Ben Gurion’s legacy

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister who declared the establishment of the State, took four steps that shaped the nature of Israel’s regime and thus laid the foundation for the current constitutional crisis, the most serious the country has ever known.

Ben-Gurion deleted the word “democracy” from a concluding draft of the Declaration of Independence; postponed establishment of the Constituent Assembly; did not separate religion from state, and refused to determine the new state’s borders. Israel has since then been a crippled democracy, as former Attorney General Dr. Avichai Mandelblit ruled: “The country’s founding fathers understood that the state structure was that of a weak democracy.” So weak, in fact, that recently, in the concluding session of the high court appealing against the abolishing of the “grounds of reasonableness”, attorney Ilan Bombach, representing the government argued that “The Declaration of Independence cannot be used as a constitutional basis.” With this, he astonished all Israelis who believe that Israel is not only the sole democracy in the Middle East, but that its democratic foundations are firmly anchored in the Declaration of Independence.

The question is why did Ben-Gurion decide to delete the word “democracy” from the declaration, why did he not convene the Constituent Assembly for writing a constitution as the Declaration of Independence demanded, and why did he easily agree to a status quo that gives the ultra-orthodox minority enormous power over the secular majority. The answer to these questions is simple. He did it because he could, meaning he built a country according to his whims as the all-powerful ruler. Ben-Gurion was not interested in strict separation of powers and did not want a regime of checks and balances, especially at a time when the country was in the making. Although the state adopted a democratic system, it was a democracy that adapted itself to the all-powerful needs of the Mapai party (later known as the Labor party). The government, army, economy and Israel’s General Union the Histadrut, were all under the absolute control of Mapai, as was the Knesset.

Mapai’s rule survived 30 of Israel’s 75 years of existence, ending in the 1977 dramatic change when the Likud came to power. Since then, Israel has been completely transformed: the economy was privatized, the Histadrut passed into the hands of the Likud, the kibbutzim were privatized, the Likud itself underwent a metamorphosis, the religious Mafdal party morphed from a moderate ally of Mapai into a messianic-nationalist-activist movement and the ultra-orthodox Agudat Israel party participates in the government and dominates the Knesset’s Finance Committee. This group, does not participate in the workforce or in the army, but fill up the inflated “yeshivot” where they study the Torah all day, living on government budgets.

The Declaration of Independence is currently unable to settle the dispute between two camps which do not agree on the most fundamental principles of democracy. For the ruling camp, democracy is the rule of the majority as established through Knesset elections. For the opposition camp, democracy is first and foremost the protection of human and minority rights. The phrase “Jewish and democratic,” which ostensibly expresses the Zionist consensus, does not appear in the Declaration of Independence and has become the focus of debate between the opposing camps.

These camps disagree not only on what democracy is, but also on the definition of Judaism. In the absolute “rule of the majority” interpreted by the right, the Knesset can enact any law based on the “will of the people.” And regarding the state’s Jewish character, the religious argue it is expressed in powers derived from religious law (The Halacha), including Sabbath observance, kosher laws, gender separation, nature of the traditional family, privileges for men, the denial of LGBTQ rights, marriage through the rabbinical courts, etc.

While the liberal camp defines the Supreme Court as the authority that determines which law is constitutional and which law does not conform to the fundamental principles of the state as Jewish and democratic, the religious-national camp does not see the Supreme Court as an impartial judge. In his appearance in front of the High Court, Simcha Rothman, chairman of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, made it abundantly clear what the ruling camp thinks about the Supreme Court justices, when he called them, in their face an “oligarchic elite”. It could be understood that in the new mood, expressed by Rothman and gang, the Supreme Court and all the gatekeepers of democracy, the Attorney General, the Israel Security Agency, the Mossad and the military, are nothing more than remnants of the Mapai rule that passed away over 40 years ago.

In an opinion piece published in Israel Hayom on September 15, 2023, Yaakov Berdugo, a Netanyahu devotee writes that the goal of the High Court of Justice is to “bypass the choices and desires of the people at any cost and march Israel along the judges’ desired paths on the most sensitive issues.” The High Court of Justice is summed up by Berdugo as possessing three aspirations: “Engineering of relations with the Palestinians, transforming Israel into a state of all its citizens, and having the upper hand in the identity of elected officials.” In other words, the High Court of Justice is a left-wing body that works against the will of “the people” on the Palestinian issue, gnaws away at the Jewish nature of the state and works to topple Netanyahu from power against the “will of the people.” Hence, anyone who sides with the High Court or undertakes to carry out its rulings against the government’s decisions is displayed as a rebel against the “will of the people”. The gatekeepers and Supreme Court justices represent the deep state through which the Mapai rule, although long gone, continues to exist through its central institutions.

Relying on the Declaration of Independence as a founding document, and interpreting its spirit, instead of relying on clear, written clauses built on a broad consensus, is what enabled the fundamentalist right’s attempt to carry out an attempted regime coup, to transform Israel into a Jewish state according to religious law and to establish an apartheid regime in perpetuity over the Palestinians. Years of neglecting both points, whitewashing the settlements, legitimizing settlers, granting concessions and money to the ultra-Orthodox, excluding and discriminating against Arab citizens, and the unwillingness to decide on the plight of 5 million Palestinians all of these weakened the democratic foundations of the country, and created a distortion that created fertile ground for the rise of Israeli fascism

Hundreds of thousands are marching in the streets, among them the writer of these lines, loudly shouting “democracy” against these attempts to abolish the powers of the High Court. Clinging to the Declaration of Independence is not a proper answer for attorney Ilan Bombach, who claims it is not a founding document. The Declaration of Independence was intended to serve a one-party, centralized regime which responded to a historical need: to build a state from nothing, to give it a language, institutions, to wage war against the indigenous Palestinian population, to take in a million Jews to establish a Jewish majority and provide them with housing, education, health, and employment.

Since then, reality has changed. The startup nation cannot be satisfied with a sparse document that does not provide answers to all the problems in the current crisis. When a majority replaces “the people” with all its diverse components, and imposes its will on the minority, the road to fascism is paved. It is impossible to hide behind “Jewish and democratic” to cover up the system’s failings. We must enact a constitution that enshrines the rights of all residents living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The former head of the Mossad, Tamir Pardo, made it clear in no uncertain terms that what Israel maintains in the West Bank and Gaza is an apartheid regime.

The call for “democracy,” correct in itself, cannot mask this truth. Those who truly want democracy, and to ensure its existence for generations, should apply it to all residents living today on that piece of land under Israeli control. Democracy for everyone between the Jordan and the sea.

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