As Israel Turns 75, What Next?

 Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

Each year, the Israel Democracy Index takes the public pulse by conducting research based on the findings of a survey of a representative sample of the population.

Its most recent non-partisan report found that up to 75 per cent of Israeli Jews aged 18 to 34 identify as right-wing -- a trend, the report said, that has developed over the last decade. In addition, young people increasingly identify as being religious, or are being born into “ultra-Orthodox” families which tend to be more conservative.

That was in part reflected in last year’s national election, when a far-right alliance led by the Likud Party took power. Their leaders are now ministers in the coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A planned judicial reform announced by the government in January has led to deep divisions and the largest sustained mass demonstrations in the country’s history. Over the past four months, the gap in society between opponents and supporters of the controversial plan has been widening. The former say the overhaul would threaten Israel’s democracy, while the latter say it is necessary to curb what they describe as the country’s overly powerful Supreme Court.

But this is only a manifestation of far deeper divisions. Following the Nov. 1, 2022, elections, this latent political showdown finally erupted. Even Independence Day celebrations have been marred by political protests against the Netanyahu government. Has Israel reached a breaking point as it enters its 75th year?

The anger of Israel’s secular and liberal voters -- and the elites who make up the legal, academic, business, security, and media establishments -- is aimed at the people who voted Netanyahu back into office. Just below the surface is the contempt a large portion of the Israeli population feels for their compatriots who identify as nationalists and religious, as well as those of Mizrachi background, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin, who are severely under-represented among these elites. These Israelis feel that they’ve been left behind, locked out of the structures of Israeli success.

The left’s conception of Israel is rooted in the purely secular vision that animated the Labour Zionists and other left-wingers who ruled the country without challenge in the Jewish state’s first three decades. The Israel of the nationalist right and the religious parties, whose voters make up about half of the country and a clear majority of its Jewish population, is a country that the secularists don’t like. They seem to be saying that Israel won’t be a legitimate state if its democratic system continues to produce majorities for the right.

The fundamental cause of the decline of the left lies in demography. It was pinpointed by then-President Reuven Rivlin in a speech to the Annual Herzliya Conference in 2015 in which he said that “Israeli society is undergoing a far-reaching transformation,” in which it was becoming composed of four “tribes” of roughly equal strength: secular Jews, national religious Jews, “Ultra-Orthodox” Haredim, and Israel’s Arabs, all with entirely different outlooks “regarding the basic values and desired character” of the state.

The court reform crisis breaks down along those lines. The Israel Democracy Institute report shows that while there is a small but stable majority against the reform, 84 per cent of the left trusts the court, but only 26 per cent of the right does; and while 63 per cent of secular Jews trust the court, just six per cent of the ultra-Orthodox do.

The academic and journalist Avishay Ben Haim has suggested in various venues that Israel’s defining political struggle isn’t between left or right, or even the religious and the secular, but between representatives of what he has called the First and the Second Israel.

In Ben Haim’s analysis, the First Israel comprises the country’s traditional elites, the largely socialist and largely Ashkenazi milieu -- Jews of European origin -- that presided over Israel’s coming into being, while the Second Israel includes Israel’s Mizrachi Jews and its growing Orthodox population. While the two Israels might coexist uneasily within the same body politic, they are in fact fundamentally different and opposing entities.

The First Israel, he asserts, measures success by how closely it resembled the West, which means celebrating everything from big IPOs to Netflix deals. The Second Israel, realizing it is very much a product of the East, is more focused on family, tradition, and nation. For the First Israel, Jewish values are tolerable only as long as they don’t interfere with the dictates of cosmopolitanism; for the Second Israel, democracy is just another name for the sort of compromises that Judaism needs to generate, but it should never supplant or minimize it.

The current crisis presents a historic opportunity to refashion the Jewish state in a way that embraces the original aims of the founding: protecting both democratic rights and freedoms and also the unique Jewish character of the state.

If Israel is to become a more stable democracy, it must, as former President Rivlin implied, reform its political system so that all its tribes feel at home in the state. It must move from being a state in which a majority can do almost whatever it likes to one in which there is real partnership between the various groupings.

