Israel Is Not the Democracy We Pretend It Is

Photo via The New York Times

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Israelis will be heading to the polls in a few weeks, as the entire Knesset is up for election on October 27th. Polls suggest that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule may come to an end, although legislative control will be decided by a razor-thin margin. The campaign is proving to be quite newsworthy, as Netanyahu’s government, which has been found by a United Nations commission to have committed genocide in Gaza, is now being branded as pro-Palestinian by its opposition. This absurdity illustrates that the actual outcome of these elections is mostly meaningless. Netanyahu is far from an aberration in Israeli politics. Compared to the challengers labeling a government accused of genocide for being too soft on Palestinians, he can fairly be classified as a “moderate.” Anyone who views his fall in the polls as good news for Palestine or future peace is sure to be sorely disappointed. 

While the fact that Israel’s elections are essentially a contest of which party can claim to be “strongest” on national security is disturbing, this is not a story about Israeli legislative politics. Rather, it is a story about something far deeper and more fundamental: the idea, held sacred by most of the Western world, that Israel is the Middle East’s only democracy. In his announcement forming the Yashar Party, the primary opposition party this cycle against Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, leader Gadi Eisenkot declared his overarching goal was to “ensure the existence of Israel as a Jewish, democratic, and strong state.” For his part, Netanyahu recently admonished his opposition in the Knesset that “Israel has been and will remain a democracy,” in a fiery speech that included plentiful podium fist-pounding. 

Appeals to Israel as a beacon of democracy are nothing new. In fact, they trace back to Israel’s very founding. When President Harry Truman made the landmark 1947 decision to swiftly recognize the new state of Israel, full de jure recognition was reserved until the country had a democratically elected government, which took until 1949. Since then, the United States-Israel relationship has had its foundation in the vague moral arguments of promoting democratic ideals through the protection of its only embattled foothold in the Middle East. It is a simple argument, made much stronger by the fact that none of Israel’s Middle East neighbors can be seen as being anything remotely close to democratic. 

Unfortunately for adherents to the school of democracy protection and promotion, Israel is far from the poster child of democratic success. Israel consistently scores in the low 70s on the 100-point Freedom House Freedom in the World Report, barely remaining in the “Free” category. By comparison, every major Western European democracy scores above 85, and many exceed 95. V-Dem, widely regarded as the most in-depth measure of democracy in the world, downgraded Israel out of the “liberal” democracy category in 2024, a stunning rebuke that capped over a decade of steady decline. It is the same first step Hungary took on its alarming slide into what V-Dem now classifies as an electoral autocracy. Notably, both Freedom House and V-Dem assess the West Bank and Gaza separately from Israel, meaning even these damning scores do not account for the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli military rule.

It is not just outside research groups that are labeling Israel as a democratic failure. The Israel Democracy Institute, which has a stated mission of “bolster[ing] the values and institutions of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state” and has received a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Israeli government, publishes a yearly Democracy Index. In their most recent report, only a quarter of Jews and around 10% of Arabs in Israel gave the country a positive rating for democracy. No matter who you ask or how you measure it, Israeli democracy has shown time and again to be far more of a political talking point than lived reality. 

In recent years, the decline of democracy in Israel has been especially drastic. In 2019, Netanyahu was indicted on a series of corruption charges, including bribery and fraud, following a years-long investigation. He promptly accused the investigators of an “attempted coup,” kicking off a lengthy legal and political battle that remains unresolved. Netanyahu was never able to produce any evidence for his “coup” allegations. The trial has experienced numerous war-related delays, prompting allegations of deliberate attempts to prolong the conflict for personal gain. A Haaretz investigation revealed that Netanyahu pressured security officials to raise threat-level assessments against him in a bid to further delay his trial appearances. His government has also refused to establish an independent state commission of inquiry into the intelligence failures that preceded the October 7th attacks, arguing that a panel appointed by the Supreme Court would be biased against it. Questioning the legitimacy of the judicial system and attempting to dodge accountability through “national security” and “bias” arguments is a well-documented tactic on the road to authoritarianism. 

In January 2023, the Knesset attempted to implement unprecedented judicial reforms that would strip the Israeli Supreme Court of its ability to declare legislation unconstitutional, alongside other changes aimed at weakening the courts in favor of the legislature. Members of Netanyahu’s government introduced and actively championed the reform, although the Prime Minister himself was barred from directly participating due to the corruption charges. The proposed reforms sparked mass protests and international attention, and were finally paused after general strikes in March. The Supreme Court later struck down the flagship “reasonableness” amendment, and the Knesset eventually settled on merely replacing some members of a Judicial Selection Committee with political appointees, an effort that is itself the subject of an ongoing Supreme Court case. 

