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The much-flaunted notion that Israel can be Jewish or democratic but not both rests on fallacious thinking and tendentious presentation. Israel will not be a state or a democracy if it is not, at one and the same time, both democratic and Jewish.
The debate as to whether the Jewish character of Israel is compatible with its democratic regime is conducted wholly within the spheres of party politics and constitutional law. It is extraordinary but true that both spheres completely ignore the historical aspects of the issue, while its theoretical-philosophical aspects --- the nature of democracy and the attitude of the sources of Judaism to it --- get no more than a nod in passing. Such are the characteristics of a partisan debate that prefers to deal with the ‘hot’ issues of the moment by applying immediate legislative ‘solutions’. The tactics of smart politicians are geared to short-term purposes and choose to ignore the wider picture of the problem and its consequences. But the price paid for this tactical expediency is high. Distortions and perversions are created --- by carelessness and from malice aforethought. Changes pile up and new facts are created without anyone having properly evaluated their substance, not to speak of their likely outcomes.
The public, too, loses its bearings in the obstacle-strewn field through which its leaders lead it. The public can see the obstacles and the detours around them, but not where the route is taking them. In any case, it is given no opportunity to express an opinion or choice as to whether it wants to reach the goal, which is to be revealed to it in the fullness of time, namely, after the event.
Judaism Is Not a Platonic Idea
It is advisable therefore to restate the trivial truism which is being denied: Judaism is not a Platonic Idea, fixed and immutable in its eternal sources. It is the cultural and historical life and journey of the Jewish people. Democracy is not a fixed configuration of constitution and institutions. It is a giving of structure to complex social and political processes lived out by different peoples, each with its own evolving, fluctuating form of government. Furthermore, in no known people is the form of government --- be it democratic or otherwise --- identical to the historical totality of the culture which fashioned the people’s identity. It is merely one of this totality’s components. Others are material civilization, social institutions (family, community, nation), ethics, spiritual and scientific creativity, philosophy, the arts, and also, yes, religion, without doubt a key component. A politico-governmental system is but a political process which has been institutionalized and which serves as framework for all these components, shaping them and being shaped by them.
Democracy, as a form of political regime, takes a path through events over time that permits a certain type of solution to problems as they arise --- internally, between people in society, or externally, in state-to-state relations. By ignoring the aspect of time and history, both the past from which our collectivity originated and the future to which we aspire together, in order to concentrate solely on the present and on the interests of individuals as individuals, the collectivity, the group disappears, and with it the historical path it has followed and is still following. As an inevitable result, the issue in question also loses any comprehensive definition and fragments into elements whose connections with each other no one remembers.
Judaism versus Democracy --- Which Overrides?
Let me at once illustrate what I mean. The claim that the Jewishness of Israel stands in opposition to its character as a democracy is asserted as an obvious fact, to the extent that this ‘fact’ is more or less taken for granted by all sides. Debate is confined to the conclusions to be drawn from the ‘fact’. The Right concludes that as Judaism has priority over democracy, democracy must defer to it; the Left claims the opposite, that democracy has priority over Judaism, which must therefore bow before it. What gets lost in the noise of the dispute is the fact that the claim itself is a brand-new coining and reflects no more than a passing phase in a social debate that has been going on for a long, long time.
Before the Yom Kippur War [1973], the only ones to proclaim such a contradiction were a handful of extreme leftist anti-Zionists (whose respect for democracy was, at best, doubtful). In their mouths it sounded like a provocation from the very fringes of the public debate. Of course, the debate revolved around the very same issues as today --- religion and state, religious coercion, pluralist Judaism, the state’s treatment of its Arab citizens, the Palestinian refugees and peace with Arab countries, and so on. This set of interlocking issues had come into relevance long before the state was declared established, well before Israel’s Declaration of Independence pronounced that Israel would be a democratic and a Jewish state. Given that history, it is a matter of wonder that the authors of the Declaration and its signatories --- who came from all points of the political compass --- seem to have been unaware of the ‘fact’ of this contradiction between the two terms --- ‘democratic’ and ‘Jewish’.
