Article: Israeli Post-Democracy: Origins and Prospects

Keith Kahn-Harris and Joel Schalit are the authors of an article titled "Israeli Post-Democracy: Origins and Prospects", published on 10 June 2010 on the pro-democracy news and opinion website openDemocracy.net.

The full text of the article can be read free of charge here:

www.opendemocracy.net/keith-kahn-harris-joel-schalit/israeli-post-democracy-origins-and-prospects

Excerpts: "'The middle east's only democracy'. [...] This profound sense of itself as a democracy, which by that token makes the country an exception in the region, is woven into Israelis' self-perception. This makes it all the more painful for many Israelis to feel obliged to lament that the country's political character is now seriously threatened and that its democratic political institutions and culture are in effect under siege. It is even harder for them to confront the reality that as the repressive nature of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories is increasingly exposed to the light, Israel's government has begun to treat sections of its own Jewish citizenry as it does Palestinians. True, the project of settling the West Bank (and until the withdrawal of 2005, Gaza) has always carried dangers for Israeli democracy within the 'green line' that demarcated Israel proper from the territories it conquered in 1967. The central conceits of the settlement project [...] rely on the false supposition that Israeli democracy could avoid being undermined by a fundamentally non-democratic project imposed on its closest neighbours. [...]

"Alarm about the corrosive effects of colonial occupation on Israel has long been expressed by intellectuals, radicals and jeremiahs (such as the late Yeshayahu Leibowitz); but its spread can be measured in the way that even establishment political figures (such as Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert most recently) have publicly stated that without disengagement from Palestinian territory, Israel cannot remain a democracy. [...] [A] rightist [government] coalition led by Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud [...] seeks to hold onto the maximum possible number of West Bank settlements and contains figures with explicitly anti-democratic instincts. [...] These developments in themselves do not suggest that Israel inside the green line will, any time soon, dispense with elections or become a dictatorship. However, there is a real possibility that this Israel may drift into a kind of 'post-democracy' (in Colin Crouch's term): imposing restrictions on civil rights and the rights of minorities, the media and NGOs, in a way that erodes the checks and balances on the Israeli state. Israel would become a different kind of polity, one that in key respects might resemble Vladimir Putin's Russia or (at best) Silvio Berlusconi's Italy. [...]

"Even if Israel did fully withdraw to the green line, the 'post-democratic' tendencies that have been set in motion cannot now easily be stalled. The reason is in part because the tendencies pushing Israel towards post-democracy are connected to more than the settlement project; they are also the product of possibilities that have long been inherent within Zionism. [...] Zionism, in important ways comparable to other nationalisms even if the details differ, sought to create a national Hebrew culture forged out of the disparate Jewish diaspora, and to erect a state for Jews. [...] The strength of Israeli civil society has provided a powerful bulwark against the ever-present possibility that Israel would devolve into openly racist authoritarianism. In the post-democratic era, this bulwark is being eroded. Zionism is being reduced to a retrograde 'statism' that seeks only to build state power, and is suspicious of any counterweights. [...] Israel's political horizons were in historical terms always more limited than they once appeared, but [...] it has taken the rise of anti-democratic forces to national leadership for everyone, including Israelis, to figure this out."

Keith Kahn-Harris is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Religion and Contemporary Society at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Israeli-American Joel Schalit is a book author and editor based in Berlin, Germany.

Books on how civic associations promote anti-democracy

Amaney A. Jamal, "Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World" (Princeton University Press, 2007):

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8420.html

Publisher's description: "Democracy-building efforts from the early 1990s on have funneled billions of dollars into nongovernmental organizations across the developing world, with the U.S. administration of George W. Bush leading the charge since 2001. But are many such 'civil society' initiatives fatally flawed? Focusing on the Palestinian West Bank and the Arab world, Barriers to Democracy mounts a powerful challenge to the core tenet of civil society initiatives: namely, that public participation in private associations necessarily yields the sort of civic engagement that, in turn, sustains effective democratic institutions. Such assertions tend to rely on evidence from states that are democratic to begin with. Here, Amaney Jamal investigates the role of civic associations in promoting democratic attitudes and behavioral patterns in contexts that are less than democratic. Jamal argues that, in state-centralized environments, associations can just as easily promote civic qualities vital to authoritarian citizenship – such as support for the regime in power. Thus, any assessment of the influence of associational life on civic life must take into account political contexts, including the relationships among associations, their leaders, and political institutions."

The book won the 2008 Best Book Award of the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA).

From the award committee's remarks: "Amaney Jamal [...] teaches us that civic organizations have very different effects in non-democratic states. Far from being schools for democrats as some of our literature would suggest, civic organizations produce actors who mirror the attitudes and behaviors of their political patrons. In keeping with the larger literature on social capital, she finds that members of associations do display higher levels of trust than non-members. But, breaking with the older literature, she shows that their attitudes toward democracy are ambivalent at best. The association between trust and democratic values posited in work from established democracies does not hold.

"Jamal's Barriers to Democracy is a fascinating test of the theory of social capital built with evidence from survey data, open-ended interviews with elites, observation of over one-hundred individual organizations, and comparative reference to Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan. The committee was impressed with the force and import of Jamal's arguments and the truly impressive empirical data and research she brought to bear on her analysis. The study represents comparative politics at its best."

The book is fully searchable on Google Book Search (including table of contents):

http://books.google.com/books?id=Yk-PS2HtJJQC&printsec=frontcover

Amaney A. Jamal is Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton.

A number of earlier books seem to come to similar findings, among them, edited by Sigrid Rossteutscher, "Democracy and the Role of Associations: Political, Organizational and Social Contexts" (Routledge, 2005):

www.routledge.com/books/Democracy-and-the-Role-of-Associations-isbn9780415499156

Publisher's description: "Voluntary associations have been presented as a solution to political apathy and cynicism towards representative democracy. The authors collected in this volume, however, argue that these claims require more robust substantiation and seek to critically examine the crucial link between the associative sector and the health of democracy. Focusing on the role of context and using diverse approaches and empirical material, they explore whether these associations in differing socio-political contexts actually undermine rather than reinvigorate democracy."

The book is fully searchable on Google Book Search (including table of contents):

http://books.google.com/books?id=IUaYlUpj2PsC&printsec=frontcover

Sigrid Rossteutscher is now Professor of Sociology at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany.

A book at least Jamal is aware of and refers to is "Civil Society Before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe", edited by Nancy Bermeo and Philip Nord (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000):

www.rowmanlittlefield.com/Catalog/SingleBook.shtml?command=Search&db=^DB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0847695506

From the publisher's description: "Bringing together historians and political scientists, this unique collaboration compares nineteenth-century civil societies that failed to develop lasting democracies with civil societies that succeeded. Much of the current literature on the connection between civil society and consolidating democracy focuses exclusively on single, contemporary polities that are ever-changing and uncertain. By studying historical cases, the authors are able to demonstrate which civil societies developed in tandem with lasting democracies and which did not. Contrasting these two sets of cases, the book both enlightens readers about individual countries and extracts lessons about the connections between civil society and democracy in contemporary times."

Review: "This book bringing together the writings of historians and political commentators from Europe and the United States [...] shows us that civil society is not necessarily synonymous with democracy ..." ("European Library")

The book is fully searchable on Google Book Search (including table of contents):

http://books.google.com/books?id=32UTDxBjYHoC&printsec=frontcover

Nancy Bermeo is now Nuffield Professor of Comparative Politics at Oxford.

Philip Nord is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton.