owned only 1.5 percent of land in Israel. Beyond the Green Line Israel’s newly occupied territories have seen a massive growth of Jewish settlements and the displacement of Muslim nomadic tribes.

Like in Bharat, Poland and Hungary, some liberal practices continue to function in Israel proper. The press is capitalistically organized (it is “free”) and there is freedom of association and movement. Obscenity and vulgarity in Israeli cultural life is flourishing and Jewish teachings are routinely ignored. In this sense Israel is a Jewish secular state and Zionism (like Muslim nationalism and Hindutva) is a movement which seeks to secularize a religion.

However, the 2023 legislation limiting the ambit of the judiciary shows that even the liberal rights of the Jewish citizenry are being curtailed. The legislative containment of the judiciary has mass support and demonstrations against it have proved futile. The Jewish ummah throughout the world (and especially in America) enthusiastically supports legal and economic discrimination against the Muslim citizens of Israel.
In the past few decades liberal democratic tendencies have been flourishing among Western oriented Israeli Muslim intellectuals. A group of such intellectuals in 2007 published a series of “Vision Documents” calling for liberalization – the extension of liberal democratic rights to the Palestinians – of Israeli state policies and structures. This aroused virtually no support from the Muslim masses and was viewed with considerable hostility by the Jews who resented that these “good Arabs” (Western oriented persons) were also calling for a de-judaization of the Israeli state.

Israel does not have a constitution. The Knesset passes “Basic Laws”. From 2001 to 2005, three proposed Basic Laws were formulated all of which sought to strengthen the liberal orientation of state policy but all of them endorsed the conception of Israel as a Jewish state. No Arab individual or group was included in the drafting of these proposed basic laws. The publication of the “Vision” documents was an unsolicited response to these proposed basic laws. In 2007 Shin Bet, Israeli Security Organization, warned the Prime Minister that “the Muslims were becoming a genuine long term danger to the very existence of the state of Israel”.

European descendent Israelis – they constitute the dominant element in the Israeli elite – and the Western educated Israeli youth are torn between two mutually irreconcilable Enlightenment doctrines, nationalism and liberalism. Their commitment to their Jewishness is an anti-religious racial (nationalistic) commitment legitimating their exclusive possession of the state apparatus. But their commitment to Modernity is universalist, requiring a recognition of equal capitalist rights to all human beings. Thus when the modern secular Jew is confronted with Arab demands for equality he cannot act rationally. All the evidence is that in Israel (as in Bharat) his racial commitment triumphs over his commitment to liberal values.

The modern Jew regards all Muslims as terrorists or at least as the fellow travellers of Hamas and Hezbollah. Netanyahu is a modern Jew who skillfully exploits the racialist bias of the Jewish masses. He describes Arab Knesset leaders as “existential threat to Israel”. He has passed over 30 laws especially designed to promote denial of liberal rights to Muslims. In 2018 these laws were capped by the Basic Law of the nation state which according to the Muslim Knesset member Yousuf T. Jabareen “represents a death blow to Arab civil and constitutional rights”. The adoption of the Nation State Basic Law was overwhelmingly popular among the Jewish citizenry. The Nation State Law (2018) effectively abolishes the Green Line. All Muslims are now non-citizens in the Israeli state – those living in Israel proper and those living in the West Bank and Gaza.

The Palestinian Authority is on its death bed. Political representation in the Knesset has become meaningless. Military units are being deployed within Muslim towns. Jewish settlements are expanding on an exponential rate. The hopes of the Muslim modernists to gradually liberalize the Israeli state have collapsed comprehensively.

Lessons for Islamic Revolutionaries:

1. Liberal democracy is dying – not just in Israel and Bharat but throughout the world. It is being replaced by authoritarian democracy. The non-representative, non-elected relatively permanent constituents of the state system – the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the military, the media, the corporation, the key players in global financial markets, are increasingly usurping political and administrative powers. As capital concentrates and centralizes it needs a strong state which alone can ensure systemic adherence to capitalist rationality.

2. Therefore our struggle against global capitalist order must be focused on deconstructing the essential power of the relatively permanent custodians of capitalist state power – the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the media, the corporation, what Imam Mohandes Bazargan رحمۃ اللہ علیہ once described as the play of parliament is becoming increasingly ineffective. Nevertheless the parliamentary power can be used to weaken the executive power of the relatively permanent constituents of capitalist states – the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the media, the corporation.

3. Deconstructing the institutional structure of a capitalist state is a long term project. It requires the mobilization and responsibilisation of a mass based ideological leadership which can gradually establish a network of grassroots foci of power – a state within a state – to which power can be transferred from constitutionally legitimated state institutions – the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the media, the corporation. A contemporary example of this is the Sangh Privar’s establishment of a nationwide Shakha network which have increasingly subordinated state institutions in Bharat.

4. Transition from a liberal to an authoritarian democratic state structure is normally facilitated by the ideology of nationalism – either ethnic (as in Israel) or religious (as in Bharat). Therefore we must recognize nationalism as the main oppositional ideological force confronting Islam. Nationalism has corrupted Judaism in Israel (and in America) and Hinduism in Bharat. Muslim nationalism is a toxic poison which infiltrates into Islamic consciousness at the mass level. Currently in Pakistan there is no Islamic political party the political agenda of which is not dominated by Muslim nationalist tropes. The secular constitutional Pakistani state was created by a Muslim nationalist movement. If we are committed to a reconstruction of the state we must squarely face the ideological challenge posed by nationalism and expel all (Muslim) nationalist themes from Islamic revolutionary discourse.

5. Today major countries that are transitioning from liberal democratic to authoritarian democratic state structures (Israel, Bharat) are imperialist allies. This hasn’t always been so as the cases of Nasser’s Egypt and Nkrumah’s Ghana illustrate. Liberalism remains a strong, though declining, ideological force in Western Europe and America but it is not powerful enough to override the geostrategic national interests of the main imperialist countries. So America does not complain about human rights violations in Israel or Bharat. We must understand that despite its nationalist rhetoric an authoritarian democratic regime (such as Imran Khan’s Tehreek-i-Insaf government) can accept imperialist subordination.

6. Sometimes, as in Israel and Bharat, the parliament can itself be an instrument for achieving a transition from a liberal to an authoritarian democratic regime. It may do this by introducing constitutional amendments such as the Nation State Law of 2017 and the 2023 legislation to reduce the “independence” of the Israeli judiciary. In such cases the legislature uses executive authority and weakens the citizens’ access to fundamental liberal rights forcing the citizens to behave rationally – i.e. in accordance with the dominant authority’s conception of the “correct” strategy for maximization of the rate of capital accumulation. Islamic revolutionaries must realize that dilution of the provision of human rights does not normally weaken the rule of law of capital – instead it has strengthened it in both Israel and Bharat.

7. Authoritarian democracy is a populist regime. It is sustained by the popular support of the mobilized masses under a charismatic leader – Lenin, Mao, Sukarno, Modi. It is not a dictatorship. The masses enthusiastically support the transition from liberal to authoritarian democracy. This transition represents a collectivization of capitalist individuality at the national level. The collectivist capitalist citizen seeks freedom, equality, progress, not for himself but for all Jews or Hindus or Christian or Muslims. Deconstructing this collective individuality is the principle task of Islamic revolutionaries in authoritarian democracies. We must endeavor to persuade the common man to reject capitalist values – freedom, equality and progress – and to participate in the process of constructing a state order which is focused on the achievement of Falah in Akhirah not on the futile project of seeking to create heaven on earth.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally written on 4th August 2023.