On the contrary, they were under the impression that the one was a complement and even a necessary consequence of the other. The controversies which broke out [immediately after the establishment of the State] over the Law of Return [giving the right to every Jew anywhere in the world to live in Israel as a citizen], the constitution, and the secular-religious ‘status quo’ formed part of the democratic process shaping the Jewish identity of the new state. None of the parties accused the other of being anti-democratic or non-democratic in its opinions. The debate was conducted in a democratic manner with the purpose of resolving the differences between the tenants of positions which were opposite but legitimate under the law.
After the Yom Kippur War however, the bad news started getting around: there was a contradiction between ‘Jewish state’ and ‘democratic state’. Intellectuals from academic circles promoted the theory. They brought it in from the anti-Zionist fringe to the secular Zionist center and used it to attack both the religious Jews who were trying to extend ‘religious coercion’ and the adherents of a ‘Greater Israel who wished to rule over another people’ [adherents of ‘Greater Israel’ believe that Israel should rule all the land between Egypt in the south and Lebanon in the north and between the Mediterranean in the west and the River Jordan in the east]. Extremist circles on the right and among Ultra-Orthodox Jews could not have agreed more. They seized on the selfsame ‘contradiction’ to launch their counter-attack. Thus, from the extreme right and the extreme left, the argument found its way to the centrists of the left and of the right, who having failed to navigate between the extremes, now found themselves floundering in their turbulent wake. At no point in time had the issue been analyzed in depth.
Democracy --- a Secular Alternative to Jewish Identity
So what led to the revelation of a ‘truth’ which had somehow, till that time, escaped the perception of all scholars of Israeli society? There is no doubt that the escalating controversy between ‘religious’ Jews and ‘secular’ Jews on the subject of ‘religious coercion’ on the one hand, and ‘Greater Israel/the Occupied Territories’ on the other, had a determining effect on the definition of the issue. There is no denying either the fact that continued occupation of the territories of Judea and Samaria [a.k.a. the West Bank] cast a shadow over Israeli democracy. Somehow it justified the fear that ‘ruling another people’ would corrupt or corrode the quality of democracy within Israel itself. Unfortunately, the smoke billowing up from the field of battle-debate obscured objective vision and in particular distracted attention away from two interesting facts. First, the state of Israel had becconsiderably more liberal in policy, not less liberal after the Six Day War, both towards its Arab citizens and within its internal political system --- in relations between political parties, especially government-opposition relations, in the freedom of functioning allowed to the media, and in respect for citizens’ rights. It is quite clear, looking back, that the process of democratization, far from being weakened, had actually grown stronger.
Second, at the same time as the processes of governance were being liberalized, the Left’s secular élites were working into shape a profound change in their evaluation of democracy. As a rival of equal weight to religion, hitherto presented as the exclusive shaper of Jewish identity, they proposed a secular worldview, an alternative way of life equally capable of shaping an identity, but for secular Jews. With all sides to the political conflict digging themselves ever deeper into their entrenchments, democracy appeared to be the best choice of regime possible; indeed, it was lauded not only as a form of regime and value structure for relations between societies and social groupings, but as an all-inclusive worldview, capable of defining an individual and collective identity befitting Israeli society.
