This episode explores what kind of democracy is being defended in Israel today. Who are the supporters of the ruling coalition and what explains the popular appeal of the right-wing parties? Listen to a discussion with a wide historical context about the present political crisis, which many scholars have called a constitutional coup.
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DiQ S6 EP7
Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani on Israel: Democracy on the Defensive
Glossary
What is the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition?
(02:11 or p.1 in the transcript)
The Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition is a social movement on the party and outside the parliamentary system, whose goal is to influence the public agenda, with the intention of bringing about a comprehensive change of Israeli society and its various institutions. The initiative to establish the movement came from second and third generation men and women of the Jews of Arab and Eastern countries. They come from all parts of the country and represent different levels of Israeli society. The active nucleus of the movement includes academics, workers, businessmen, clerks, teachers, artists and intellectuals, community activists, students, social and cultural organizations, residents of towns, townships, and neighborhoods. The Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow was founded in March 1996 by 40 women and men. In December 1996, following a series of discussions, the movement was formally established by 100 members, who constituted the Constituent Assembly. Since then, this body has expanded and it functions as the council of the movement, in which the fundamental decisions binding the movement are made. At the founding conference, the secretariat of the movement, which operates under the decisions of the movement's council, was appointed. In addition, the Committee of the Spokespersons and the Audit Committee was elected. All officials were elected in secret elections and committed to equal representation of women and men in all elected institutions of the movement. It was decided that the elections for all institutions of the movement would be held once a year. source
What was the February 26, 2023 Hawara pogrom?
(05:24 or p.2 in the transcript)
Following the murder of two Israeli brothers in the West Bank on Feb. 26, 2023, a mob of around 400 Israelis attacked the Palestinian town of Hawara. They torched dozens of homes and cars, leaving one dead and hundreds wounded before being stopped by Israeli security forces. Though some government leaders – including the head of the parliament’s National Security Committee – praised the mob or called for the state itself to erase the town’s existence, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned them for “taking the law into their own hands.” Others – including the top Israeli military commander Major General Yehuda Fuchs in the West Bank – used even stronger language, calling the attack a “pogrom,” as did a statement against the attack by the Israeli Historical Society, signed by some of Israel’s most renowned historians. According to historian John Klier, a pogrom is “an outbreak of mass violence directed against a minority religious, ethnic or social group [that] usually implies central instigation and control, or at minimum the passivity of local authorities.” source
Who was Meir Kahane?
(06:08 or p.2 in the transcript)
Meir Kahane was an American-born Israeli political extremist and rabbi who campaigned for self-protection of Jews. Kahane joined a paramilitary, right-wing youth movement in 1946. He was ordained an Orthodox rabbi in 1957 after studies at Mirrer Yeshiva in New York. In 1968 he formed the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL), attracted followers with the post-Holocaust slogan “Never Again,” and sent armed patrols of young Jews into Black neighborhoods. After being imprisoned for conspiring to make bombs, Kahane moved to Israel in 1971. There Kahane formed the Kach Party and stirred nationalist fervor against Arabs, whom he campaigned to remove (violently, if necessary) from Israel and all Israeli-occupied areas. He won a seat in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) in 1984, but his term ended when Israel banned the Kach Party for its antidemocratic and racist beliefs. Back in New York, Kahane was shot to death by a naturalized American of Egyptian descent. source
What was the 2014 Gaza War?
(08:17 or p.3 in the transcript)
On July 8, 2014, Israel launched a large-scale military operation using aerial and naval firepower against a variety of targets associated with Hamas and other militant groups. After more than a week of bombardment failed to halt the rocket attacks, Israeli land forces entered the Gaza Strip on a mission to destroy tunnels and other elements of the militants’ infrastructure. Israel withdrew its land forces from the Gaza Strip in early August, declaring that their mission had been fulfilled. Israeli air strikes continued, as did rocket and mortar attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip. In late August, after nearly two months of fighting, Israeli and Palestinian leaders reached an open-ended cease-fire. In exchange for Palestinian adherence to the cease-fire, Israel agreed to allow more goods into the Gaza Strip, to expand the fishing zone off the coast of the Gaza Strip from 3 to 6 miles (5 to 10 km), and to enforce a narrower security buffer in the areas adjacent to the Israeli border. Overall, the conflict was one of the deadliest between Israelis and Palestinians: 70 Israelis and more than 2,100 Palestinians were killed in the fighting. source
What was the 1967 Six-Day War?
