Zvi Bar'el :‘Illiberal democracy’ in action

‘Illiberal democracy’ in action - Opinion

Minister Miri Regev seeks to destroy the old cultural memory and replace it with a fundamentalist national culture.

haaretz.com|Di Zvi Bar'el

“I have no doubt that every Egyptian is very familiar with the scope of the disaster and the threat that has befallen our nation. We aren’t talking just about the Israeli military threat or the American dictates or the weakness of Egyptian foreign policy. This weakness has spread to every corner. There is no theater, film or scientific research left in Egypt. All that remains is festivals, conferences and mountains of lies,” charged Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim at the awards ceremony for the national literary prize in 2003.
Ibrahim, who won the prize of 100,000 Egyptian pounds, refused to accept it from then-Culture Minister Farouk Hosny. After a few seconds of shocked silence, the roof of the Opera House rang with thunderous applause. The culture minister writhed in his chair, and after the applause died down, he said, “Ibrahim’s words are a mark of honor for the government. For if it weren’t so democratic, Ibrahim would not be able to utter his biting criticism.”
Israel’s culture minister has a different interpretation of the meaning of democracy. It more closely resembles that of Egypt’s former and current presidents, Hosni Mubarak and Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi, both of whom cultivated elites who became known in Egypt as “the regime’s intellectuals.” The natural next step would be to adopt the laws of Egypt, Turkey and Iran, which forbid harming the reputation of the state, its religion or its army. Miri Regev could even dispense with the legislation and use her own ministerial powers to establish a “state culture” that would be created only by “the state’s” artists and intellectuals.
But Regev isn’t the problem, just a symptom. She is only a log bobbing in the rapids down which Israel is plummeting, from its status as a liberal democracy to what American journalist Fareed Zakaria terms “illiberal democracy”: a democracy in which procedure, elections and public participation in them are more important than liberal values like freedom of expression and minority rights. Regev clings to the 30 Knesset seats her Likud party won as proof of the majority’s wishes, and consequently as a legitimate democratic prop for her authority to shape the culture according to her own wishes.
This is a familiar error. The great democrat Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, calmed the public after he was elected by a large majority in the 1994 election by promising, “There will be no dictatorship. I come from the people, and I will work for the sake of the people.” Go tell that to the Belarusian people. His colleague, Askar Akayev, the ruler of Kyrgyzstan, also won 60 percent of the vote in an election, and within two years he had passed draconian orders via a referendum that turned him into a constitutional dictator.
Zakaria draws a distinction between, on one hand, a democracy that bolsters the government’s power, and, on the other, constitutional liberalism, which seeks to limit the government’s power. Regev is a great believer in the democracy that gave “her” 30 seats, and sees liberalism as a threat that contradicts “her” democracy. And she isn’t wrong. But in advancing this view, Regev shoots the state in the foot – because her Israel has lost the strategic asset inherent in the title of “the only democracy in the Middle East.” There’s a plethora of democracies of the type now being established in Israel: democracies that venomously settle accounts with the culture created prior to their establishment. For instance, that of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, which tried to destroy the culture created under the monarchy, or that of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which persecutes symbols of “Western” culture. (Both countries, incidentally, hold elections as democracies usually do.)
Like them, Regev is now settling accounts with the “left’s” culture – i.e., with what existed before her. She seeks a historic rectification, a revolution that will destroy the old cultural memory and replace it with a fundamentalist national culture. And she’ll succeed. Because she is the people, and she “came to work for the sake of the people.”