Russia and Israel
My primary source for this article is an essay appearing in Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It (2005). Dalrymple has been called the George Orwell and Edmund Burke of our age.
In his essay “How to Read a Society,” Dalrymple discusses Astolphe de Custine’s book, La Russe en 1839, which Alexander Herzen deemed the best ever written on the subject and lamented that only a foreigner could have written.
Custine was a younger contemporary of Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville’s classic, Democracy in America, was published in 1835, just before Custine visited Russia. It has been said that Tocqueville can teach us more about the mentality of American society than legions of social scientists. Perhaps the same may be said of Custine’s prescient study of Tsarist Russia, whose servile mentality, says Dalrymple, was by no means liberated by Communist Russia.
Dalrymple reveals a remarkable convergence between the servility Custine saw in despotic Russia and Tocqueville’s predictions of the servility that would eventually gain ascendancy in democratic America. Tocqueville foresaw that equality of conditions—the first principle of democracy in general—would engender a welfare state (most prominent in Europe). Such a state would not only supply the people with their necessities and manage their principal concerns, but also “spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living.” When this came to pass, “the will of man will not be shattered, but softened, bent and guided.” Although the government would not tyrannize over the people (as in Russia), it would “enervate” and “stupefy” them.
But what has this to do with Israel, exalted as a democracy by its people, especially by their politicians and judges, their academics and journalists? Let’s consult Dalrymple’s essay:
Custine grasped that the propensity to deceive and to be (or to pretend to be) deceived lay at the heart of Russia’s evident malaise. The maintenance of despotism depended upon this universal vocation for untruth, because without the fiction that the despotism was necessary, that it conduced to the happiness and well-being of all, and that any alternative would be disastrous, the subject population would cease to be controllable. The inability to speak the most evident truth perverted all human relationships and institutions.
Juxtapose Israel’s ruling elites, who persist in saying, with former Chief Justice Aharon Barak, that democracy and Judaism are compatible. Yet the former Chief Justice not only decriminalized homosexuality and gay marriages; he also legitimized the expulsion of 10,000 Jews from their homes by ruling that Gaza (as well as Judea and Samaria) constitute “belligerent occupied territory,” even though no state ever exercised sovereignty over these areas. A brazen falsehood.
Add a law which, in this so-called democracy, makes it a criminal offence to tell the truth about Israeli Arab committed to Israel’s demise. Add a judicial ruling which requires the State to sell to Arabs land purchased for Jews by the Jewish National Fund—this, in the name of a democracy alleged to be compatible with Judaism.
All this—and many more of such lies—conforms to “political correctness,” a euphemism for the intellectual dishonesty rampant among Israel’s ruling elites, and reminiscent of their Russian counterparts and Pravda. Of course, the Big Lie that Israel is a democracy is all that endows these elites with legitimacy and respectability in a demotic era notorious for “spin.”
Returning to Dalrymple on Custine:
For the whole elaborate charade of despotism to work, for the pretense that the despotism is both indispensable and conducive to the welfare of all, everyone must appear to believe in it—including the despot himself.
Thus, former prime minister Ariel Sharon, who paraded as a champion of democracy, told his cabinet, “Anyone who speaks and writes against the Disengagement plan is guilty of incitement.” The same Sharon fearfully decried anyone who said his government was illegitimate.
Custine saw such fear in the charade of Russian despotism: “The tsar … remains trapped in a permanent state of fear and irritation because he knows that … he cannot permit anyone or anything to question the pretense on which his authority depends…. Custine says of him, ‘he sees in the most insignificant events a shadow of revolt …’” [Recall how one Israeli citizen has been indicted for insulting a public official.]
In Tsarist Russia, “To lie,” says Custine, “is to protect the social order, to speak the truth is to destroy the State.” The tsar “had not only to assert a lie [think of the Oslo lie about territory for peace] but also to deny that he knew it was a lie. And all public officials—the emperor included—had likewise to pretend that they did not know they were being lied to, or else the whole edifice of falsehood would have come tumbling down.”
“If Custine were among us now,” says Dalrymple, “he would recognize the evil of political correctness at once, because of the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question. Custine would demonstrate to us that, without an external despot to explain our pusillanimity, we have willingly adopted the mental habits of people who live under a totalitarian dictatorship.”
Dalrymple continues: “…on the basis of his understanding of the Russian character, Custine could prophesy that within two or three generations a violent cataclysm would occur that would spell not liberation but a renewed and more terrible form of despotism, for men with souls molded by tsarism would have no vocation for freedom.”
Is Israeli democracy, despite periodic multiparty elections, a subtle form of despotism? Tocqueville writes:
The form of tyranny sometimes described as “democratic despotism” … was championed by the Economists well before the Revolution. They were for abolishing all hierarchies, all class distinctions, all differences of ranks, and the nation was to be composed of individuals almost exactly alike and unconditionally equal [“a state of all its citizens”]. In this undiscriminated mass was to reside, theoretically, the sovereign power; yet it was to be carefully deprived of any means of controlling or even supervising the activities of its own government. For above it was a single authority, its mandatory, which was entitled to do anything and everything without consulting it. [As Judge Barak has ruled: “everything is justiciable.”] This authority could not be controlled by public opinion since public opinion had no means of making itself heard; the State was a law unto itself and nothing short of revolution could break its tyranny. De jure it was a subordinate agent; de facto a master.