The Ideological Trap
Such is the turn of events that generated the belief that an irreconcilable contradiction separated Israel’s Jewish identity from its democratic identity. This in turn focused the debate on determining the precedence between the two concepts. With respect to the secular Left, this was very understandable: if democracy is perceived as a secular identity alternative to Judaism, there must be a clash between the two, especially if both are to be realized in the one state. The reactions of the Religious Zionists and of the extreme secular nationalists are also understandable in a way. Both tend to oppose one identity to another and demand a categorical choice between them. What is more difficult to understand is the reaction of the moderate centers, on the Left and on the Right, to the now ‘accepted truth’ of the democracy-Judaism contradiction. Although both sides of the center believed Judaism and democracy to be complementary, their leaderships had got themselves caught in the ideological trap set by the extremists. They did not even pause to consider that the concept of democracy was now being interpreted in a way essentially different from what the Declaration of Independence had intended, and that the new interpretation set up a contradiction not only between itself and the Jewishness of the state, but also between itself and every other modern nation-state.
Let us review the facts. The model of democracy adopted by the authors of the Israeli Declaration of Independence in their finest hour was the national-parliamentary model developed in Western Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom. Together with this national-parliamentary concept, Israeli democracy was endowed at birth with the social-democratic goal of a ‘welfare state’, and this goal indeed directed the actions of the early Labor governments. The theoretical basis of the new state was thus that the collective entity --- ‘the people’, in the full cultural and historical meaning of the word --- was now sovereign in its own state (to remind readers: democracy means ‘the rule of the people’) and that the object of the government’s care must be ‘society’, understood as a solidarity of inter-relationships cemented by the duty of mutual responsibility.
But the model of democracy under discussion today is another animal entirely; it is the American model, in its neo-liberal version. In this version the citizen is sovereign, meaning each individual citizen, and hence the aggregate of all citizen-individuals. ‘The people’ is no longer a collective. ‘Society’ is now civil society, formally, legally, and functionally bound together by the institutions of the state. It is only in the sense of an aggregate of individuals that the ‘mass’ may be called a ‘nation’. ‘The national will’ expressed through elections is thus no more than the weighted combination of all individual wills, or the largest common denominator assented to by all those individuals --- and it is only these individuals that the state is bound to represent and serve.
Needless to say, the transition from democracy model no.1 to democracy model no.2 constitutes a revolution in all spheres of activity --- moral-personal, social, legal, and political. And, yet, this revolution has been accepted as if it were self-evident, or as if it constituted no change at all. It is as if we were still discussing the same model of democracy proposed by the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The key problem is that those who see democracy as an all-inclusive world view are convinced that there exists something called Democracy with a capital ‘D’, a Platonic Idea, one and eternal, and even non-controversial. Either you accept this conception from their hands exactly as they define it, or they count you among the evil racist chauvinists who deny its ‘truth’.
This neglect of history leads to another neglect. One of the arguments contributing to the public debate and also presented as proven fact is that Israel possesses no ‘democratic tradition’. Democracy is not imprinted into its constitutional and institutional structure, does not infuse its societal ethos or style of public life, is not natural to its patterns of political behavior. This shortcoming is explained usually by the fact that the majority of the Jewish citizens of Israel, having been gathered in from non-democratic states where they had no example of democracy to learn from, have not adapted to a proper democratic style, such as practised in the U.S.A.. Hence, Israeli democracy is superficial and mainly technical in nature, the mere imposed rule of the majority, lacking roots in individual values and way of life. As a result, anti-democratic pressures multiply easily and threaten real danger to the stability of the regime.
Zionism and Democracy
What is the evidence for this charge? At most, surveys of attitudes on specific political issues are compared to patterns of relations between institutions and political parties in the United States. American middle-class behavior is contrasted to the normal political style and mode of life in Israeli society. If these ‘facts’ are true, there has indeed appeared in Israel a style of politics and governance and a social ethic which radically differ from that measured in the United States. Does this mean that the Israeli style has, by democratic criteria, not made the grade? Reviewing the essential features of Jewish tradition, Zionist tradition, and Israeli tradition in their historical contexts, one gets a completely different picture.
