Oh thank God, Israeli democracy saved
Avigdor Lieberman’s loyalty oath failed to pass a Knesset committee hearing.
How one can swear a “pledge of loyalty to Israel as a Jewish, Zionist, and democratic state” while contradicting the very nature of “democratic,” pissing on the Jewish history of minority persecution, and turning Zionism (not that I care so much to defend the good honor or labels) into little more than ethnic superiority.
Minority Affairs Minister Avishay Braverman praised the killing of the bill, “…sanity will once again play a role in the governing of the state of Israel.”
With a governing coalition like this, we can only pray.
Why are you surprised that it failed?
Personally, I think it’s going to take a lot more than this to “save democracy” in Israel.
Israel democracy wasn’t saved, because nobody knows what Israel democracy is supposed to be. Is the aspiration a pure liberal Western democracy (in which case the country has been a failure since ’48?) Is it a “Jewish” state? A state for the Jews? Some kind of synthesis of all of these ideals? Is it striving to be something else entirely? None of us seem to know.
why have we defined democracy as meaning equality? doesn’t democracy mean letting the people decide?
maybe what most people on this site want is slightly less democracy, less allowing the majority to call all of the shots, and more equality, justice and other values that a pure democracy doesn’t necessarily offer.
Arie, the modern understanding of democracy is a combination of a majority rule together a commitment to human rights. It almost follows that if the majority rules that each vote should and is equal to the other, and that if the government can be periodically overthrown that opinion sounding and forming cannot be hindered. This has been labored over for most of the 19th century. So what we want is a democracy – not a dictatorship of the majority, which is not a democracy.
Technically what we support is a “democratic republic” — a rule of law as instituted by the voting public. But that’s poli sci jargon.