The title of the article is derived from a booklet released in September of this year, 2023, just days before the "Al-Aqsa Storm" by French journalist Charles Enderlin, an expert on Israeli issues. Enderlin worked as a correspondent for France's Channel 2 in Tel Aviv from 1981 to 2015 and has published several works on Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
His testimony is that of a knowledgeable person, an empathizer with Israel, demonstrating a type of covert empathy, but he cannot be accused of bias against it or branded as anti-Semitic. However, his empathy does not prevent him from maintaining objectivity. From his perspective, Israel's democracy is not just threatened; it is dying.
Israel flaunts to the West and the world its identity as the homeland for Jews, who have faced some of the most horrendous discrimination and persecution, and also posits itself as the sole democracy in the Middle East.
Yet can Israel, especially today – after the atrocities it has committed and continues to commit in Gaza – still claim the moral high ground because of the historical injustice of the Holocaust it faced in Europe?
Principles are not divisible or reducible, and when applied reductively, they weaken the persuasive power of those who do so and strip them of their moral capital.
This question is inherently moral and must be raised; can those who have suffered wrongdoing be exempt from all legal and ethical restraints to inflict gross violations on others, including killing, destruction, and displacement, without accountability or deterrent? Ethics and laws are not commodities at the "supermarket" from which we select what we want according to need or whimsy, leaving aside what does not suit us, or choosing selectively based on circumstance.
French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish scholar of the Torah and frequently cited by Charles Enderlin, had expressed this after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, saying: “Using the Holocaust to claim that God is with us under all circumstances is as grotesque as the battle cry of the executioners 'Gott mit uns',” which is a Swedish military song from the 17th century meaning "God with us."
Principles are indissoluble and irreducible, and when abstracted, they lose their compelling force and deprive those who do so of their ethical balance.
The other imperative concerning Israel's democratic nature is questionable in light of the right-wing government that has been leading Israel for exactly one year. The query has an epistemological character; Israel's "democratic capital," according to the French analyst Enderlin, is eroding or in his words, dying.
This shift is not only attributable to the right-wing government led by Benjamin Netanyahu but is more profound, from Enderlin's perspective, since it is structural and linked to the original sin of its establishment. The analyst invokes Hannah Arendt's opinion from 1951 in her book on totalitarianism, where she posited that resolving the Jewish issue by creating a state has cursed those displaced and deprived of rights, the stateless. This curse haunts all forced nations as they cannot establish on the basis of equality; more bluntly, it is an "apartheid state."
Since its inception, Israel has lived a schism between secular ideology and religious references. The prevailing belief was that this contradiction was manageable, and religious Zionism saw secularists as a donkey carrying the oracle, a biblical allusion. But the "donkey" is no longer in control; it is subject to international laws and operates within a secular ideology. It is time to face the "donkey." The alignment between Israeli and Jewish identities no longer exists, and the Israeli may threaten the Jewish dimension among "the enlightened public," distinguishing Israelis from Jewish values.
This direction, dormant and rooted in the theorizing of fascist Vladimir Jabotinsky from the early last century, became overt after Obama's lecture at Cairo University in 2009 and his call for a Palestinian state.
Subsequently, a series of actions were taken by Netanyahu's government to restrain the "donkey" and all liberal tendencies, including the "Nakba Law" of 2011, wherein the Finance Minister is prohibited from funding any organization that allows commemorating the Nakba or the Palestinian tragedy since 1948.
Including punishing those calling for boycotts, whether economic or cultural, and prosecuting them legally. The Supreme Court affirmed a decision that affects freedom of expression and the non-violent opposition to the occupation. The third clause entails pressure on European governments that finance human rights organizations.
In the midst of this "movement," an organization named "Im Tirtzu" has emerged, inspired by Herzl's famous phrase: "If you will it, it is no dream." The founder, a nationalist student named Ronen Shoval, confronts all Israeli movements that doubt the Jewish peoplе’s right to the land of Palestine and does not hesitate to pursue them in what resembles McCarthyism.
However, the most crucial element for protecting the Jewish people from the shifts brought by liberal tendencies is Moshe Koppel, asserting, "The future of Israel as a nation-state for the Jewish people must be guaranteed." He established the Kohelet Forum or "Kohelet Policy Forum," a conservative Israeli think tank, non-profit, with three main objectives:
- Ensuring Israel's future as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
- Promoting representative democracy.
- Expanding the principles of individual freedom and the free market in Israel.
One of the forum's significant achievements was the legal professional named Aviad Bakshi drafting the law "Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People," or the Identity Law adopted by the Knesset in July 2018.
The right-wing considers this law more important than Israel's "Declaration of Independence", as those who declared the state of Israel on the left were lackluster.
French researcher Charles Enderlin labels the government led by Netanyahu since December 28, 2022, as an "identity coup," akin to a military coup. The identity shift manifested by assigning significant government posts to religious Zionists like Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Orit Strock, the Minister of Settlements, and creating "identity ministries" with hefty budgets for national and religious organizations. A government agency for Jewish national identity has been established, headed by extremist Avi Maoz, whose mission is to confront "profaning powers, especially stemming from Christianity."
Enderlin acknowledges that this identity revolution conceals a terminal illness: the occupation and resulting apartheid. The ethical sense among some secularists and leftists, or "the donkey carrying the oracle" as they are referred to in religious discourse, has begun to dissolve.
In view of the incongruity between the donkey and the oracle, or a donkey no longer bearing the oracle, a sense of the erosion of moral compulsion has intensified over the last decade in Israel, inside and outside Jewish institutions. This trend does not halt within Israel or the Jewish diaspora; it adopts an evangelical dimension, including in Europe, in line with extreme right-wing trends with which it is associated, led by Yoram Hazony at the forefront of the "populist right-wing nationalism."
Who now can claim that Israel is democratic when a credible witness has attested? Who can invoke the moral dimension to align with Israel when it has eroded any moral restraint before the barbaric aggression on Gaza? Now, it is another story entirely.