First, for as long as traditional Jewish communities have existed in the countries of the Diaspora (including Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia) and for as long as modern Jewish organizations and institutions, national or international, have operated, their traditional style of operating has been democratic and duly founded in rabbinic law (halakhah), taking no example or influence whatsoever from the host state’s regime. Jewish communal traditions were of course of a special character, both because culture and law were religion-based and because of the realities of exile, but they constituted a true democracy that drew its values of human dignity and freedom, solidarity and mutual assistance, from traditional religious sources.
Second, it is true that the vast majority of immigrants who made their way to the Land of Israel --- whether motivated by Zionism or poverty and persecution --- certainly came from non-democratic states, indeed from despotisms. Very few immigrated from the democracies. (The reason is evident: conditions for Jews in democratic countries were comfortable while, in non-democratic countries, there was a direct, concrete threat to their very existence and identity.) But the ‘common-sense’ conclusion does not follow from the factual premise. The Jews fleeing oppressive regimes wanted to live free in a free state. sought not only a state of their own, or a state that would take them in, but also, and primarily, a democratic state which would permit them to maintain and give free expression to their individual and communal identity.
The conclusion to be drawn from this brief historical survey is, therefore, that the state of Israel adopted political democracy not only by choice but also by instinct and historical necessity. Israeli democracy rose on a substructure of solid political traditions, originating both in independent Jewish sources and Western European models. The masses of Jews who came to Israel hoped not only for a homeland, but also for national, social, political and cultural freedom. Notwithstanding the hardships of settling an unwelcoming land, the political and military struggle, the huge undertaking of absorbing mass immigration, all of which put severe pressure on Israel’s democracy and imposed severe constraints on it --- that democracy stood up to all challenges and has pursued an ever sounder and more consistent realization.
Even in-depth evaluation of the stability of Israeli democracy cannot shake this observation. Left-wing politicians broadcast every other week the direst warnings but, for all that, Israel ranks among the firmest democracies. There is no menace to it either from within society and the political parties or from the institutions of government and armed forces.
This is particularly striking with regard to the army, usually the alternative power readiest to take over when a democratic system totters. The Israel Defense Forces (I.D.F.) have never been other than a people’s army, unquestioningly subordinate to the civilian government and to the law. The I.D.F.’s mode of recruitment and its officer corps’ roots in the whole spectrum of population groups, social strata, and political parties make it impossible for a senior commander or officer clique to lead the army, or part of it, against the civil authority. But this is also true of all other centers of power in the state. None is willing to set up an alternative to democratic government. On the contrary. Even political parties which do not rate democracy as a supreme value are by no means willing to see it go.
This is not naivety. Nor am I closing my eyes to the anti-democratic voices of the religious right, of the extremist secular nationalists, and of the radical left. These types of pressures are to be found in any democratic regime. Democracies function by restraining, channeling, and counterbalancing such forces. Their stability is a function of a political structure, which ensures that even the anti-democrats prefer ‘the rules of the democratic game’ and play to those rules alone. The same anti-democratic forces challenge the American regime. For those of short memory, I might recall the 1950s McCarthy era, when the anti-democratic forces were a power within government itself, or by contrast the societal tensions which have made the American society of our own day one of the most violent anywhere, to the point that there is a clear and present threat to the freedom of the individual, to his property, and even his very life.
The State of Israel certainly contains organizations which are not democratic and Israeli governments regularly incline towards centralization of power and the exercise of undemocratic pressures, but none of this makes Israeli democracy any less stable than that of any democratic state in Europe or America.
Ethnic Minorities and Majorities and the Status of Religion
Like any other democracy, Israel has confronted core dilemmas --- some the outcome of its history, others of the attempt to realize a national democracy in a multi-national state, born in a war for its very existence against another national movement. Historically, it is important to stress another fact: it was not Israel that first brought to the world the dilemma of the collision of two nationalisms within one state, or of the presence of a large national minority within the national majority. There has never been in our world, and there is not today, a democratic state which has not had to cope with a like conflict at some stage of its development. Nor has any of these states succeeded in eliminating the conflict by totally suppressing the tensions between the minority and the sovereign majority which gave its name to the state. Nor was it Israel that introduced to the world the dilemma of the status of religion within a state. There has never been, and there is not today, a democratic state where that tension has not caused problems and persisted in causing problems, all endeavors to end it notwithstanding.
