Emmanuel Rosen
Photo: Sharon Beck
No protests in Tel Aviv
Op-ed: Israelis live in Middle East’s only democratic state, but fail to exercise this privilege
There is regular tone of arrogance and disparagement in the way proud democracies view their lagging sisters, dictatorial or semi-dictatorial states. There is of course no room for dispute here: Democracy, despite its weaknesses, is better than dictatorship. Democracy is about progress, enlightenment, and natural choice. Dictatorship, on the other hand, is a corrupt system where the nation suffers while the rulers celebrate at its expense.
We like to reinforce this obvious thesis with obvious examples. What can you say when you compare Iran to the United States, for example? There is no sane person who would question this decisive equation. The authorities in the US don’t shoot protestors on the streets, while in Iran there is no real meaning to the people’s desires and choices.
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Yet what happens when we look at the details? When we ask, for example, how her majesty, democracy, helps the hundreds of thousands of poor Israelis who are having trouble making a living and feeding their children? What precisely is the meaning of democracy to the roughly 14,000 street kids in our democratic state? How are these adults and children different than the poverty-stricken Egyptians who struggle under Hosni Mubarak’s cruel dictatorship?
And what happens when we insist on asking whether the average Israeli truly has an influence on the decision-making processes of his elected government? Does Israel’s democratic government indeed reflect its voters’ wishes when it makes political and economic decisions? Moreover, are elected ministers and Knesset members truly the people who make the decisions, or perhaps in our democracy real power is held by an oligarchy, not to say a byzantine court, comprising bureaucrats, close associates and wealthy friends who are the real rulers, even though nobody elected them?
Israelis are indifferent
These provocative questions become even more annoying when we scrutinize the genetic code of Israel’s democracy. Time and again we ask why Israelis don’t hit the streets to protest against their democratic government, which openly ignores the people. Israelis don’t come out because they are indifferent, and they’re indifferent because Israeli democracy is a wonderful sedative. When the issue has nothing to do with Arabs threatening to exterminate us, we lack the motivation to protest and demonstrate. After all, we elected our government, and therefore according to our twisted democratic perception we fully performed our civilian duty.
It is no coincidence that many of us are enviously looking at the streets of Egypt or Tunisia. Beyond the automatically arrogant interpretation, which views any such protests as a radical Islamic/Iranian conspiracy, the fact is that millions of people are demonstrating over there because they truly want change. They live in a dictatorship but think about democracy. In Israel, with the exception of a few examples, we live in the Middle East’s only democracy, yet we forego in advance the real privilege to use it.
The above is of course not an effort to defend dictatorial regimes. While democracy is a bad system, none is better. Regrettably, this says virtually nothing about the state of the citizens who live under these two types of regimes. Convince me that the state of poor Egyptians is worse than that of poverty-stricken Israelis. Explain to me how the influence of Israel’s middle class on fuel and bread prices is greater than the influence exerted by the Egyptian middle class. Prove to me that in Israel the government executes the will of the people, while in Egypt only the will of one man is executed.
There should be a line connecting Cairo’s al-Tahrir Square and Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. These two squares must be filled by citizens who are unwilling to tolerate an indifferent, unresponsive rule. Yet for the time being, the square in Cairo is crowded, while the one in Tel Aviv is democratic, empty and sad.
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