A few years ago, a wise old Jewish man asked me, "Do you know the only time Israel was ever democratic?" And he immediately answered his own question – "for a few months between the abolition of the military government over Israeli Arabs and the occupation of the West Bank." We both laughed. But the joke was at our expense.
And then, Wednesday morning, I discovered that V-Dem, a Swedish research institute which issues a democracy index, had concluded that Israel isn't a liberal democracy, but an electoral democracy. In other words, to use simple, populist language, the only democratic thing about Israel is that it holds elections and its residents (or some of them, at least) are eligible to vote.
Interestingly, however, I haven't noticed any decline. As far as I'm concerned, the situation was lousy even before then.
What was also interesting was the following comment in V-Dem's report: "Israel lost its long-time status as liberal democracy in 2023. It is now classified as an electoral democracy – for the first time in over 50 years." One might have thought that Israel deserved this ranking even before that.
After all, it's a country that, throughout most of its existence, has either kept parts of its population, generally those who meet the definition of "Palestinian," under a military government or kept other parts of that same Palestinian population under occupation and a system of military law.
And that's even without being petty and getting into its actions at the time of its establishment, when it expelled Palestinians and barred them from returning to their homes after the War of Independence ended.
But if Israel until now was a Jewish democratic country – that is, a democracy for its Jews and Jewish for its Arabs – it has now simply become Jewish for everyone, including its liberal secular population.
And it's far from clear that the Israel of 2024 even meets the definition of an electoral democracy. That's because Israel de facto controls all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, yet only some of that area's residents have citizenship and the right to vote. It all depends on whether they belong to the chosen race or not. Overseas, this is called apartheid. In Israel, saying that word is forbidden.
Yet it's not because of the Palestinians, the occupation, the war raging in the Gaza Strip or the indictment against Israel at the International Court of Justice in the Hague that Israel was downgraded to the status of an electoral democracy, alongside countries like Poland, Brazil and others.
Rather, it happened because of domestic politics, mainly the "substantial declines in indicators measuring the transparency and predictability of the law" and the government's attacks on the legal system.
I don't know how Israel acquired the status of a liberal democracy when it maintains substantive, institutional discrimination and has perpetrated oppression in its own backyard for years. None of this usually happens in countries that presume to be part of the world's free, liberal and democratic world.
Nevertheless, this report by the Swedish research institute, even if it's only symbolic, is happy news for anyone who seeks justice for the Palestinians and hope for this country. It's already clear that no change in Israel will be propelled from the inside; that's a lost cause.
But maybe a report like this, in the shadow of the atrocities happening in Gaza and a general atmosphere of boycotts and isolation of Israel, creates a chance, albeit a small one, that this country will be saved. If only.