Democracy under attack: Comparing Israel to the US

A NYT opinion piece compares the rise of radical right authoritarianism in Israel to the US counterpart. It's an interesting analysis:

The Kohelet Policy Forum is a libertarian-leaning think tank reportedly funded by at least one American billionaire that has emerged as the ideological architect of the proposed overhaul [radical right attack on Israeli democracy]. The plan’s intellectual backers have routinely pointed to the American model of elected leaders nominating and confirming Supreme Court justices as their inspiration. By invoking the forum, Mr. Bar-David touched on a key aspect of Israel’s social and judicial crisis that has been too often overlooked: American influence.

In many ways, the fight over the future of the judiciary marks the culmination of the Americanization of Israeli society. A segment of Israeli society has always admired the United States and has striven to reimagine itself in its image. Over the past few decades, though, it hasn’t been America’s grand traditions of democracy and multiculturalism that have infiltrated the psyche of many in the Jewish state but rather its less admirable attributes.

As in America, many on the Israeli right have stopped defining themselves based on policies and have resorted instead to nativism and resistance to democratic norms. The political wedge issues in Israel are no longer questions around Palestinian statehood but rather the independence of the courts, good governance and plain decency. It’s no surprise, then, that the heirs of Israel’s earlier generation of conservatives can no longer find their place in the ruling Likud party. They’ve become Israeli versions of so-called RINOs, or Republicans in name only.

Without the demarcation of the ideological rivalries of the past, Israel’s political map is now defined mostly along identity lines, with the ultra-Orthodox, nationalist settlers and working-class Mizrahi voters on one side (the “red” Israel) and the wealthier, mostly Ashkenazi, educated class of the coastal Tel Aviv and Haifa regions on the other (the “blue” Israel). Despite the socioeconomic gaps between them, the main points of contention tend to revolve around matters of decorum, tradition and grievances.  

An example of Israel’s echoes of the United States can be found in the changes to the socialist kibbutz movement that helped shape the country’s identity and fueled its growth, which has been all but overrun by privatization and rabid capitalism that has contributed to the country having among the highest rates of inequality among nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Israel’s collective and pioneering spirit has been ravaged by consumerism and commercialism.

Like America, Israel now finds itself hopelessly polarized along numerous societal fault lines: religious and secular, rural and urban, educated and not, traditional and progressive, hawks and doves.    

Before Mr. Netanyahu attempted this power grab, Donald Trump tried it. Before Israel’s Channel 14 peddled some of its propaganda and misinformation, Fox News was doing the same.  

There is a distinct taste of Americanism to this fresh conservative Israeli persona. Mr. Netanyahu, the country’s biggest panderer to identity politics, is Israel’s most American-style politician. He spent many years in the United States, and many of his pollsters and strategists, not to mention his inner circle, came straight from right-wing Republican campaigns. 

Make no mistake, Israeli politics has always been a blood sport. But only in recent years has this hyperpartisan discourse taken hold, one that transcends ideology and instead revolves around a wannabe strongman’s cult of personality.  

Israeli militancy has always existed. But it was the immigration of the Brooklyn-born rabbi Meir Kahane in the 1970s that helped introduce an American-tinged racism to it. Arabs were no longer just adversaries to overcome in war; they were vile enemies who had to be expelled or killed.

Note the reference (i) to being hopelessly polarized along numerous societal fault lines, (ii) a wannabe strongman’s cult of personality and (iii) American-tinged racism. If that feels sickeningly familiar, it should. That's where America is right now. We are hopelessly polarized and our democracy, pluralism, civil liberties, the rule of law and inconvenient facts and truths are all under a vicious attack by a radical right cult and its wannabe dictator. Decades of dark free speech is mostly responsible for this, ~80% in my opinion.

In the US, old-fashioned, pro-democracy and pro-civil liberties conservatives are now dead RINOs. They are either out of power or cowed into silent submission and complicity with corrupt, radical right Republican Party authoritarianism and its polarizing identity politics. The same phenomenon has occurred in Israel. 

But that makes sense. If authoritarians want dictator-style wealth, power and control, democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties need to be sharply curtailed or completely controlled by the dictator, theocrats, kleptocrats or plutocrats. About the same situation applies in Russia, China, North Korea and all or nearly all other current dictatorships or plutocracies.

Israelis protest after the tyrant wannabe

fired his Minister of Defense for opposing

the radical right slow coup to kill democracy