Apartheid. Settler colonialism. Democracy
Grounding so many of the defences that are being made on behalf of Israel’s assaults on Gaza is the claim that, because it is a democracy, the campaign is legitimate.
Indeed, last year, when European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen marked the 75th anniversary of Israel’s creation, she celebrated Israel as having made the "desert bloom" through both its "vibrant democracy in the heart of the Middle East" and its "dynamism, ingenuity and groundbreaking innovations".
The underlying trope — that the Middle East is a region populated by nothing more than tribal sectarianism and religious intolerance and that Israel stands alone as a beacon of civilisation — is nothing new.
In 2014, American political theorist Michael Walzer, in an essay titled "Israel must defeat Hamas, but also must do more to limit civilian deaths", argued we should side with Israel "because Israel is a democracy".
For Walzer, Israel’s being a democracy means that right-wing governments in charge in 2014 (and still in charge today) can be removed.
In other words, democracies are dynamic and evolving political communities, capable of correction. In the Israel-Palestine context, because it is a democracy, Walzer imagines that Israel is capable of producing sufficient numbers of statesmen and members of civil society to drive a politics that will commit to Palestinian statehood.
By contrast, what we can expect from Palestinians, most especially Hamas, but in reality, any group committed to armed resistance, is nothing but a deranged ideology wedded to terroristic and nihilistic violence. As a society without the staples of democratic politics — free and fair elections, free speech, and political pluralism — Palestinians lack the institutions and political cultures that can mark a way out of their present morass.
Moreover, as Stephen Shalom, an emeritus professor of political science, pointed out in his response to Walzer’s argument, "in most anti-colonial struggles it has often been the case that the colonial power was the more internally democratic society".
He wrote: "Does that lead us to support France (with its Rights of Man) against the Algerians or the Vietnamese who were seeking independence? The British of the Magna Carta against India or Kenya? The democratic Belgians as they oppressed the Congolese? The Germans, with their universal male suffrage, as they committed genocide against the Herero people in Southwest Africa?"
In each instance, as with the Palestinian cause, there are oppressed people and those who oppress them. Whether oppression is carried out in the name of a democracy or otherwise the demand should be for that oppression to stop.
Crucially, a democratic institutional infrastructure that is constituted by, among other things, free and fair elections, a free press, commitments to free speech, and the rule of law, is no guarantee of anything when that society is committed to the systematic oppression of other people.
Arguably, in any state, democracy or otherwise, where the military plays an outsized role in the community’s sense of itself and its purposes, something has gone dangerously wrong. In Israel, military conscription is compulsory.
In addition, the fact that Israel spends 10% of its GDP on the military — the United States spends about 4% — goes some way to show just how central the institution is to Israeli life.
If we take seriously the charges that the United Nations and other human rights organisations have made against Israel, namely, that it is a settler-colonial and apartheid state, these are not defects that are necessarily going to be fixed through democratic politics.
Whenever humans oppress other humans — whether it is the oppression characteristic of Jim Crow in the United States, apartheid in South Africa or that which occurs on factory floors and at the borders of all nations — this insinuates itself into the spiritual, cultural, political, and social life of a community.
As Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi describes it: "I’m not the victim of the occupation. The Jew or the settler child who carries a rifle at the age of 15, they are the victims of the occupation. For me, I am capable of distinguishing between right and wrong ... I am a freedom fighter."
While undoubtedly egregious and extreme, the moral rot that lives at the heart of Israeli society is a rot that lives at the heart of all societies held together by oppression and domination.
Of course, being oppressed need not provide any special moral clarity, or sanctify any and all possible responses. To be oppressed is, most basically, to be traumatised.
There are undoubtedly a great many Israelis who are appalled by the destruction of Gaza and who accept the descriptions of settler colonialism and apartheid as accurate descriptions of Israeli society. But a Tel Aviv University poll taken at the end of 2023 revealed that only 10% of Israelis thought the army was using too much firepower.
In other words, the overwhelming majority of Israelis support what others, elsewhere in the world, are describing as a genocide.
This suggests the moral revolution that is going to be needed to end Palestinian oppression is not going to come from within Israel, no matter how gleaming its democratic credentials.
— Dr David Jenkins is a lecturer in political theory at the University of Otago.
