How Israel’s illiberal democracy became a model for the right

JVL Introduction

In a special issue of Dissent Magazine on the Global Right, Suzanne Schneider looks at Israel’s role as a model and a campaigner against liberal democracy.

Israel is one of the few countries in the world without a written constitution

A typical liberal-democratic model was proposed in October 1948, but Ben Gurion, Israel’s first President, would have none of it.

Israel had already set itself up as exceptional in many ways, one particularity being its Emergency Regulations on Property of Absentees, which legitimised the confiscation without compensation of Palestinian property.

As Suzanne Schneider, author of the article below asks: “How could a state located on confiscated Palestinian lands enshrine the right to property?

Nonetheless Israel’s self-image and that of it in the West generally was as basically a liberal democracy with democratic deficits which could be corrected over time.

But in recent years explicit, and often successful, attempts have been made from the right to strip this liberal façade away.

Israel’s democratic deficit, says Schneider, is now touted as  a feature, not a bug, an alternative constitutional model that rejects liberal universalism.

And it is one which Netanyahu’s party, Likud, has consciously worked to export, to Hungary and elsewhere, encouraging in the process a global web of ethnonational institutions, politicians, and intellectuals.

It does not bode well.

RK

This article was originally published by Dissent on Sat 1 Jun 2024. Read the original here.