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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
78 April 2023 April 2023 PB
Israel’s uneven
democracy is now
breaking
draped with a map of Israel that included the
unlawfully occupied West Bank and parts of
Jordan. In February he called for the Palestinian
town of Hawara in the occupied West Bank to be
“erased” after Jewish settlers rampaged in
response to a shooting attack that killed two
Israelis. There have been vicious and murderous
military incursions into Gaza and the West Bank
killing hundreds, and injuring and illegally
displacing thousands of civilians. In early April
Israel bombed militant Hamas targets in Lebanon
and the Gaza strip and its police twice assailed
the Asqa Mosque in Jerusalem beating
worshippers during Ramadan.
Speaking to the Observer last month, Simon
Schama, author of the three-volume ‘Story of the
Jews’, said that Israel was at risk of becoming a
“nationalist theocracy” with the inclusion of ultra-
religious, far-right parties in the coalition
government. He warned that Israel’s 1948
declaration of independence – “a noble
document, which promised equal civil rights to all
religious and ethnic groups” – had disintegrated.
The country’s usually liberal, if homogenised,
judiciary has appropriated for itself the right to
dismiss Ministers, and it has indulged the
prosecution of Netanyahu for his alleged graft.
Although Israel lacks a written Constitution and a
normal system of ‘judicial review’, the Supreme
Court has long asserted that some “basic” laws
amount to a quasi-constitution it can enforce,
overruling the Knesset. Netanyahu’s government
has been aiming to allow the Knesset to appoint
judges and to overturn Supreme Court decisions.
This would undermine the rule of law and weaken
Israel’s fragile democracy.
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the
streets in Israel’s largest-ever protests. 60%
oppose the reforms. Even Mossad and much of
the military was reported to have encouraged the
protests. In the end Netanyanu agreed to delay
the invidious reforms.
President Isaac Herzog has suggested:
“Anyone who thinks that a real civil war, of human
life, is a line that we will not reach has no idea. The
abyss is within touching distance”.
per head was $55,000, making it richer than the
average EU member. It invests more than any
other country in research and development, 5%
of GDP.
However, it is not a functional democracy. Israel
has endured five elections in four years,
culminating in the creation of what its obnoxious
and corrupt Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu
proudly calls “a full-on right-wing government”
last year. Far-right and Orthodox parties won a
quarter of the Knesset seats and Netanyahu’s
right-wing Likud party have formed a coalition
with them. Some 10% of the country’s Jewish
population is ultra-Orthodox and another 20% is
conservative, though 50-60% of Israeli voters are
considered ‘moderate’.
While the vast majority of the 20% of Israel’s
population who are Arabs are citizens, they tend
to live in poorer cities, have less formal education,
and face structural discrimination on an Apartheid
basis. Arab political parties have long struggled
to gain representation in Israel’s government. In
July 2022, the Israeli Supreme Court upheld a law
authorising the interior minister to strip exclusively
Arab citizens of their citizenship if convicted of
acts that amount to “breach of allegiance to the
state”. In Gaza, the illegal Israeli blockade is in its
17th year. In March the finance minister, Bezalel
Smotrich, delivered a speech in Paris saying
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation.
“There is no Palestinian history. There is no
Palestinian language”. He spoke at a lectern
H
istory gave the Jews an eighteen-
hundred-year diaspora and then the
worst crime in history, the Holocaust.
Britain ruled Palestine under a
mandate confirmed by the League of
Nations in 1922 but in May 1948 it washed its
hands of the whole Jewish-Arab mess, proclaiming
that it would formally withdraw from the country
at midnight on 14 May. David Ben-Gurion
proclaimed the long-cherished state of Israel but
the Arab League was determined to wipe out all
the Jewish settlements in Palestine and on 15 May
Egypt, Syria and Jordan invaded but Israel
withstood. In 1967, in the Six-Day War Israel
seized half of Syria’s Golan Heights, the Jordanian-
annexed West Bank (including East Jerusalem),
and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as well as the
Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. In 1973 the Arab
coalition invaded on Israel’s holiest day, Yom
Kippur. Israel counter-attacked and gained
territory in Egypt and Syria. Under the 1978 Camp
David Accords, that followed, Israel return the
Sinai Peninsula to Egypt which a little later for the
first time acknowledged Israel’s right to exist.
Since 2008, Israel has waged four wars on
Palestinian territory killing nearly 4,000 people.
Right now neighbours including nuclear Iran, now
cosying up to Saudi Arabia, and Hamas which
governs Gaza aim for its obliteration.
It has never been easy.
On the eve of its seventy fifth anniversary, Israel
is a fragile and fractious success.
The risk of a conventional war with neighbouring
Arab states is at its lowest since 1948. The last
Palestinian intifada, against occupation ended
18 years ago. In 2021 Israel ranked 22nd in the
UN’s Human Development Index, between Britain
and the US. In 2022 the Economist Intelligence
Unit’s Democracy Index placed Israel 23rd out of
167 countries just behind France and Great Britain
and ahead of Spain and the United States. It is the
only democracy in the Middle East. Israel’s tech-
powered economy is a global star. Last year GDP
By Suzie Mélange
INTERNATIONAL
n Multi-year average
(2003-2022)
n Average of June and
October 2022
Once again we assessed the
level of public trust in various
institutions. These figures
present the 2022 findings and
the multi-year averages for
the Jewish and Arab samples.
For all the institutions shown
this year’s findings for the
Jewish public are lower than
the multi-year average.
Source: Israel Democracy
Institute
IOF
President of
Israel
Supreme
Court
Police
Government
Media
Knesset
Political
parties
Trust in State Institutions (Jews.%1)
0 20 40 60 80 100
Israeli Jews’ Trust in State Institutions
Is
Was
Rael
Biggest
mrches ever,
for democrcy
April 2023 79
VILLAGE IDIOT
MAY-JUNE
BERTIE AHERN
April 2023 79
“There is one Bertie Ahern narrative he is anxious to
rewrite because, of all his ghosts, it is the one that
continues to haunt his reputation and that threatens to
overshadow any tilt he might make at the presidency in
2025. It is the 3,270-page report of the planning tribunal
published in 2012, which found that he did not truthfully
account for payments lodged to accounts connected with
him and that he did not operate a bank account between
1987 and 1993 when he was, respectively, the minister for
labour and the minister for finance. Aherns insists he told
the tribunal the truth.
I think I was very badly treated, quite honestly. If I had
the money, to this day, I would have gone back and
overthrown the whole bloody thing. But I didn’t have the
money to do that. Even after the thing came out, I thought
about challenging the whole thing but it [had already] cost
me a fortune and it would have cost me another fortune. If
[I was] anyone else, I’d never have got any of that stuff.
I see all this stuff now about guys in [Leinster] House with
20 houses and 15 houses and 17 houses. Jesus, I’m still
with me one house... and all the stuff that was thrown at
you after 24 years in politics. But anyway, that’s life. You’re
just dumped on”
— The Irish Times 9 April 2023
The Planning Tribunal found Bertie Ahern had spoken
untruthfully twenty-two times in his evidence to it. In all, the
Tribunal said that he did not truthfully account for payments
of £165,000 made to accounts connected to him.
It found that developer Owen O’Callaghan had indicated that
he generally found it necessary to engage in corruption in
order to develop property in Dublin, and implied he had “taken
care” of Ahern and given an inducement of some sort in
return for a favour. This corroborated evidence from another
developer, Tom Gilmartin, that O’Callaghan had personally
implied the use of corrupt payments, including to Ahern.
