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The politics of fear threatens Israel from without and within

There was something surreal about visiting Israel last week. I had come to learn about Israel’s independent sector, and it was inspiring to see how nonprofits were taking up the task of shaping Israel’s future, regardless of who forms the next government.
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February 26, 2015

There was something surreal about visiting Israel last week. I had come to learn about Israel’s independent sector, and it was inspiring to see how nonprofits were taking up the task of shaping Israel’s future, regardless of who forms the next government.

Partisan politics still abounded, which wasn’t surprising in the run-up to an election. What was astonishing was witnessing how the politicization of issues had extended to the critical question of how to deal with the threat of a nuclear Iran.  

Rather than building consensus around one of the most momentous challenges facing Israel since its inception, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s miscalculated decision to address a joint session of Congress had transformed the issue into an object of partisan politicking. 

The controversy not only has exacerbated tensions between Israel and its most important ally, it also has diverted attention from serious challenges Israel is facing internally. It is an intermingling of strategic prerogatives and political maneuvering that would have befuddled Israel’s founders.

The pioneers of Israel knew they could not succeed in establishing a sovereign democratic state at peace with its neighbors without the support and strategic partnership of the world’s most powerful nation, which itself is grounded in a fundamental commitment to democracy. They could not have imagined a time when the question of whether the Israeli prime minister should address a joint session of the U.S. Congress would be a controversial issue.  

The founders of Israel also would not have imagined a time when legislation to limit the rights of non-Jewish citizens was proposed by members of its governing coalition. Israel’s Declaration of Independence — which, not coincidentally, recalls the words of America’s founding documents — proclaimed that the Jewish state “will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel [and] will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” 

Israel’s founders almost certainly would not have anticipated a situation in which Israel maintained control over millions of Palestinian Arabs without equal rights for almost half a century. They would have been heartbroken to know that, 67 years after it was born, dangerous currents inside Israel and serious threats from outside would threaten Israel’s existence as a democratic and Jewish state

The reality of this moment in Jewish history is that adherence to the principles of democracy does not carry the weight it did when Israel was created. In the eyes of many, including a significant percentage of Israel’s political leadership, the principles of democracy have become subservient to external threats.  

The synergy and interdependence of democracy and national security have been transformed into a zero-sum game. As a result, fear is progressively defining the ethos of the Jewish people — in Israel and the Diaspora — to the point of causing serious harm. 

Israel’s early pioneers believed it was dangerous to give disproportionate influence to fear or any emotional response to the profoundly painful past of the Jewish people. Rooted in the traditions of both Judaism and enlightened Western democracy, they were wary of allowing fear to skew their ability to discover and develop solutions at the most precarious time in modern Jewish history.

In the 21st century, fear has become an all-too-common tool for recruiting political support. It is the Achilles’ heel of democracy, the lowest-common denominator of a citizenry, which is why demagogues and fearmongers on both the right and the left have successfully exploited it. Fear, as Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz puts it, “overrides not only thinking but, more important, all other emotions.”  

In the case of Netanyahu, fear is a basic operating principle. He uses it deftly, invoking the Holocaust to frame virtually every threat Israel faces. I believe he does so because he is sincerely afraid of Israel being existentially reliant on another country or entity. He associates this dependence with weakness, rather than acknowledging that interdependence is a global phenomenon,  to which Israel is not and must not be an exception.  

Netanyahu presents himself as the only person strong enough to prevent a U.S./European-led agreement with Iran, which he asserts would jeopardize Israel’s existence. Rather than forging a positive relationship with U.S. President Barack Obama, he preaches fear of the intentions of the United States, Israel’s closest ally. He revives our collective fear of anti-Semitism and questions the viability of European-Jewish communities. He fuses his own fears with his penchant for manipulating others’ fears, resulting in an unnecessary political controversy, a diplomatic crisis and the absence of measured national discourse.

Fear is utilized so effectively in Israel because it fills a vacuum left by the absence of collective political norms rooted in democratic values. As the veteran Israeli civil libertarian Amos Gil observes, “There are no values and no rules of the game, there are only goals.” The challenge for Israel is to reaffirm its founding values and agree upon guidelines for political engagement.  Otherwise, its democracy will be truly imperiled, as will its greatest strategic asset — the Israel-U.S. partnership and the support of the Diaspora Jews. 

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