DESTROYING THEMSELVES FROM WITHIN:

Israel’s democratic veneer (T. HERMANN AND D. NEWMAN, 03/06/2011, Jersusalem Post)

Much has been written about the weakening of Israel’s democratic culture. Events of the past few months have posed serious questions in this regard: the Knesset decision to examine the functioning and funding of human-rights and peace NGOs, attacks on academic freedom by right-wing think tanks, rabbis issuing public statements against the renting of property to Arab citizens, the rabbis’ wives’ warnings to Jewish girls not to associate with gentiles, as well as demonstrations in Tel Aviv against foreign workers from Third World countries.

Taken individually, each event may be seen as no more than an aberration by a deviant group. But taken together, we are witnessing a “climate change” in Israeli Jewish public opinion, raising serious concerns about the long-term viability of our democracy.

The conventional explanation for the increase in these anti-democratic attitudes is as a spillover of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But laying the blame at the door of the conflict is too simplistic. Such an explanation is often motivated by political correctness and other agendas which tend to deny the structural and perceptual changes which are taking place within Israeli Jewish society.

What is fast becoming an anti ‘others’ tsunami, is an internal kulturkampf taking place between the declining and politically inactive old elites, and those groups who were, for a long time, at the socio-political periphery.