The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

Former MK Elyakim Haetzni has just written an article “The Homeless Right.” It contains a post mortem of the March 2006 elections. He Haetzni deplores the decline of the “national camp,” but he suggests it can be rejuvenated: how he does not say. No wonder. His analysis does not scratch even the surface of the basic cause of the national camp’s decline.

The basic cause is this: The national camp has always been preoccupied with security divorced from any serious analysis of the causal connection between security and the character of Israel’s system of governance—the regime. To this extent the “Right” is not homeless but heedless, if not mindless.

Consider, to begin with, the Oslo or Israel-PLO Agreement of 1993, which has resulted in more than 6,000 Jewish casualties. Oslo was not merely the consequence of diplomatic incompetence, or of the Left’s abandonment of Zionism. Oslo would never have seen the light of day were it not for the electoral coup d’état of June 1992. The 59 MKs comprising the Likud and the religious parties—including, therefore, the national camp—were trumped when 5 Arab MKs gave 56 Labor-Meretz MKs an unprecedented blocking majority. The result was a Labor-led government which, contrary to Yitzhak Rabin’s pledge to the nation, recognized the PLO and subsequently signed the Oslo Agreement.

That legally questionable agreement did not undergo, and did not have to undergo, Knesset debate, if only because formal ratification of the agreement is not required by any law. The agreement was a fait accompli, facilitated by the fact that the government, i.e., the cabinet, consists of party bosses that control the Knesset and are not accountable to the voters in constituency elections. They do not have to seek re-election in a home district, where their misdeeds can be exposed by rival candidates and irate citizens. Institutional checks and balances do not exist in Israel.

Oslo II—the implementation agreement—is an obscene case in point. That agreement would have died still-born were it not for the infirmity and venality of the Knesset, which made it rather easy for the Rabin government to buy two “right-wing” Tsomet MKs for a couple of cabinet posts.

And so it was in 2004, when Ariel Sharon bought the votes of 22 Likud MKs to enact his “unilateral disengagement” plan, which he and they had campaigned against in the 2003 election—a plan rejected by an overwhelming majority of the public. Had the position of each of those Likud MKs depended on the voters in diverse constituency elections, rather than on a party slate susceptible to manipulation by the party chairman, one can be fairly certain that those MKs would not have yielded to political bribery, knowing their treachery would be exposed by rival candidates in the next election.

To these institutional flaws—known to the Right—add those of the Supreme Court, recognized as a self-perpetuating oligarchy by eminent Israelis across the political spectrum. Despite scholarly petitions challenging the legality of the Oslo Agreement, which constituted a prima facie violation of sections 97(a), 97(b), 99, and 100 of the Penal Code governing treason, judicial redress was denied. There was no organized and sustained protest by the Right against the Supreme Court as an institution of the regime, in contradistinction to its left-wing rulings.

Nor was there any judicial redress of grievances when the Sharon government, in violation of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom, dispossessed and deported the 8,000 Jews living in Gush Katif. (Here I will not dwell on the Supreme Court’s dodge about “national security,” and its reference to Gaza as “occupied territory”—rulings contradicted by its own judicial precedents.)

I could elaborate much further on the inherent flaws of Israel’s governing institutions, which, as much as the character flaws of Israeli politicians, are responsible for Israel’s insecurity. Suffice to mention the following.

• The average duration of Israeli governments is less than two years. This renders it almost impossible to pursue consistent, resolute, and long-range national policies. (In fact, the transience of Israeli governments makes them more susceptible to foreign influence.)
• The obscene venality of multi-party cabinet government demoralizes and divides the nation and leaves the people confused about the government’s direction.
• The fragmentation of the cabinet on the one hand, and the impotence of the Knesset on the other, results not in a power vacuum but in prime ministerial government—a subtle form of dictatorship.

To say, therefore, that Israel is merely an “imperfect” democracy hardly describes a system of governance which enables the ruling elites to ignore public opinion with impunity. Israel is in truth a democratically elected despotism!

The various groups composing the “national camp” have dismally failed to expose this truth—and this, more than anything else, is the basic cause of the Right’s decline. With the long-stranding exception of the Yamin Israel party, these groups are afraid to expose—certainly in a sustained and systematic way—the myth of Israeli democracy. It’s easier and safer or more “politically correct” to focus on the issue of security.

The Right is not “homeless”; it’s gutless!