So, Israel is No Longer a Liberal Democracy?
What that does, and doesn't, mean.
So Israel is no longer a liberal democracy. Based on the 2024 Varieties of Democracy “V-Dem” Index released earlier this week, the country has been downgraded from “liberal democracy” to “electoral democracy”. This has been met with much self-satisfied delight among the Western Left/liberal commentariat, and social media in particular, and predictably ignored by the Western Right/hawkish cheerleaders. The responses and non-responses alike are typical of the terminable issue within the West’s view of Israel which presents only two views of the country, one (call it the Owen Jones view) in which Israel is an irredeemable and violently oppressive “coloniser”, and the other (call it the Douglas Murray view) in which Israel is an impeachable paragon of human rights and democratic decency. Most people in the West interested in Israel and the Israel-Palestine conflict find themselves perpetually stuck between the Jones’s and Murray’s, both equally blinkered and in many respects dishonest, and the narrative warfare just perpetuates itself adding little of insight or value. As usual, the Western gaze has little interest in Israel unless rockets and bombs are flying, and even then seldom pay any attention to Israeli domestic politics or policies.
In that regard, hopefully this is a useful contribution to making some sense of what the recent V-Dem report means, and does not mean, for Israel as a democracy. In order to make sense of that, we first need to put some operational definitions on “democracy”, and the various characteristics of states within the V-Dem methodologies. The V-Dem characterisation of “liberal democracy” and “electoral democracy” reflects, respectively, Schumpeter’s “minimal democracy” construct and Dahl’s “maximalist democracy” construct. The fundamental difference between minimal and maximal democratic constructs is the presence of factors that are not necessarily direct features of electoral democracy but are nevertheless crucial to the operation of a liberal, open social order, such as freedom of expression and association and freedom of the judiciary. Thus, it is possible to have countries that hold open fair elections but have, for example, curtailed the independence of the judiciary and the media (e.g., Hungary, Poland).
These characteristics underpin the V-Dem distinction between “liberal democracy” and “electoral democracy”. An electoral democracy is minimally democratic, i.e., it holds free and fair elections in addition to exhibiting universal suffrage, and freedom of expression and association. Liberal democracy contains these characteristics, while additionally exhibiting separation of powers of the core branches of State: judicial and legislative constraints on the executive, and individual liberties and equality guaranteed by the rule of law and legal access. A crucial distinction, therefore, is that a liberal democracy is characterised by the protection of individual and minority rights, and the ability of the judiciary to hold the executive accountable and limit the overreach of executive power. Conversely, an electoral democracy reflects Dahl’s concept of “polyarchy”, in that the institutions required for democratic function are present (e.g., elected representatives in an electorally-accountable government), but may lack certain characteristics of maximally democratic liberal democracies. The V-Dem analysis is not merely a box-ticking exercise, but a comprehensive academic endeavour that draws on a voluminous dataset to provide a statistical quantum of a nation’s democratic qualities.
The first point to emphasise with clarity is that Israel’s backslide from liberal to electoral democracy is not related to the war in Gaza. Of course, this important fact seems to be conveniently overlooked, albeit predictably, by Western Left/liberals who have interpreted the “Israel is not a liberal democracy” as vindication of their preconceived view of a state which they believe should not exist. Western Hawks have their own predictable response; to point to the fact that even as an electoral democracy, Israel remains in far better shape politically than the closed autocratic regimes that surround it. This point is a popular Hawkish cliché, but it is also sophistry for the simple fact that Israel’s yardstick on democracy and human rights is not, nor never has been, repressive Islamic regimes. Israel’s yardstick is the West, the norms and standards of liberal democracy. The reality is that Israel’s falling out of the liberal democracy categorisation, for the first time in 50 years, has nothing to do with the current war at all; it primarily reflects the government's assault on judicial independence since Netanyahu’s electoral victory in November 2022. In the context of the distinction between liberal (maximalist) and electoral (minimalist) democracies, the downgrading to electoral democracy is, to quote the report, “primarily due to substantial declines in the indicators measuring the transparency and predictability of the law, and government attacks on the judiciary.”
The second point to emphasise is that the V-Dem report is not necessarily a disaster; the magnitude of change is minor and Israel retains the minimum democratic functions of free and fair elections and freedom of expression. These characteristics are crucial to the possibility of an altered course in the trajectories of Israeli domestic political turmoil. Israel’s electoral system is such that large power swings are possible, with just 2% of the electorate required to return a seat in the Israeli parliament (the Knesset). This system also renders Israeli domestic politics acutely unstable, with the electoral landscape dominated by a multiplicity of small parties representing narrow interests that orbit around the larger parties, such as Netanyahu’s Likud, bartering their way into awkward coalitions. Terms of office in Israel are four years; most governments never make it past three years before coalitions disintegrate. The coalition which Netanyahu assembled to form a government in November 2022 was the most Right-wing government in Israeli history, with ultra-nationalist and ultra-Orthodox religious and settler interests dominating the conversation.