 

Will Rapprochement Bring Peace to Yemen?

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Might the protracted civil war in Yemen be coming to an end?

After years of open hostility and proxy conflicts across the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Iran in early March agreed to re-establish diplomatic relations, seven years after breaking ties.

Saudi Arabia’s monarchy and a majority of its populace are Sunni, while Iran’s people are overwhelmingly Shi’a, and this has involved clashes throughout the Middle East, especially in Yemen, which borders the Saudi kingdom in the Arabian Peninsula.

The rapprochement between them comes after years of Iranian-backed Houthi militias in Yemen targeting Saudi Arabia with missile and drone attacks. A Saudi-led coalition has been at war with the Houthis since 2015. It has led to the deaths of more than 350,000 people.

Now, however, Saudi and Omani envoys are holding peace talks with Houthi officials in the capital, Sana’a, as Riyadh seeks a permanent ceasefire to end its military involvement in the long-running war. Topics include the reopening of the Houthi-controlled airport in Sana’a and the Red Sea port in Hodeida, and the lifting of the Houthi blockade of the government-controlled city of Taiz.

Hans Grundberg, the UN special envoy for Yemen, said he was working with all relevant actors to ensure that current efforts are in support of the UN mediation. “My role has consistently remained focused on resuming an inclusive, Yemeni-led political process. Only such a process can deliver a sustainable settlement and bring about a future of durable peace and development,” he has stated.

The hostilities began when a former Yemeni field marshal, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, was installed by the Saudis as interim president eleven years ago. This did not sit well with a northern Yemeni militia known as the Houthis, who are Shi’a Muslims.

The Houthi movement in Yemen’s north-west Sa’dah province in response to the growing influence of Sunni Salafism which attacked their Zaydi Shi’a faith as apostasy.

They captured Sana’a in September 2014, dragging the country into civil war. In turn, a Saudi-led coalition of Sunni states launched a military offensive against them. At the time, Saudi officials told the United States that it would take them six weeks to restore the legitimate Yemeni government and end the Houthis’ coup.

 Nine years on, though, the Houthis have emerged as a strong military power while the Saudi-backed forces remain fragmented. In September 2019, a missile and drone assault on a major Saudi oil installation had briefly disrupted half of the kingdom’s crude production. So the Saudis’ approach shifted from defeating the Houthis to securing their own borders from Houthi attacks.

To find a way out of its costly quagmire in Yemen, Saudi Arabia scaled back its military intervention and stepped up its diplomatic efforts in a bid to de-escalate. The kingdom declared two unilateral cease-fires in 2020 and 2021 and reduced its already inadequate military support to Yemeni government forces.

In April 2022, the Saudis and the Houthis agreed to a cease-fire that lasted for six months, and in June of that year the two sides held talks that excluded the Yemeni government. “The Houthis have won the war in Yemen,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst, reported at the time for the Brookings Institution.

Because of pressure from Riyadh, Hadi handed over his authority to a Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), the eight members of which were selected by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But this is no easy task. The Houthis’ military gains have allowed them to dictate the path of international diplomacy in Yemen. They know Saudi Arabia is desperate to extricate itself, and that the international community wants the Yemen problem to go away.

The Houthis have refused to negotiate with the PLC or other Yemeni factions, such as nor were any other Yemeni parties, such as the separatists of the Southern Transitional Council, that they cast as “Saudi mercenaries.” They view the war as one between them, as the only true representatives of Yemen, and the Saudis.

Even as negotiations progress, the rebel group has continued to carry out attacks targeting key seaports and vital infrastructure and ratcheting up the pressure on the internationally recognized Yemeni government.

On Feb. 16, the ambassadors of the United States, France, and the United Kingdom condemned Houthi drone attacks on vital Yemeni infrastructure, noting that “Yemen possesses natural resources that enable it to meet the needs of its citizens if it is able to resume exporting oil and gas, without being attacked by the Houthis.”

Not deterred, on March 23 the Houthis conducted a military drill close to the Saudi border to remind the Saudis of the cost of no agreement and further concessions.

Through the recent China-brokered Iran deal and by making concessions to the Houthis, Saudi Arabia seeks a quick and easy way out of the Yemen war, which has become an “unnecessary distraction” from its domestic development objectives.