(30:15 or p.7 in the transcript)
Six-Day War, also called June WarorThird Arab-Israeli WarorNaksah was brief war that took place June 5–10, 1967, and was the third of the Arab-Israeli wars. Israel’s decisive victory included the capture of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, Old City of Jerusalem, and Golan Heights; the status of these territories subsequently became a major point of contention in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Six-Day War also marked the start of a new phase in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians since the conflict created hundreds of thousands of refugees and brought more than one million Palestinians in the occupied territories under Israeli rule. Months after the war, in November, the United Nations passed UN Resolution 242, which called for Israel’s withdrawal from the territories it had captured in the war in exchange for lasting peace. That resolution became the basis for diplomatic efforts between Israel and its neighbors, including the Camp David Accords with Egypt and the push for a two-state solution with the Palestinians. source
S6EP7 Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of the Central European University in Vienna, and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. This is the seventh episode of season six of "Democracy in Question," and I'm really pleased to welcome today Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Tel Aviv University. He has taught at Stanford, Princeton and Columbia Universities, among others. He's editor-in-chief of Van Leer's "Maktoob" series of translations from Arabic, and the editor-in-chief of the "Theory and Criticism in Context" series. Between 2005 and 2010, he was head of advanced studies at Van Leer and edited its journal, "Theory & Criticism" for a decade. He also chaired the Horowitz Institute for Social Research and is currently a member of the Scientific Committee of the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study in France and from there it is that he and I are having this conversation.
Besides his interest in social theory, sociology of knowledge, he has also made significant contributions to the study of ethnicity, race, sovereignty, and coloniality in Israel, with a particular reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on which he has published numerous important books in Hebrew. His English language books include "The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Religion” in 2006, and "Beyond the Two State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay” in 2012. He's also translated numerous novels from Arabic, including those of the Lebanese writer Elias Khouri. Born in an Iraqi-Jewish family, Yehouda is one of the founders of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition, an extra-parliamentary movement which has sought to challenge the ethnic structure of Israeli society. Our conversation takes its cue from the recent protests against what is widely seen as a pronounced illiberal drift in Israeli politics following last year's elections, which saw the return of Benjamin Netanyahu to power at the head of an ultra-conservative coalition.
Yehouda has been a relentless critic of Israeli democracy much before the recent election, in fact, for years. So, I will begin by asking him whether we are witnessing today democratic backsliding by means of what many scholars have called a constitutional coup? What kind of democracy is being defended in Israel today? Who are the supporters of the ruling coalition? And what explains the broad popular appeal of these right-wing parties who have formed the coalition? I ask Yehouda to situate the present political crisis in Israel in a wider historical context as well, in which many critics like himself have highlighted aspects of ethnic democracy and used colonial analogies. His strong views and trenchant critique that avoid any easy moralizing dichotomies have often subverted majoritarian orthodoxies. So, Yehouda, welcome to the podcast and thank you very much for making the time for joining me today.
Yehouda Shenhav (YS): Thank you, Shalini. I need some time for blushing after this introduction and after this blushing, we can start.
SR: It details really your achievements and the complex issues you've brought to the table, which have not always been easy for many of your critics to work with. In December 2022, Israeli citizens voted in their fifth election since 2019 and it brought Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister back to power for the third time. A controversial figure who's been previously ousted for fraud and bribery charges, he has now assembled the most right-wing coalition government in the history of your country with several far-right and ultra-orthodox parties intent on pushing an overtly extremist political and ideological agenda.
One of the chief targets of the new government is your supreme court. And the last few months have seen several major demonstrations against these systematic attacks on the independence of the judiciary. That is something which reminds many people of analogies with Hungary, with Poland, where the judiciary has also been under attack from authoritarian rulers. So, let's begin by discussing these protests. Do you think these are largely issue-based or is there a broad and diverse coalition built along multiple solidarities where citizens are out on the streets? How exactly are they organized and what are their main demands?