Although the outbreak of the current war in Gaza overshadowed the judicial reform efforts and most of the bills never went into effect, the intent of the governing parties to consolidate power and erode checks and balances was and is overwhelmingly clear. The war in Gaza is the tragic escalation of long-running efforts to tighten Israel’s control over the Palestinian territories. Amnesty International reports that administrative detentions in the West Bank were already at a 20-year high before October 7th. Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law, were continuing to explode in size long before the current war. While settlers with full voting rights continue to pour in, over three million Palestinians remain under occupation and military law, with zero Knesset representation. As Hagai El-Ad, then-executive director of Israel’s leading human rights group, B’Tselem, put it, Israel “is not a democracy that has a temporary occupation attached to it.”

The upcoming election has been making news for all the wrong reasons as well. Israel’s Central Elections Committee recently attempted to bar all Arab parties, and two individual candidates, from standing in the October elections. The Committee alleged that these parties and individuals violated a law that bans candidates and parties that show “negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” The decision, which was overturned by the Supreme Court, would have left Israel’s Arab population, about 20% of the country, with zero candidates from Arab parties. 

The absurd and autocratic irony of claiming to protect the existence of Israel as a democratic state by banning parties from standing in a “democratic” election is painfully obvious. Defenders of Israeli democracy insist that turmoil like this proves the system works. At the height of the judicial reform protests, Alan Dershowitz, one of Israel’s foremost defenders in America, argued that Israel’s frequent elections and mass demonstrations “are not symptoms of a weakening of democracy; they are evidence of a strong democracy at work.” But surviving an assault is not the same as being healthy. A democracy whose elections stay open only because judges keep overruling attempts to disqualify the opposition, while the governing coalition simultaneously works to strip those same judges of power, is a democracy on borrowed time. 

Examples of Israel’s failing democracy can be cited until one is blue in the face, including its placement in the eighth percentile for press freedom and fifth percentile for civil liberties among OECD countries. The obvious counterargument will always be to look at Israel’s neighbors – at least there is some democracy in a region of autocracies. The fundamental premise of this assessment is fatally flawed, however. A half-democracy has no standing to be celebrated as a democracy, and a democracy doing everything possible to assert autocratic powers while hiding behind democratic smoke and mirrors is no better than self-assured authoritarianism. In fact, in many ways it is worse: operating as an autocracy without the usual international scrutiny, and with American weapons and diplomatic cover, certainly has its appeals. 

American leaders have occasionally said the quiet part out loud: “protecting democracy,” both in Israel and elsewhere, is often little more than a convenient public justification for pursuing economic and strategic self-interest. In 1986, then-Senator Joe Biden probably put it best: “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.” Then-President Biden attempted to recast these shockingly frank remarks as evidence of an ironclad commitment to Israel based on shared values and democracy in a 2023 meeting with Israel’s president, but it is a hard sell, to say the least. The sale becomes essentially impossible when you recall this is the same Joe Biden who asserted the “naked self-interest of the U.S.” must guide all Middle East policy decisions. 

Israel is, in the best possible light, a deeply flawed democracy that is experiencing rapid authoritarian backsliding. Major human rights organizations go further. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Israel’s own B’Tselem have all concluded that Israel practices apartheid, and B’Tselem and Amnesty have since found that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, the same conclusion reached by a United Nations commission. Put simply, this is not the behavior of democracy. Essentially, no serious study of Israeli government and society can come to the conclusion that the state of Israel is the model democracy American rhetoric celebrates. A healthy Israeli democracy in need of protection and celebration is no more than a neat, bipartisan political talking point with zero basis in reality.  

As the war in Gaza has dragged on, public support of Israel in the United States has collapsed. For the first time in Pew Research Center polling, a majority of American adults hold an unfavorable view of Israel. The iron truth of overwhelming bipartisan support for Israel has finally been broken, a shift especially pronounced among younger Americans. The atrocities in Gaza appear to finally be forcing a reckoning on Israel among Americans, which is playing out in high-profile midterm races across the country. While the recent actions of Israel are deservedly under a microscope, it is long overdue to recognize that the foundational view of Israel itself – a reliable, democratic ally in the Middle East – is either wishful thinking or convenient political fiction. Israel may be a historically reliable avenue for America to assert influence in the Middle East, but it is far from a democracy. 

In 1949, Harry Truman waited for Israel to prove itself as a democracy before granting it full recognition. Seventy-seven years later, an honest application of that same standard would produce a very different answer. 

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This article was edited by Whitney Woodrow.