Everything about Israel is a contradiction, especially its politics. Israeli leaders are elected in free and fair elections, and then are constantly protested against. Israel has held five elections in four years, and the same people have ended up in charge.
Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, but 20% of Israelis aren’t Jewish. It’s touted as the only democracy in the Middle East, but it doesn’t have a constitution, checks and balances, or guaranteed civil liberties. That begs the question: Is Israel really a democracy?
Building a state
Part of the answer can be found in the earliest moments of the state. May 14, 1948, was a very stressful day for David Ben-Gurion. At 4 P.M., he was scheduled to declare Israel’s independence, speaking a brand-new country into existence. The Zionist leadership had worked towards this moment for decades. Now, it was finally here. Yet, that morning, Ben-Gurion was still scrambling to finish writing the country’s Declaration of Independence.
To be fair, it’s not easy figuring out how to be the world’s only Jewish state. The last Jewish government in the Holy Land was a monarchy 2,000 years ago, and its laws were based on the Torah; however, theocratic monarchies were a little out of fashion by 1948.
Instead, Israel’s founders were trying to build a socialist utopia. Therefore, their state would obviously treat all its citizens equally and protect civil liberties. Obviously, it would be led by whoever the people elected. When that leader’s tenure was up, they’d transfer power peacefully to whoever was elected next, obviously. Except, upon closer examination, none of this was that obvious.
An experiment in democracy
Haviv Rettig Gur, a senior political analyst for The Times of Israel, has spent a lot of time thinking about Israel’s fragile, contradictory democracy.
He explained that, when the state was founded, “90% of Israeli Jews [came] from countries that are not democracies, and for most of them, the first experience of a vote [was] as Israelis, and yet everyone [assumed] from day one that it’s a democracy.”
Israel is a country of refugees who had limited experience with democracy. Their neighbors weren’t democratic, their home countries weren’t democratic, and yet, they established a state where every citizen had the right to vote. Democracies, however, are about more than just free and fair elections.
If you ask Israelis on the street if Israel is a democracy, they’d answer “of course,” pointing to the right to vote in elections and freedom of speech. People feel secure in their everyday freedoms. That answers the question, right?
Well, not exactly. Because, as Rettig Gur notes, “We don’t have written law in Israel, a right to equality. We don’t have a written right to freedom of religion. Every Israeli believes whatever they want and worships however they want, but we don’t have that written in law.”
Israel’s Declaration of Independence does include promises about a lot of these civil rights. It emphasizes that the new state “will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants…will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel…will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex…will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture…will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions…and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
There’s just one problem: These are promises, not laws. The Declaration itself stresses that, eventually, a real constitution would need to be written. However, it’s been nearly 80 years, and the Israeli government still hasn’t gotten around to writing that constitution.
Dr. Guy Lurie, a researcher at the Israeli Democracy Institute, explained that instead of a constitution, Israel has these things called Basic Laws, which are meant to eventually form the chapters of an actual constitution. However, these Basic Laws weren’t passed with a significant majority, like the two-thirds majority that the American Constitution has backing it up, so they can be changed by a majority vote in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, at whim.
“Because of that, it’s a weakly protected constitution, and that’s why Israel is a constitutional democracy, but not a very strong constitutional democracy in that sense,” Lurie said.
Rina Ayalin-Gorelik, the executive director of the Association of Ethiopian Jews (AEJ), broke it down further.
“We have a very vibrant and intense parliament. Then we have our government that parliament chooses, and then we have the Supreme Court and the judicial system,” Ayalin-Gorelik explained.
These are the three branches of the Israeli government: the legislative (the Knesset), the executive (the prime minister), and the judicial (the courts). The separation of powers should balance each other out, ensuring no branch can suddenly take over everything.
However, as Rettig Gur explains, “In Israel, we actually have, probably, the least checks and balances of any system in the democratic world.”
If that’s the case, though, what’s keeping Israel from descending into complete chaos? Well, some would say it already has.
Unstable governments and heated protests
From 2019 to 2022, Israel held five parliamentary elections. Free and fair elections are a good thing, but that’s overdoing it just a bit.
To add to the chaos, all that came before the anti-government protests in 2023. The demonstrations erupted against plans by the government to overhaul Israel’s judicial system.
Despite protests, unstable governments, a lack of checks and balances, and the absence of a constitution, many Israelis remain optimistic about their democracy. Why?
“Here we live, Arabs and Jews. We live together, we live in the same streets, work together, live the same lives, live in peace, and love each other,” one Israeli on the street explained.
“I’m not Jewish, I’m Muslim. All my rights as a Muslim are preserved. I can marry who I want, I can work where I want,” another Israeli added. “For example, both of us can get elected to the parliament. Both of us have a similar chance to be elected as a prime minister. There’s no law that prevents me from running as a candidate and becoming a prime minister, right? There is nothing that prevents it, 100%, without even questioning it. Israel is a democracy. It’s a Jewish democracy, but still a democracy.”