The kingdom has the leverage it needs to force the PLC to accept a political settlement with the Houthis. The Houthis and Iran might de-escalate and even accept one to get the Saudis out of the way. They are clearly on the verge of victory.

Some 24 million people in Yemen, two-thirds of the population, will need some kind of humanitarian assistance during the course of 2023.

 

Can Diverse Democracies Survive?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

In his 2022 book The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, Johns Hopkins University political scientist Yascha Mounk examines the relationship between democracy, liberalism and ethnic diversity. It is an informative text, aimed at a non-specialist readership, and one I assigned in a comparative politics course this year.

“The history of diverse societies is grim,” he warns in the opening pages of the book. “We all know the reasons. Ethnic hatreds come easy. When scapegoating demagogues stoke them during hard times, they make the classic promise: Break the democracy pact, and people like you can be great again.”

Mounk is aware that it’s always been easier for countries to rule themselves collectively when their citizenry feel that they have a lot in common. In the history of democracies, most of them have been built in countries that are reasonably homogeneous.

As countries have become more heterogeneous, there are, he observes, a lot of people who resent that, and say, “Why should I let these other people who are from a different ethnic group, who come from a different part of the world, who might have different religious ideas — why should I let them participate in the collective we?”

And this attitude has become more pronounced due to changing economic circumstances. After growing rapidly in the post-war era, the living standards of ordinary people have been stagnating for decades. This growing frustration about a lack of material progress has, in turn, helped to fuel a cultural backlash against the ideals of an equal, multi-ethnic society.

Political systems

Mounk also points to another possible explanation for why many young people have grown disenchanted with democracy — they have little conception of what it would mean to live in a different political system.

People born in the 1930s and 1940s experienced the threat of fascism as children or were raised by people who actively fought it, he reminds us. They spent their formative years during the Cold War, when fears of Soviet expansionism drove the reality of communism home to them in a very real way. This is less the case for their grandkids today.

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After growing rapidly in the post-war era, the living standards of ordinary people have been stagnating for decades. This growing frustration about a lack of material progress has, in turn, helped to fuel a cultural backlash against the ideals of an equal, multi-ethnic society.

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Mounk also makes it clear that democracy and liberalism, while often viewed as synonymous, are distinct and separate concepts. Democracy refers to the system of government where power rests with the people, while liberalism is the set of values and institutions that protect individual rights and freedoms. He asserts that democracy without liberalism can lead to the tyranny of the majority, where the majority imposes its will on the minority without any regard for individual rights.

Today, two core components of liberal democracy — individual rights and the popular will — are increasingly at war with each other, he contends. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of “rights without democracy” took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to “the people.” But in practice, Mounk asserts, they create something just as bad: a system of “democracy without rights.”

Public park

As for the place of diversity in a liberal democracy, he argues for an inclusive “cultural patriotism” that embraces a mixing of national peculiarities that cuts across racial categories and melds into a unifying culture. It creates an identity that can take citizenry beyond their cultural and ethnic groups.

 He eschews terms like melting pot or mosaic. Instead, he uses a “public park” metaphor: “A public park is open to everyone.” “A public park gives its visitors options.” “A public park creates a vibrant space for encounter.”

“In a public park, we can hang out and say, ‘We just want to chat amongst ourselves; we’re not going to talk to anyone else,’ but we might also come into contact with other people and make new friendships,” he writes. “Nobody forces you to enter those kinds of contexts but, as a result of interactions, some commonality develops. That should be the aspiration of our society.”

Mounk maintains that for this type of democratic space to be successful, there must be a set of ground rules that are clearly enforced. These rules would serve as checks on those who believe the “park” should cease to exist.

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Mounk also makes it clear that democracy and liberalism, while often viewed as synonymous, are distinct and separate concepts.

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In the end, remarks Mounk, no clever institutional set-up can stop people from impinging on individual freedoms, or handing power to an authoritarian ruler, when they are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. Since citizens in many democratic countries have grown particularly dissatisfied with the performance of their governments over the past decades, this tendency is especially pronounced at the moment.