YS: This is a very good and complicated question, but if I may, Shalini, I want to start with yesterday because yesterday we witnessed a pogrom after two settlers were killed by a Palestinian, and a group of a few hundred settlers went to the village of Huwara near Nablus. They burned houses with their inhabitants, Palestinian, of course, they burned cars. One Palestinian was shot, many were injured.
And I think that when you described the current Netanyahu government, he was always a right-winger. But what we see now is extreme. His government is not only the ultra-religious parties but the group of Kahanists, those who support Meir Kahane, who was pro-Jewish supremacy and transferring the Palestinians from the land, etc. They are sitting in the government.
And since Netanyahu is under trial for corruption, for many things, there are three different trials simultaneously, he needs to save himself by curtailing the rule of law, by attacking the Supreme Court, by, they call it legal reform, but it's not a reform, it's a revolution.
Now, I go back now to your question because you asked me about the demonstration. This government is awful, but it's awful as is. I don't know if the right analogy is, as you said, Hungary or Poland or maybe Tunisia today. Because Tunisia was the most progressive country after the Arab Spring in 2011. And now the regime was hijacked. And who knows what is going to be there? But similar processes are taking place there.
The majority of this demonstration are liberals to elite people who are richer than the usual and they want to save the economy for their own purposes. And I live in Tel Aviv in the middle of those demonstrations. And I sit in my living room, and I hear a demonstrator saying, a woman, "Thanks to the Supreme Court, I became a pilot in the military. I fought in Lebanon, and I fought there, I fought there. And therefore, this is my country too. And I won’t agree with what the government is doing when they're taking the country from me."
This is not something I can identify with. And this is something the Arabs don't identify with. To be honest, my Palestinian friends are indifferent to all this. Because before Netanyahu, there was a liberal regime. There were Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, two liberal people. Benny Gantz said in 2014, "We killed 1,300 people in Gaza and I did it." So, this is the opposition. A friend of mine wrote an article comparing the barbaric behavior of Ben-Gvir, this Kahanist in the current government, to the, I would say, decent violence of those who shoot missiles. And this is what Herbert Marcuse would call a society with no opposition.
SR: Yehouda, let me pick up two things. One that you mentioned and one that you didn't mention, but I think I would like to ask you that question. I would like to talk about this mixture of ethnicity, religion, and nationalism, because it's not just specific to Israel. We are seeing that in many countries where it's being used in order to say, “We are a permanent majority in this country because of our ethnicity, regardless of whether we win an election or not, it's we who are on grounds of our religion or ethnicity, the permanent majority”. So, this doesn't have to be an issue-based one because we are by birth the majority, which obviously is absolutely opposed to any principle of liberal democracy. And we are seeing the spread of this kind of idea of who constitutes the nation, who belongs to the nation, who is excluded, per se, from the nation.
But this brings me to a personal question to you. You have a complex location in Israel because of your own biography, and that is what the reading of your book, "The Arab Jews" brought home to me and the post-colonial dimension of this. So, that you are addressing this whole question of who belongs and why a lot of the protests are such that many of the Palestinians and Arabs living in Israel cannot identify with them because you are looking at this question from a different personal angle. So, could you say something about your own biography, your family history, and how that shapes how you look at some of these questions?
YS: Of course. Thank you for the question. Before I say something about this biography, I would say that basically, Netanyahu is using the ethnic cleavage within the Jewish society between Mizrahi Jews, sometimes called Sephardim, and Ashkenazi Jews who came from Europe and North America. He uses this cleavage and there is a cleavage and there's a gap in terms of many things. For example, at the university where I teach, only 9 percent of the professors are of Mizrahi origin, 9 percent, women 35 percent, Palestinian 1 percent. And Mizrahi Jews, Arab Jews, I want to call them Arab Jews because here in the Israeli discourse, if you're an Arab, you cannot be a Jew. If you're a Jew, you cannot be an Arab.