The United States, which separates religion and state with the greatest rigor (ostensibly), since from its very foundation it defined itself as the state of all its individual citizens, has not found a way to eliminate either of the two dilemmas. In the ethnic domain, the white majority collides regularly with the great ‘non-white’ minorities, particularly, the blacks. In the religious domain, influential Christian churches have never ceased intervening in socio-political issues, particularly in the field of education. It must be stressed here that, contrary to its professed secularism, the United States is still very much the state of the white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant majority that founded it. The true problem is that, though this majority is getting smaller and smaller and will soon become a minority, the U.S.A. has no alternative consensus upon which to establish a national and social solidarity.
Totalitarian regimes tend to solve this sort of dilemma by repression. The difference between such regimes and democracies is that the latter acknowledge that their component national identities and divergent collective value systems are both necessary and legitimate. They even make efforts to allow them full self-expression. A defining characteristic of democracy is that it does not try to suppress these internal forces but to live with them. But how? Obviously, by compromise based on common material and cultural interests, by agreement on values, principles and rules of dialogue conducted for the purpose of mutual understanding, and by an effort to demarcate the legitimate claims of majority and minorities. A compromise based on mutual self-restraint, seen as doing justice to both majority as majority and to minority as minority.
The search for such a just compromise raises the fundamental question whether it is possible to find some common denominator, a universal value acknowledged by all individuals over and above their group allegiances, which can be used to ‘neutralize’ conflicts, to ‘take them out’ of the social, public and political arena in such a way as to ensure complete legal, political and social equality for all individuals and groups, be they majority or minority. The whole issue of whether Israeli democracy and Jewish religion are mutually contradictory turns on the answer to this question. Let us see what it is in it.
The Rights of the Individual Over the Values of Religion and Nation
Over and above the disputes between majority and minority, Jews and Arabs, religious and secular Jews, there is being fought out a larger conflict that subsumes all these and this is the conflict between the aspirations of national democracy and of individualist democracy. National democracy aspires to a justice that takes into consideration the different collective entities and identities within the state and their rights to social, public and political expression, but does so without renouncing the sovereign rights of the majority which established the state to guarantee its own existence, freedom, and identity. Individualist democracy has much more far-reaching ambitions. It aspires to found social, public and political life on the rights of the individual, and on those rights alone. This vision awards individual rights the status of supreme value, and on these are predicated the constitution of the state and its legal system, the structure of its institutions and the way they function, its political policy, and its morality. Those who have been won overto this approach assure us that individual democracy has the capacity to neutralize all conflicts and remove them totally from the sphere of public and political interchange.
How? In their system, religious and national values would be required to subordinate themselves to the values of the rights of the individual. Jews or Arabs whose identity is shaped by their religion or national feeling would be required to relinquish all collective expression of their identity and content themselves with a form of expression sanctioned by the implementation of their rights as a private individual going about his own private affairs.
Those who argue that there is a contradiction between a Jewish state and a democratic state are in effect arguing for the individualist vision of democracy. They are saying, in effect, that any and every undertaking that gives social, public, or political expression to collective human values, and gives priority to these collective values over individual freedom, is setting itself up in opposition to democracy --- as the individualists understand it.
This argument requires thorough examination. Is it indeed true that any conflict among collective identities, that seek to fulfill all their democratic rights within the one state, creates a conflict, not only between the rival collectivities but also between themselves and the very democratic, socio---political order itself?
A classification of the socio-political tensions or conflicts any regime must manage, and which does not deliberately blur the differences between the types of conflict, will show that this argument rests on a basic fallacy. I will go further and demonstrate that the argument itself embodies an essential contradiction to the principles and central goal of democracy ---which are to permit free and full expression to the social and cultural identities of individuals and groups, not only as individuals, but as peoples, or as members of cultural or religious communities.