However, the evident democratic backsliding, euphemistic as that term is, does remain concerning as a reflection of trends in Israeli politics and democracy, and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Before October 7th and the war in Gaza, Israeli domestic politics had arguably never been more polarised or tumultuous, with widespread civil protests against the proposed judicial reforms. To understand why the issue of judicial reform has been so damaging to Israeli democracy, it is necessary to grasp some aspects of Israel’s political order. In the first instance, Israel has no written constitution, despite efforts to produce one at the foundation of the state. Instead, it was envisioned that “basic laws” would be passed by the Knesset, which culminated in the 1992 passing of two such laws (Human Dignity and Liberty, and Freedom of Occupation) specifically addressing human rights, which contained clauses against the degree to which rights enshrined in the Basic Laws could be limited. As the Basic Laws superseded other legislation, legislation passed by the Knesset that was legally challenged could be struck down by the Supreme Court if it was deemed to be incompatible with the rights enshrined in the Basic Laws. Over subsequent years, the Supreme Court has struck down over 20 legislative provisions related to issues of the rights enshrined by the 1992 Basic Laws.
In that regard, to the Right-wing of Israeli politics, the Supreme Court had become an obstacle to power. In some ways, this perception is ironic given that on matters of most concern to the Israeli Right, namely national security and issues arising from the military occupation of the West Bank, including settlement expansions, the Supreme Court has by and large sided with the state. Nevertheless, the judicial reforms, initially passed in a bill by the Knesset in 2023, proposed severe curtailments to judicial review of the executive, bringing judicial appointments under government control, and allowing the Knesset to circumvent any decision of the Supreme Court to strike down legislation. An important characteristic of the Israeli parliamentary system is that every government holds a majority, which carries the important implication that the judicial reforms would mean that a government could pass, without any checks or balances, legislation restricting or rescinding the human rights enshrined in the Basic Laws. As the Supreme Court is effectively the only branch of state that can constrain legislative and executive power, the judicial reforms were rightly viewed by the public as an attack on Israeli democracy itself, generating the social convulsions that preceded October 7th.
It is important to note that the V-Dem 2024 report is based primarily on trends over 2023, and thus there are elements to the emphasis on the judicial reforms that are already somewhat obsolete. In the face of widespread civil unrest at the proposals, the government suspended elements of the judicial reform bill, which was followed by the Supreme Court nullifying the government's attempt to curtail its powers of judicial review. Nevertheless, this places the judicial system and the government firmly at odds, and the war in Gaza rages against the background of what amounts to a domestic constitutional crisis in Israel. The democratic backsliding also has a nexus to the war in Gaza given Netanyahu’s public rhetoric declaring that elections “mean a defeat for Israel.” Published around the same time as the V-Dem report, the Israeli Democracy Index 2023 highlighted the plummeted levels of public trust in the government (at 23%) and the Knesset (at 19%). Yet the war has now become the means through which Netanyahu and his lunatic Right-wing ultra-nationalists and religious settler fanatics will seek to leverage holding on to power for their full term of office. It is entirely conceivable that their remaining three years in government if they manage to resist widespread calls for a general election, could yield further erosions of Israeli democracy.
While the viability of the present government and the downgrading of Israel’s democratic status appear to be more acute issues, such a focus belies the longer-term domestic temporal trends of the kind the Western gaze is habitually oblivious to. The first is that the downward trend in the V-Dem quantum of liberal democracy, from 0.7 (on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0) in 2000 to 0.63 in the most recent ratings. The temporal trends coincide with much of Netanyahu's reign, in which he has mobilised forces out of page one of the populist playbook, mounting attacks against the ever-nebulous “elites” and garnering support from the fringes of the Right. Within Israel, this has meant bestowing power on small, extremist parties representing narrow religious and settler interests who are openly hostile to democracy and, if it stands in the way of their messianic mission, the state itself. In 2018, Netanyahu’s government passed a new Basic Law, termed the “nation-state law”, legislation which stipulated that the right to self-determination in Israel was unique to the Jewish people, de facto downgrading any non-Jewish Israelis to second-class citizens. After the formation of the recent coalition in November 2022, the government policy agenda submitted to the Knesset had at its first principle that the “Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel” and to promote “settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel”, including “Judea and Samaria” (i.e., the West Bank). The agenda of this coalition of settler ultra-nationalists and religious fanatics has been openly autocratic and theocratic.