So, the Netanyahu government is full of Mizrahi Jews and higher than ever in any other government. That's the problem. And they have the sentiment of anti-Arab, although there's a gap between them and Ashkenazi. And Netanyahu himself is an Ashkenazi Jew. But he uses that gap or cleavage in order to promote this nationalism. I myself was born to an Iraqi-Baghdadi family. And until the age of five, I had heard only Arabic at home, the Iraqi dialect. Only when I was five, I went to kindergarten, and I started hearing Hebrew. But my parents couldn't speak Hebrew before then. This is my mother tongue. I was born in 1952. To be in Israel in the '50s and '60s of Arab origin was a big problem, was a source of shame, was a source of oppression.
This is one of the reasons my family changed the name from Shahrabani to Shenhav. And I as a protest brought Shahrabani back to my name later on in my life because I was ashamed of erasing my Arab origin, which I did because I wanted to be a proper Israeli. And I was a proper Israeli in parenthesis, of course, until Sabra and Shatila if you remember in 1992, there were those massacres in Lebanon. I was completely transformed. I became anti-Zionist. I understood that was all the lies that I was told in school. In essence, I have started to reclaim my Arabic origin. But to be an Arab, or of Arab origin, or Arab Jew was a big issue. And you have either to conceal it or to be on the margin of that society.
And I'm ashamed to say, in the beginning, I concealed it. I became an Israeli, I adapted the Hebrew dialect and whatever you need to do in order to be a proper citizen in a society where to erase foreign languages was an achievement. Because they wanted everybody to speak proper Hebrew. To become a monoglot society and yet you know how many languages were in Israel in the '50s? Hundreds. If you talk about Pan-Arabism, for example, from the Maghreb in Egypt and Iraq and Yemen and all this, you have a spectrum of many Arab languages. Not to speak about Yiddish, which is not my language or wasn't my parents' language, but it's a beautiful language. Why erase it? And to become what they used to call the new Jew, the Israeli who is not part of the diaspora, because in the diaspora we didn't have a state and we were weak.
It's in stories, in literature. If you were in the diaspora, you were a weak person and you could not fight back. And in some stories or some research used to say that men in the diaspora used to have periods, like women. Weininger, for example, Otto Weininger in late 19th century, that was the argument. So, you have to transform into the new Jew and nationalism was a big ideology to provide for that. Today, even people in the close family, the son of my sister, I wanted to convince them not to draft into the army. You cannot speak with them. They all want to do it because that's how you achieve a status in the Israeli society. If you have been a soldier, a fighter, an officer in the army, if you don't become a Zionist, you get out of the clan, you get penalized. These are the social control processes. The fact is that the Arab Jews in Israel today are statistically speaking, the most haters of Palestinians. And Netanyahu is playing on their sentiment.
So, you ask me about my contradictory position because, on the one hand, this government is a nightmare. On the other hand, part of it are those Arab Jews that I fought for. You mentioned the Rainbow Coalition. In the '90s we founded this movement for a second generation of Arab Jews to improve their opposition in terms of economics and status and all this kind of thing. And now they are on the other side. So, where should I identify myself? With the Ashkenazi demonstrators, or well-to-do demonstrators, or the Arab Jews that are part of this fascist government? I don't know.
SR: I think this is a fascinating question to explore about identities and how complex these identities are and how they are also situationally changing, but how they changed for you in your lifetime as well. Let's look at, however, the political questionnaire, what in your view would explain the popularity and the mass appeal of Netanyahu, but also of the religious Zionist party, the Shas, the United Torah Judaism Alliance, his coalition partners. Because, obviously, they have all come to power in winning an electoral victory. And as you say, many whom you would've expected not to sympathize with them, sympathize with some of their positions so much that they have decided to join the coalition. So, do you think this is in a sense reflecting, growing polarization along lines of religion: the citizens who want a highly religious society, be they Arab Jews or not, and those who are secular?
YS: To some extent, yes and to some extent no. I would say that you see a coalition with different interests. The ultra-religious parties hate and fight against the Supreme Court for their own reasons because the Supreme Court is secular and has liberal values and maybe forcing them to draft to the army. Some of them is what you would call patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Because to be a patriot is a comfort position to be.