Three Types of Conflict
A democracy must manage three types of tension or conflict when dealing with collective identities within its social and political frontiers:
A. The conflict between groupings or parties that support the regime, its values and constitution, and groupings opposed to the regime, out to capture power and effect a revolution.
B. The conflict between two groupings, or two peoples, who both support the regime, its values and constitution, but are rivals for senior status and the full expression of their identity within the state.
C. The conflicts between groups, each supporting the regime, its values and constitution, but each possessing its own set of higher values, which govern their worldview and way of life, which they consider as above or beyond the values of democracy, and which worldview and way of life they would like to see realized in that state.
Regarding conflicts of the first type, there is no possibility of compromise. No regime can tolerate groups striving to undermine its very existence. A democracy must defend its constitution; any opposition openly working to undermine it has crossed the frontiers of official toleration. However, a democracy has to be very careful not to harm its very basis by suppressing opposition despotically. Even the fight against the enemies of democracy must be conducted in accordance with the constitution and the law.
Regarding the two other types of conflict, the situation is totally different. Obviously, a democratic regime cannot be solely a mechanism of elections and majority decisions. Obviously, it must protect the basic rights of minorities against the arbitrariness of the majority and the basic rights of the individual against the arbitrariness of the community. Obviously, the defense of minority and individual rights is governed by moral values, the constitution, and legal norms, which enjoy supremacy in their field of application, namely, the ways and means individuals, groups, peoples and states use to conduct dialogue and to co-exist. However, this supremacy in the field of inter-person and inter-group relationships is not an absolute supremacy; it does not extend to the many other components of personal, social and political life. Democratic values and norms do not determine the meaning of an individual’s life, nor do they shape the way of life that gives expression to this meaning. Far from it. Religious believers, or adherents of a cultural-national philosophy (such as humanists), or of a philosophy of social solidarity (such as socialists) --- and together these make up the great majority of every human society --- these groups consider that democratic values derive their validity and authority from a higher, absolute plane of religion, or of national humanist culture, or of a collective aspiration to cooperation, mutual reliance, and justice.
It follows that to set the values of religion, people, and society above the values of democracy in its narrow sense, and to insist on the right to shape one’s way of life according to a religious, national-humanist, or socialist philosophy, even within the institutions of society and politics, does not constitute a negation of democracy. On the contrary, these are the legitimate expressions of the will to lead a full life within democracy. The tensions or conflicts thus created are indeed truly the tensions or conflicts natural to, or intrinsic to, democracy and not forces working to disable or undermine democracy. They constitute the very marrow of the democratic process itself and they define the functions and objectives of that process.
Full Democratic Justice
It is this understanding of the relationship between the democracy of the state and the collective identities of the groups which established the state, or were later brought within it, that has directed Israel’s internal policy since its founding in 1948. It was the premise that the sovereign power in the new state is the Jewish people and that Israel was founded to serve the vital interests of that people, that determined that the state bore a commitment to, and responsibility for, Jewish tradition and religion. For it was they that, from generation to generation, had fashioned Jewry’s historical-cultural identity. For the sake of the unity of the people and the continuity of its historical identity, the institutions of the state, it was decided, would give expression to that tradition and religion, even though system of government itself would be secular. Even though the majority of its citizens were known not to be not religiously observant (though most are traditionalist and retain national feeling in one way or another), the legal infrastructure of family and community life was put under the rule of rabbinic law (halakhah). The secular state leaders accepted these religious norms in their capacity as representatives of the Jewish people in Israel, and compelled the majority of Israel’s Jewish citizens to curtail their individual freedom for the sake of their national identity as citizens of Jewry’s own state.
