Reflections on Democracy
1. The Nazis came to power by a democratic election.
2. Hamas came to power by a democratic election.
3. Ariel Sharon came to power by a democratic election and adopted a policy rejected by an overwhelming majority of the public.
4. Sharon founded a party, Kadima, which gained control of the government without having competed in any democratic election.
5. Although Kadima included several politicians under police investigation, as well as politicians who obviously joined that party for opportunistic reasons, polls projected that Kadima would win at least twice the number of Knesset seats of its nearest competitors—a commentary on the character of Israeli democracy.
6. The government is ever intoning the dictum that democracy requires the “rule of law.” Yet, for this same government, tens of thousands of illegally built Arab homes in Israel do not threaten the “rule of law,” while Jews protesting expulsion from their legally held homes in Hebron “threaten the very foundations of the state.”
7. In the name of democracy the government pursues a policy of zero-tolerance for Jewish patriots, while pursuing a policy self-restraint toward Arab terrorists.
8. Israel’s Supreme Court, a self-perpetuating oligarchy, renders decisions in the name of democracy, which decisions violate the abiding beliefs of an overwhelming majority of Israel’s Jewish citizens.
9. Supreme Court president Aharon Barak insists that Judaism is consistent with democracy, yet the democratic principle of one adult/one vote heralds the demographic ascendancy of Israel’s Arab citizens, which would make a Jewish and democratic state impossible.
10. In the name of democratic freedom, the Barak Court quashed the indictment of Arab MK Azmi Bishara, who urged Israel’s Arab citizens to emulate Hiszbullah, hence to murder Jews.
11. In the name of democratic freedom, this same court refrains from upholding Basic Law: The Knesset, which prohibits any party that rejects Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state.
12. Although Israel is not in truth a democracy, its political and judicial elites derive their legitimacy and respectability from Israel’s reputation as a democracy.
13. Israel’s reputation as a democracy induces the capitals of the democratic world to pressure Israel to make gratuitous concessions to the most implacable enemies of democracy—Arab despots.
14. Despite the preceding, Jews in Israel, ignorant of how to design a modern Torah form of government, slavishly echo Churchill’s dogma that “democracy is not the best form of government, but all others are worse.”