And about the Arab Jews, there are many motives to be there. When you are an Arab or Arab Jew, you have to prove that you are not an Arab. Because during the biography of the state of Israel, often the Arab Jews and the Palestinian put in clash with each other. For example, Arab Jews used to live around the boundaries of the countries where most of the violent events took place because there was the plan to populate the country and the well-to-do were in the center. And if you look at the Arab Jews, for example, in Israel, sometimes you see a David star on their chest because they look Arab. So, they need to claim their Judaism. And it's like Arabs who put a cross to show that they're not Muslim, that they are Christians.
Most societies are racist but in Israel, racism is legalized almost in an indirect way. It's this racism that enters into rules, regulations, cultural arguments, but it boils down to racism at the end of the day. But you asked about the demonstrators and these demonstrators use the term “democracy,” and the government uses this term democracy. And I don't know, we need new terms because everybody is using the term “democracy” and the discourse is a dead discourse. The words do not mean anything anymore here.
SR: This is an interesting question because you've been a very well-known and uncompromising critic of Israeli society and politics for a long time. So, what you're pointing out about the words is Ivan Illich had this description of what he called amoeba words – words which can stretch in any direction, and they can be made to fit any context. And they can shift their shapes, and everybody can fit them into any discursive context. Democracy may be one of those words, because with some people it means purely having been elected in at least a free election. For other people, it may mean not just formal democracy, but also substantive democracy.
I would like you to talk about what you have pointed out very often in your writings as the structural weaknesses of democracy in Israel. And many have talked about it in terms of developing concepts like ethnocracy or an ethnic democracy. And you have just now alluded to the fact that you would even think about this kind of ethnicity in terms of racial exclusion. So, could you explain why these concepts would be helpful in understanding democracy. Not only in Israel, I think they could be helpful elsewhere as well.
YS: I think ethnocracy is a term now, it's being used in many places and in Israel as well. Ethnocracy is a good term in our society. Professor Oren Yiftachel promoted this term. Some called it democracy, meaning that is a democracy for Jews only. And as we spoke earlier, I don't think it's a democracy even for Jews only, it's democracy for particular Jews. Because democracy is not only, as you say, it's formal, but it's substantive. And it includes citizenship gaps, so to speak. I'll give you an example. Agamben talks about exception. This is the legacy of the British colonial rule from 1945. And Israel adopted the same law in '48 and it continued. Today in Israel, there is a state of exception without an expiration date.
So, the government can employ it every day, whenever they want and selectively. For example, I don't know what happened in the last raid on Gaza, but in 2014, a few hundred Palestinian activists were arrested, administrative detainee, not to demonstrate against the raid on Gaza. This is a very effective tool of the government. Now, what is the rationale, the justification? There is terror, war against terror. So Agamben says many western democracies use the state of exception today. So, I don't know, should we call them democracies? Shouldn't we call them democracies? We don't know. But if I go back to your question about the mixture of ethnicity and religion and nationalism, you know how paradoxical the situation is.
If I'm an American Jew and I want to come to Israel and become a citizen, I can do it in 24 hours. Because I'm a Jew and the state of Israel is a kind of refuge, safe haven for the Jews with the Law of Return. But if I'm a Palestinian and I went to the U.S. for a few years, I want to go back, I wouldn't get my citizenship. Not to speak about the fact that today all these Palestinians who live in the territories in Gaza, under the Israeli rule, have no citizenship rights.
Now the Israeli right-wingers will tell you, "No, we don't rule Gaza anymore." This is nonsense. We control Gaza, control the checkpoints, control what's going on, everything that comes in and out. Gaza is not a sovereign, whatever, state or place at all. So, even though Israel does not sit on the territories of Gaza, it controls Gaza completely, let alone the West Bank. Israel is not a state of its citizens because its citizens are of all kinds, Palestinian Jews, migrant workers. It's a state for Jews, even if the Jews are not from Israel, but from other places in the world.