It was again on the premise that the Jewish people is sovereign and that the State of Israel was founded to give the Jewish people the same sovereignty in its land as any other free people, that Jewish nationality was given unique and exclusive status in the state. National and religious minorities were accorded democratic rights as individuals, including the right to cultural and religious freedom and the right to sustain a separate national identity by means of autonomous education systems and lifestyles. However, just as Jews in the Diaspora enjoy no unitary, all-inclusive representation of their collective identity at the political level, so it was taken as a given that the ethnic minorities in Israel would possess no national-political representation, which might restrict or prejudice the sovereignty of the Jewish people in its own state. Democratic justice was upheld in that the collective identity of the only large minority enjoyed full self-expression in a number of Arab states, Jordan in particular, whose population is mainly Palestinian. Furthermore, the fact that the Jewish in what was then Palestine had agreed in principle to the 1947 United Nations Partition plan [to partition the Mandate territory between its Jewish and Arab inhabitants] and that this plan is now in the process of implementation by the creation of an independent Palestinian entity, means that the solution offered to this particular conflict --- whereby the Jewish community possesses unique political status in the state of Israel --- can be seen to embody full democratic justice.
Individual Happiness as Supreme Value
But how do things look from the point of view of people who consider that democracy is merely instrumental to the sovereignty of individual citizens, and that only individual rights must govern social, public and political lifestyle? This conception contains two rather presumptuous assertions. The first is to deny, or ignore, that belonging to a national, historical and cultural group, or to a society inspired by cooperative social values, or to a religion, is no less essential to the identity of human beings, in giving sense and fullness to their lives, than the individual rights that protect individuality itself --- maybe even more essential. Most people are ready to limit their individual rights in favor of an acknowledged personal obligation or for the sake of supreme values that give a more exalted meaning to life. The second assertion is that the happiness of the individual --- in the sense of making a success of one’s talent, in acquiring and enjoying possessions, and climbing to a higher socio-economic status --- that this model of success is the one and only universal and unanimously acknowledged common denominator and must, as such, be erected into society’s ultimate value, there to impose its primacy over any other scale of values, any other commitment, and any form of collective, religious, social, ethnic, national, communal or familial solidarity.
What we have here is the neo-liberal, ‘pragmatic’ notion of democracy as the rule of the citizen-individual. Under such a rule, ‘the happiness of the individual’, in its narrowest (egotistical) sense takes supreme place. It determines all legislative, legal, and institutional arrangements and inter-personal ethics and prevails over what is due to family, community and people. No other value possesses imperative authority: its status can be no more than that of ‘proposition’ or ‘recommendation’. No duty stands higher than the primary right of the individual, with the exception of those specific obligations born of the necessity to ensure that individual rights apply to all, in other words the negative obligations not to do harm. Certainly, no positive duties to get up and do something have any status.
It cannot be denied that were all individuals to give their wholehearted assent to such a scale of values, all conflicts based on allegiance to religious, national or ethnic communities would indeed vanish as if by the wave of a magic wand. The social arena would be occupied only by individuals, competing each against the other in ‘fair competition’ and with ‘equality of opportunity’ and on the basis of respect for the individual rights of their fellow-man. Could there ever be a more perfect, harmonious democracy? --- provided of course that one takes care to ignore inequalities of property and possessions, and also of talent, inclination, temperament and capacity and so on between the individuals pursuing their individual happiness; and as long as one turns a blind eye to personal conflicts, class conflicts, inter-religious, inter-ethnic and other conflicts, which the competitive ethic aggravates without counteracting them by duties of mutual responsibility and learnt commitments to collective solidarity.
