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After a surprisingly fractious negotiating period, Israel finally has a new government in place. The most religious, hard-right government it has ever had! A brief list of its priorities are listed here.
For my part, I remain puzzled over how some of their initiatives are termed anti-democratic. For instance, they want to allow businesses to reject certain customers/requests based on their faith. This reminds me of the "LGBT cake" ordered by a gay couple from a Christian baker in the US a few years ago. One gets the sense that they did it as a provocation, and to rub it in his eyes. He refused, was sued, and the case later went all the way up the courts.
If you're libertarian, shouldn't individuals and businesses be free to associate and do business with whoever they may want? I can see why this would be offensive if you're a leftist, but the charge is that this is "anti-democratic" which isn't synonymous with leftism. Or it shouldn't be, at least.
The coalition agreement is non-binding but rather a statement of principles. How much gets implemented remains to be seen, and there is rife speculation - one may be forgiven for thinking it is wishful thinking - in the media about the current government being short-lived. Either way, Israel's new government will be worth watching for how far a genuine right-wing government can be allowed to travel before it gets blocked by the establishment.
It's also worth mentioning that Prime Minister Netanyahu's own Likud party is substantially more secular than its right-wing/religious partners. So there is also an internal split that Netanyahu has to manage. He is liked by his base, but is loathed by much of the larger Israeli establishment. Particularly in the judiciary and the academic/media class.
This was half-written almost 4 weeks ago but I lost interest; might be as good an opportunity to post as ever will be.
Israeli elections and the limits of excuses
Can Israel get so right-wing that it'll lose its title of «the only democracy in the Middle East» and turn into just another icky Middle Eastern ally of convenience, like Saudi Arabia? Can it be disavowed, at a minimum, by the democratic consensus of the US – not wokes and token bugbears like Omar, but the Pelosi party core?
The Israeli are committed to find the answer. In the recent elections, one Itamar Ben Gvir, came third and is poised to become Minister of National Security. Conservative Jews of the US are worried:
Gvir is a Kahanist, a terrorist supporter (convicted in an Israeli court, ah, but I hear now it's partisan lefties), perhaps tied to the assassination of Rabin, and an unashamed Jewish supremacist, with a... non-expansive idea of who counts as a Jew to boot.
To be clear: I think that Israel is a true democracy, more of a democracy than, say, the US (by virtue of a clear binding ideology and having a multi-party system) – albeit an increasingly illiberal one. But that's not all of what Westerners mean when they use that word.
Maxim Katz, an Israeli-raised Russian liberal opposition leader (Russian mother, if that matters) who has gone back recently on the account of the war, notes curious parallels between his two homelands:
The commentariat is split between stressing that he can't know nothin' without decades of experience on the ground and how wretched it is to use filthy Russian analogies for understanding the best country in the world – and grimly agreeing. You can find the same discourse on Reddit (1, 2, 3) and elsewhere. A suspicion creeps in that Max will soon learn how this isn't really funny. I don't like him, but immensely appreciate the unexpected consistency of his liberal inclinations. You get this with Jews (expansively defined) sometimes, as with other people.
Not always, to be sure.
This post was inspired by my getting blocked here by JarJarJedi (you get a notification for it btw) after making the case for considering Israel a potential global threat and source of X-risk (you be the judge of its merit). Here's his rationale I didn't respond to in time: 1, 2.
It was an amusing and edifying moment. I don't remember altercating with JJJ in my years here, and in fact I thought favorably of him. Uh, have you read HunterXHunter? When I saw those, I was reminded of Ch. 298 (manga novices: go right to left). A specific frame - you'll know it when you see it. The hair-trigger activation of the tribal Us vs. Them framework, blatant lies, underdog posture that'd put any woke establishment journalist to shame, cackling and hollering about Da Joos, blatant misrepresentation and shell games with definitions, paroxysms of coarse tryhard sneering, gaslighting (textbook stuff, «you wear tinfoil if you do not submit») – it was as if... the facade of a human peer disappearing, revealing something alien, and much simpler in its drives.
But I guess he felt the same way, which is why he wrote it like this and blocked me.
It's a typical pattern when talking topics that concern their interests, sometimes not even related to their identity (encountered it in fairly nerdy apolitical domains) with strongly identifying Jews – making ones who lack (or suppress) such impulses all the more precious to me – and it's much of «my problem with Jews», and also exactly what I had in mind when making my case, the very mechanism by which opponents and passerbys are scared into false consciousness, into ignoring the elephant in the room, while the radicalism of the in-group grows. Nice to get confirmations quickly.
But would such sentiment, at scale, no doubt going beyond the election of Ben Gvir in a few years (and thanks to his policies), be enough to discredit Israel as a «Western-style democracy»?
Question- if Israel hadn't decided to provide state subsidies to the Haredim, would they be more productive?
In the US, which similarly has extremely loose homeschooling laws and a permissive attitude towards religious wackos, the religious wackos are generally productive citizens because they'll starve otherwise. Even isolated cults like the Hutterites and FLDS generally support themselves.
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