SR: So, let me come back to one point, which you just raised, and that is your critique of the state of exception. And one of the arguments which a lot of people have made, but with reference to post-colonial societies that you yourself have made is the argument about the colonial foundations of the state of exception. So, could you say something about how one would apply a historical critique of colonial domination?
YS: I think that the colonial framework is very much appropriate to analyze the Israeli society, or the society in Israel, as I like to call it, because there's no one Israeli society. And I think that people do not want to hear this critique, but Zionism is a settler colonial movement. As a Jew and as a leftist, I thought that once upon a time, at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, Zionism was legitimate as any other national movement. And there was antisemitism, I don't deny this. And there was what was called the Jewish problem. And at that time, I think that it was completely legitimate to have Zionist or Jewish, whatever national movement.
The way it was implemented on the ground is the problem because, after '48 ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, the Jews expelled 800,000 Palestinian. And they told them that after the war they will be able to come back. And after the war, there was a government decision not to allow them to come back to the villages, to the lands, to their families. And those people went to the West Bank, to Gaza, refugee camps in Lebanon, in Syria and Jordan, and other places. But there was a government decision not to let them come back and this is an ethnic cleansing. There were a lot of massacres against the Palestinians.
Historiography doesn't talk about it, but this is what the Zionist, leftist, liberal, accept as, yes, there was a massacre in Deir Yassin. But more and more we learned also through the novels of Elias Khoury which are based on true stories and the new historiography. We know that there were massacres in many places in Palestine in '48. And the Palestinians became 20 percent of the population rather than the majority. And there was a military government over the Palestinians until '66.
SR: So let me come to one other aspect, not the historical, but the current aspect. Let me ask you something about the political economy of the settlements because one of the arguments I've been hearing of late is the argument that the Israeli state allows settlers to move to these areas instead of providing welfare support to poor Orthodox families. So that actually there is a political-economic logic to settlements, which gets obscured by the religious logic of it.
YS: This is perfectly true. And this argument goes that Israel was ostensibly a welfare state, but the discourse was socialist. But was very far from a welfare state. And in the last years at least since the '70s, many of the poor people go to the West Bank. And among the mainly ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arab Jews or Mizrahi Jews who go to the territories, we call the territories, and get housing for free and there's no unemployment. And they get all the other benefits that they wouldn't get within the proper Israel. And now if you look at the population of the settlers, half of them are from not those messianic settlers, but lower strata people who, for example, the city of Ariel is composed of Russians, poor Mizrahi Jews, people who did not have a chance to have their own houses. Now, they have houses, and they improve their lifestyle due to their occupation.
To say that their occupation is costly is wrong. Israel benefits a lot from this occupation, even though it takes money to control, for the military. Today you have half a million settlers. I don't think that any government, even if it was the most leftist government, let alone another Zionist government can evacuate those half a million people. And this will not happen. Even if we want this to happen. That's why I thought that a two-state solution is not the right solution. Because you won't be able to evacuate the territories. Half a million people with half of the army built on settlers, who are commanders, high-rank commanders in the military.
It's over, it's irreversible. On the other hand, let me tell you something, Shalini, the term settlement is used to define those places in the territories, West Bank, and all this. But within proper Israel, they are not called settlements. But there are 19 years of difference between '48 to '67 and between then '67 to now. There’s Upper Nazareth which was built to suffocate Nazareth. So, why this is not a settlement like in the West Bank, this settlement brought more peril and menace to the Palestinian than any balcony in the West Bank that the government is demolishing today because it's illegal ostensibly.
So, I don't see a difference. And I think also that if I'm against a two-state solution, although I'm a Jew and I cannot speak for the Arabs they are entitled to have a state of their own. But I think if there would be a two-state solution, which is the solution, which is accepted by the superpower, by European Union, it'll be a disaster for the Palestinian. Because every Palestinian within Israel that will say, "I want to have..." Then go to the Palestinian state. Here, you have no collective rights, only individual rights. And even this is a damaged kind of right.