This latter principle reflects the political culmination of the much longer temporal trend influencing the trajectory of Israeli democracy, namely the journey of the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) from the margins of Israeli society to power brokers of Israel’s new political realities. This trend surfaced over the period of the Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War between two different conceptions of religious Zionism, one which denied the legitimacy of the state of Israel as an “an anti-messianic act”, and the other which blended the establishment of the state as a messianic act in itself, “intrinsically sanctified” as the human implementation of God’s call1. This latter conception of messianism, emboldened with the belief that the military victories of the Six-Day and Yom Kippur War were divinely sanctified, morphed into a religious Zionism squarely at odds with the state-limited, secular political Zionism that had characterised the Labor movement of the foundational decades of Israel. Under the spiritual leadership of Rabbi Kook, the Gush Emunim movement expanded settlements in the West Bank, predicated upon the belief that while they recognised the legitimacy of the state of Israel, the laws of man were always secondary to the laws of God, such that for “the first time in Jewish history that messianism was utilized as a legitimation for action in defiance of a democratically-elected autonomous Jewish government.”2
Thus, within the Gush Emunim conception of religious Zionism, the messianic mission could never be subservient to democracy, the state, or state institutions; a view that is now extant within Netanyahu’s government. The political mobilisation of this doctrinal messianism has occurred concurrent with the evolution of the Haredi from the societal fringes. Exempted from military service, there are now exclusively Haredi units in the IDF. Attendance in secular state schools has been declining steadily for decades while attendance in the independent ultra-Orthodox school system grows, in the context of the highest birthrates of any group in Israeli society. The latent “fifth column” that for most of Israel’s existence have lived off the state separate from the majority of Israeli society has emerged as a social and political force, infused with nationalism and messianic zeal. The rhetoric from Netanyahu and his ultra-nationalist and religious goons indicates that their intention for the post-Gaza war is the imposition of a full security state over all territory west of the river Jordan; the messianic dream of Eretz Israel in its entirety. The implication, as yet unsaid, is that this would yield a situation they intend to operate in perpetuity, one which would inevitably be incompatible with preserving a democratic state.
And so domestically Israel remains at a constitutional and political impasse. The V-Dem report is not a red light, but it is an amber light for both acute political turmoil and longer-term temporal trends reflecting the convergence of religious zealotry, settler extremism, and secular ultra-nationalism into the dominant contemporary political force in Israel. There is some cause for optimism evident in the mass protests at the judicial reform bill, the judiciary overturning the government's attempts to limit judicial review, IDF reservist pilots threatening to stand down if the judicial reforms were implemented, and the freezing of implementation to several of the bill’s more autocratic provisions (e.g., a government majority on the judicial selection committee). In one interpretation, this is evidence of a robust democracy. To some extent that is true, but a better characterisation is that it reflects a robust civil society; Israeli democracy is inherently unstable and fragile. This fragility paradoxically provides another glimmer of hope given the electoral system allows for large swings in the composition of the Knesset. The Israeli Left, near-extinct as it is, could attempt to strategically align with Israeli Arabs, who comprise ~20% of the population, while mobilising the anger at Netanyahu and his government for the security failings that underpinned the October 7th pogrom.
On balance, however, the odds of a dynamic centrist or centre-Left resurgence appear slim. The contemporary Israeli Right, aflame with messianic zeal, appears content to drive the country to the status of a pariah state. Aluf Benn, chief editor of Haaretz, recently summed up the status quo:
“With or without Netanyahu, “conflict management” and “mowing the grass” will remain state policy—which means more occupation, settlements, and displacement. This strategy might appear to be the least risky option, at least for an Israeli public scarred by the horrors of October 7 and deaf to new suggestions of peace. But it will only lead to more catastrophe.”3
An environment of increasing militarisation and settlement expansion does not lend itself to preserving democratic norms and function. Netanyahu’s legacy may inevitably be the autocratic and theocratic forces he has unleashed on Israeli society.
Ravitzky, A. ‘Exile in the Holy Land: The Dilemma of Haredi Jewry’, in Medding, P.Y. (ed.) Israel State and Society: 1948-1988. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp.89-125.
Waxman, C.I. Messianism, Zionism, and the State of Israel. Modern Judaism. 1987 May;7(2):175–92.
Benn, A. Israel’s Self-Destruction: Netanyahu, the Palestinians, and the Price of Neglect. Foreign Affairs. 2024 March/April:44-58.