At first, that sounds like an oxymoron. How can a state be Jewish, as in for the Jews, and still protect all the democratic rights of non-Jews?
For many Israelis, there’s no tension between those two elements.
“I don’t see it as an all or nothing,” Lurie explained. “Israel is a democracy, but its democratic character is not perfect. It’s a grave challenge. I think Israel still has a way to go before it becomes a perfect democracy.
Ayalin-Gorelik noted some of the issues Israel’s democracy faces, but stressed that these flaws don’t mean it’s any less of a democracy.
“There are some discriminatory policies against Ethiopian Israelis and against minorities. That’s why we exist as the association for Ethiopian Jews,” she explained. “We fight against discrimination and discriminatory policies, and we make a change. I think that the fact that I, as a black Jewish woman in my country, can protest and can go to the Knesset and work with a member of Knesset in order to change the reality and change policy, means that Israel is a democracy.”
Tribalism as a check and balance
While this is all nice and reassuring, is it sustainable in a country with dozens of political parties that always seem to be at each other’s throats? What guarantees do we have that Israel’s democracy will keep working?
“At the beginning of Israel, you had all different kinds of Jews and all different kinds of Arabs. They don’t connect, they don’t live together, they don’t like each other, they don’t understand each other,” Rettig Gur explained. “Our politics are divided into these cultural tribes, the tribalism of these religious, ethnic, and cultural tribes. The ultra-Orthodox community, for example, lives apart from the secular, who live apart from the religious Zionist.”
“This tribalism of Israeli society created a situation in which no tribe was ever a majority, and there was no way for any tribe to force itself on the other tribes over time, so they developed a kind of institutionalization of the different tribalism,” he added.
Rettig Gur pointed to Israel’s electoral system, in which voters vote for a party, not a particular candidate. “They’re not electing directly, their representative from their area, they’re electing their tribe. These representatives of nationwide tribes all come to the Knesset, and in the Knesset, have debates and conversations, and mediate our life together.”
“In other words, we have one great check and balance in the system, and it is bottom up. It’s the cultural tribes,” Rettig Gur stressed. “That actually holds back oppression and [the] majority’s ruling. Not perfectly, not every time, there are a tremendous number of mistakes, but the reason this democracy works, and this is counterintuitive for the West, is that tribalism, Middle Eastern-style tribalism.”
Rettig Gur pointed to the issue of civil marriage as an example of how this system works. In Israel, there is no civil, secular marriage. Jews have to go through the Rabbinate. Muslims have to marry through Sharia courts. Catholics marry in canon law courts. The Druze marry in their own courts.
“Nobody likes this system in Israel, nobody thinks it’s a good system, but the culture war that would develop the second we started to write our own system was too great,” he stressed.
Instead, “Israelis have found workarounds that have allowed them to marry anybody they want.”
Israel is committed by international treaties to recognize marriages done abroad, so some people travel to Cyprus, a 45-minute flight from Israel, and get married there. Then they come back and get their marriage recognized in Israel. Israelis also use the institution of common law marriage to bypass the issue. Common law marriage grants many of the rights that married couples have to couples who have lived together for a long time and are seen as married by their communities.
This is how different tribes and Israeli politics work around each other. This is how Israel appeases people who are concerned with the religious character of the state, and those who think the religious courts should butt out of their business. The law is strict and conservative. The reality is liberal. It’s a workaround to avoid a culture war.
It’s also a system that allows each tribe to function the way it wants because it has to. In a society as diverse and fractious as Israel, it may just be the best chance we’ve got to maintain a vibrant democracy.
The process might not be efficient, the results aren’t always liberal, but the give and take of these fragmented tribes is at the heart of Israeli democracy. That extends to all citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation.
For example, for years, conservative parties in the government have been trying to pass a law that lowers the volume of the Muslim call to prayer. Muslims pray five times a day, including before dawn, and lots of people don’t love the daily 5:00 AM wake-up call.
“Every time it comes up, the Arabs don’t have the votes, and the ultra-Orthodox vote it down time after time,” Rettig Gur explained. “At one point, one of the heads of the ultra-Orthodox parties was asked about this. His literal statement was, ‘What the Likud wants to do to the Arabs, the secular left is gonna wanna do to my Sabbath siren.’ There is a kind of [mechanism] at the heart of Israeli politics where you can see [the tribalism] in real time.”
The fact that there’s an Islamist party in the Israeli Knesset is wild, but what’s even more insane is the ultra-Orthodox parties back that Islamist party because they have a shared tribal value. By the way, that Islamist party has returned the favor plenty of times.
It’s such an unlikely coalition, and it’s such a perfect example of Israeli democracy in action. It shouldn’t work, but somehow, it does.
We don’t always agree. We don’t always even like each other. We have a long way to go before this country can be said to be perfect. But the contradictions of Israeli democracy remind us that a better world is possible. As a wise man once said, “If you will it, it is no dream.” (That man was Theodor Herzl)
We all will it. We all want to live in a better world. Even if we disagree about what it should look like, we all have the imagination to make it happen.