SR: A constant refrain I was hearing when I was in Israel last was on the demographics of the country. A lot of attention has been devoted of late to the concessions which the Netanyahu government is planning to make to the ultra-conservative Haredi community for example. Whether about the education system or continued exemption from military service, gender segregation, even in terms of urban planning. And the question here would be how these would undermine even the most modest achievements of integrating these kinds of orthodox communities. But given the demographic dynamic, more than a third of Israeli's population is likely to be by mid-century belonging to some of these very conservative groups. So, how do you think this demography will influence the future directions of politics in Israel?
YS: It's a disaster. Disaster. Israel has the highest technology for fertility and they're encouraging fertility rates among the secular Jews as well. If you compare secular Jews within Israel or Jews say in America, the fertility rates of the Israelis are higher than any other Jewish group. So, it's not only the religious, but it's also the seculars that are part of this demographic race. Now, the argument was that the Arabs will have a higher demographic rate, but today Jewish demography in the West Bank is higher than the Palestinian.
You see every family of settlers, Ashkenazi or Mizrahi have 8, 10, 12 children, and this is in this demographic race. That's why I don't think that a two-state solution, it goes back to that is a viable solution. And I don't think that in that case, the one space, I'm not talking about one state, but about one space. It shouldn't be according to the formula of one man, or one woman vote but should be more like cantons and enclaves, where different communities make their own regulation and rules not only Palestinian versus Jews but different Jewish groups and different Palestinian groups. Most of my friends are Palestinians, but secular, educated.
And I prefer a space where I can speak Arabic, I can, you know, go to Beirut to visit my friend Elias Khoury, whom I meet only here at Nantes because he cannot come to Tel Aviv and I cannot go to Beirut, although I live two or three hours from Beirut. This is the division that I am thinking about and not this two-state solution, which is a ghetto. It's a ghetto mentality. And we have to open this ghetto. I come originally from Iraq, which is in the Middle East. I want to have this space open. My maternal grandfather was living in Baghdad, and in the '40s he used to come with dates from Baghdad to Palestine and go back with oranges to Baghdad. Isn't it a nice dream, a vision, and something to think about?
SR: Thank you very much for ending on this utopian, optimistic note. We really need that today. Thank you very much for this wide-ranging conversation from the very personal autobiographical to the political and thank you for being with me.
YS: Thank you, Shalini. I enjoyed it. Thank you.
SR: Yehouda Shenhav’s critical perspective on the recent constitutional coup in Israel by the governing right-wing coalition situates the current political crises in the context of the history of his country. Positioning himself explicitly as an Arab Jew whose family came from Iraq, he examined the mix of religious and ethnic nationalism that has characterized Israeli society and politics. He highlighted aspects of what he and others have called an ethnic democracy or an ethnocracy in Israel, arguing it has always only been a democracy for a section of even its Jewish citizens.
Analyzing the strong series of current protests against Netanyahu's government's ongoing attempts to weaken the Supreme Court and the rule of law, he pointed out that various coalition partners in the government are attacking the Supreme Court for very different reasons. While the Prime Minister himself is keen to secure immunity from prosecution for himself in multiple cases of corruption, the ultra-religious bodies abhor the secular liberal values that the Supreme Court upholds.
Discussing the nature of Israeli democracy, he argued for the need to recognize the colonial foundations of the state of exception that allows it arbitrary and uncontrolled exercise of power. These are colonial continuities inherent in the use of a state of exception that can be imposed without temporal limits employed every day selectively, and for whatever period of time the government wishes to do so.
The demographic dynamic will also play a key role in shaping the future of Israeli politics and society. As we heard, understanding the political economy of the settlements is important because they have a political economic logic which often gets obscured by their seemingly religious logic at first glance. So new future Israeli government is therefore ever likely to displace the half a million Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Mizrahi or Arab Jews already living in the settlements, which have now become irreversible.
This was the seventh episode of season six of Democracy in Question. Thank you for listening and join us again for the next episode in two weeks’ time, I will be talking then with Martin Krygier, the well-known legal scholar on anti-constitutional populists who are using the law and constitutions to dismantle constitutional checks on unbridled arbitrary exercise of power. Please go back and listen to any of the episodes you might have missed, and of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.