But what if, despite the natural egotistic tendency of most people to put their own individual happiness first, the reality of their existence as human beings were nevertheless rooted in beliefs, culture, family allegiances, community and people, and in the inner and outer capacity to lead a life expressing meaning, commitment and responsibility to an authority beyond their own individuality? What if the conception that the individual takes precedence over the community within which he was born and educated is nothing but a fiction born of egotism which no effort can make into an exclusive guide to happiness? What if it is totally impossible that collective identities, national, social, or religious, will vanish or be satisfied with the institutional, partial, feeble realization that individual rights and spontaneous individual choices allow? What if most individuals, given their natural egotism, nonetheless feel that they will never achieve happiness and self-fulfillment, nor exercise their full individual rights, unless they can also fulfill the allegiances and obligations which make man a creature ‘made in the image of God’ --- the quality that is his dignity and glory? Given the truth in all these possibilities, does the egotistical happiness of the strong --- guarded by the individual sovereignty and equality of rights --- still look like a perfect democracy?
Democratic and Jewish
We have arrived at an ironic paradox. We are offered a concept of democracy that denies legitimacy to the social and political activity of collective entities, formed by allegiances imposing obligations on their individual members; a concept of democracy that denies the established principle that it is the people that is sovereign, and not an agglomeration of individuals, a crowd; a concept of democracy which exalts the sovereignty of the individual and fashions in this light political and public life and all that is in it. In other words, this extreme liberal conception is itself a sort of despotism. For in the name of their individual ‘equality’, ‘happiness’ and ‘freedom’, it compels individuals, religious or secular, Jew or Arab, to renounce the full expression of their spiritual identity and the complete fulfillment of those values, which they consider not only a right but an obligation.
Observation of the current social reality in the United States --- the very place that has perfected the constitutional concept of the state as embodiment and guardian of the interests and rights of the individual citizen, a state created by individual immigrants come from all the countries, peoples and religions of the world in pursuit of their happiness --- observation of this state sows doubt as to whether it has, in fact, succeeded in consistently realizing this concept. Furthermore, insofar as it has realized it, has it succeeded thereby in guaranteeing the majority of its citizens their substantive freedom, rights, and dignity --- in the sense that they can fulfill their individual, Constitution-guaranteed rights in the teeth of the power of the state’s institutions? Splendid as its Constitution may be, the United States is still, as we have seen, the state of its white Anglo-Saxon majority, and in spite of the consistent separation of religion and state, it is still a Protestant state. These are precisely the grounds for several of the rifts and divisions that have appeared in American society, and inasmuch as the state has been able to apply the concept of the supremacy of individual rights to overcome these divisions, a desperate self-questioning is going on as to the identity of the United States as a nation.
If, in an immigrant state as rich as the United States, the concept of individualist democracy is failing the test, how much less so can it help in Israel, a state created through the immigration of individuals belonging to one people called Jews. Israel is a state born of the needs of the people who founded and built it in order to live there as a people. This people still needs its state to ensure its continued existence as a people and to preserve its unique cultural and historical identity. Should it surrender its state, it would disintegrate into a scatter of splintered, alienated groups. Israel is a state built for and by a people who have remained united for generations by virtue of a unique monotheistic culture, tradition and religion, which never organized itsas a church, but as a way of life directed by rabbinic law and applying to the whole people.
Furthermore, Israel is a state in which there also live citizens of other religion-defined peoples --- Muslims, Christians and Druse. These other peoples form important minorities that also identify themselves as complex collectivities and not as collections of random ‘individuals’. They are not to be satisfied with ‘individual rights’, but demand the expression of their collective identity. In a state with such a history, where the facts of its existence are what they are, and which has been established for the reason it has been established, to systematically apply the liberal democratic concept of the ‘sovereignty of the citizen-as-individual’ would be to impose the despotism of slogans of freedom. Not only would this not solve the state’s national and religious conflicts, it would make them ten times worse. The structure of citizen solidarity would break up; unhealable divisions would appear; society would disintegrate and its culture decay. Why, then, would a citizen ‘pursue his individual happiness’ in such a state? Why should he even want it to continue to exist?
In sum: Israel will not be a state and not be a democracy, if it is not, at one and the same time, both democratic and Jewish.
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