BYGADI TAUB
The only way to make Israel renounce its Jewish national character is to overthrow its democracy. Since as long as there is universal suffrage and a large Jewish majority that cherishes its Jewish culture, then Shabbat will be Israel’s day of rest, Jewish holidays will structure its calendar, Hebrew will be its first official language, and its public symbols will draw predominantly on the Jewish tradition. This makes clear why the post-national globalist Jewish elite (in Israel and no less importantly outside it) must work to undermine democracy if it seeks to make Israel a non-Jewish state. Nowhere is the connection between the critique of nationalism and the assault on democracy—through the use of human rights—as clear and explicit.
And it is not only clear in theory, it is also manifested institutionally. Consider the rise of Israel’s Supreme Court to the status of an uber-government. It usurped power by means of reinterpreting two of Israel’s semiconstitutional Basic Laws, which sought to secure “human dignity and liberty” and “freedom of occupation.” These laws, the court argued—without any explicit authorization in the language of the law—granted it the power of judicial review. It has since used these laws mostly to overrule the executive and the legislative, but when it comes to the rights of individuals, the court is sensitive to the rights of suspects almost only when they belong to minorities and the issue has a political aspect (illegal immigrants, Arab citizens, terrorists native or foreign). In ordinary criminal cases, where citizens are most vulnerable to the abuse of power by the state, the court is almost entirely indifferent to their rights and mostly serves as a rubber stamp for the prosecution.
The usurpation of power took some decades to mature, but it has finally reached a state in which there is no formal limit to the court’s power, no area of politics over which it does not assert jurisdiction, and no checks or balances able to counter it. Of course, it also helps that the decidedly progressive court has veto power over the nomination of its own judges. It is thus able to impose a progressive agenda, subverting the democratic mechanism of decision-making.
A vast number of other NGOs—which include “human rights” in their mission statements—operate freely inside Israel, with the aim of changing Israeli society and subverting its democratic modes of governance. As Swedish journalist Paulina Neuding aptly put it, Israel is a virtual Disneyland for NGOs. Many of these are bent on inflaming the conflict, defaming Israel by documenting the human rights violations of one side only, real and imagined, with the explicit intention of drawing outside pressure to force Israel into making concessions to its foes. A 2021 report by B’Tselem titled “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid,” clearly aims at world public opinion, which B’Tselem hopes to leverage in order to bully Israel into doing its bidding. B’Tselem director, activist Hagai El-Ad, has already taken the case against his own country to the U.N. Security Council in 2016. This is the kind of anti-democratic strategy in the name of human rights that Fonte first identified in the wake of the Durban conference.
Anti-Zionists who think Israel is an “apartheid” state are a minority in Israel. But they wield influence far beyond their numbers. They have Haaretz, Israel’s most important daily, which energetically promotes their case, and they are disproportionally represented in academia, the bureaucracy, and the courts. They are also supported by a seemingly limitless stream of cash from abroad from NGOs and private donors, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, international institutions and, strikingly, foreign governments, too.
This deluge of cash is aimed at changing Israel in the spirit of the progressive globalist elite, in ways its citizens have clearly rejected. Those include the usual anti-religious, anti-national, and anti-family agendas, with the additional goals of fostering Palestinian nationalism and political Islam (and pushing Arab citizens of Israel in these directions). Some of that money comes from Jews in the diaspora: B’Tselem, for example, is heavily subsidized by the New Israel Fund, whose donors are largely American Jews.
Matan Peleg’s book A State for Sale: How Foreign Countries Interfere with Israeli Policy documented funds furnished by states and associations of states to campaigns designed to change the social, political, and cultural fabric of Israel. Among these are a campaign to negatively influence the public perception of settlers, a campaign to expunge Jewish religious content from Israel’s education system, and another aiming to naturalize illegal immigrants.
Toping the list of state actors who have poured money, over the last decade, into trying to change Israel are Germany, with over 154 million shekels, the EU with over 152 million, the U.S. with over 61 million, the U.N. with 59.4 million, and with Holland, Switzerland, and Norway trailing not far behind. There is also Turkish money harnessed to promote the Muslim Brotherhood among Israel’s Arab citizens.
All this money is used to undermine the rights of Jews to self-determination in their own nation-state, by creating levers that can subdue the democratic will of Israel’s citizenry.