Zeev Sternhell Opinion The Left Should Blame Itself
haaretz.com
For years, a slow process has been happening
right in front of our eyes: the erosion of liberal, open and pluralistic
democracy, which is the only true democracy. In all other variations –
above all the ethnic, xenophobic “illiberal democracy” tainted by the
anti-Semitism of Viktor Orbán, the hero of the Israeli right – the aim
is to do away with human rights and make discrimination and inequality
the norm.
Make no mistake, the nation-state law
is a station along that road, but it isn’t the last station. The claim
that it involves nothing new, nothing that didn’t exist before in
legislation or practical terms and therefore it doesn’t matter, is
nonsense. What had been barely tolerable, even considered wrong and
needing change, has become the norm.
But for the move to be complete, it has
to pass the test of the High Court of Justice. This is why the right
wing has been closing in on liberal democracy from both sides: both
legislation and a dramatic change in the Supreme Court’s role as the
supervisory, balancing authority. Both moves are being pursued in broad
daylight, brutally and shamelessly.
Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s announcement that until Prof. Alex Stein was
appointed to the Supreme Court, no other justices would be named, and
the Judicial Appointments Committee would be paralyzed, was totally
frank. All that was needed was to stand up against her courageously and
firmly, but for that the committee members desperately needed the
support of their former colleagues.
They
waited in vain: justices and former justices, including five former
presidents of the Supreme Court, did not show up for the fight. Instead
of wielding their professional authority and personal prestige to
prevent the disgrace of hiring a lawyer from a third-tier American law
school, for whom Israel was just a stepping stone between Russia and
America, they let Supreme Court President Esther Hayut
make a deal with Shaked. This is something highly improper from Hayut’s
perspective and destructive from the perspective of Israel’s governing
norms.
I
have no complaint against the leaders of Israel’s right wing, Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu included. That’s why they’re in politics.
This is what they think and want. In European terms, they’re the far
right, not hesitating to enacting laws that discriminate based on
ethnicity and nationality.
In American terms,
they’re alt-right. If the alt-right had been in power in the 1960s,
African-Americans wouldn’t have received equal rights. And today, if not
for the determined struggle by the liberal camp, the events at
Charlottesville would have been repeated.
The politics of the
right, as in Germany and Italy in the 1930s, France in 1940 –
culminating in anti-Jewish laws – and Poland and Hungary today is a
politics based on nothing but hate, hostility, confrontation and
incitement. It’s the same as the politics that almost destroyed European
Jewry. Like all demagogues since the Dreyfus affair, like those who
would bury freedom in the 20th century, our right wing is still fighting
the enemy within, which for its part was fighting even before for truth
and justice, without fear of the regime.
In our case the enemy
is the “liberal elites,” the left, the human rights groups like the New
Israel Fund and Breaking the Silence. Lest we forget, if not for the
enemy within of the time, the despised “cosmopolitan” and “rootless”
elites such as the novelist Émile Zola, the socialist leader Jean Jaurès
and the liberal newspaper editor Georges Clemenceau, Dreyfus would have
rotted away on Devil’s Island to the cheers of the great majority of
France.
If
after the enactment of the nation-state law, capitulating to the right
wing and the State of the Shin Bet Security Service takes over our
lives, the left will have nobody to blame but itself.
Zeev Sternhell
Haaretz Contributor
Commenti
Posta un commento