Israel’s democracy wars

Why is it assumed that the doyens of Israeli academia are necessarily democratic and good judges of the country’s democratic character?


Prof. Shlomo Sand

Seth J. Frantzman
Terra Incognita/JPost
04 May '10

The most common nervous reaction among a certain segment of Israel’s left is the refrain that Israel is always threatened by undemocratic forces from within. The Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel Aviv University recently released a poll showing that the average adult Jewish Israeli believes “there is too much freedom of expression” and that many respondents “favor punishing Israeli citizens who support sanctioning or boycotting the country.”

Haaretz’s headline screamed “Israel’s Jews back gag on rights groups.”

The reaction was fast and furious from the academic establishment, which had commissioned the study. Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal of TAU claimed “Israelis have a distorted perception of democracy – most people are almost anti-democratic.”

David Newman of Ben-Gurion University and fellow Jerusalem Post columnist claimed the results were “very worrying.”

THE SURVEY was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Large segments of Israeli academia and various organizations like the Israeli Democracy Institute believe the public is anti-democratic and they craft surveys to tell them exactly that. The fact that the survey measured only Jewish members of society should have been a red herring.

It is no different from a survey by Ma’agar Mochrot in March that surveyed Arabs and Jews on “democracy” but primarily wanted to examine young people’s attitudes on the state’s Arab citizens. What about what the Arabs had to say about the Jews and the state?

Why is it assumed that the doyens of Israeli academia are necessarily democratic and good judges of the country’s democratic character? Bar-Tal, for instance, is on the editorial board of the Palestine-Israel Journal whose logo is a Palestinian flag and an Israeli flag without the Star of David and which routinely refers to Palestinian terrorism as “resistance.” When they “understand” Palestinian terrorism, support boycotts of Israel, the “one-state solution” or encourage soldiers not go to the army, are these “democratic” choices?

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