Israel is an authoritarian society
Something that I realized on February 9, 2024:
Israel is an authoritarian society.
I don’t know why it has taken me so long to consider the truth of this statement, and indeed I still need to examine and understand Israeli society as its own thing. But refreshing my memory on the outstanding features of what constitutes an authoritarian societal system, it’s clear that Israel checks off high-ranking boxes. Patriarchal. Militaristic. Dogmatic. Ethnocentric, oh my god.
And, as Robert Jay Lifton intimated in his study of totalitarian China in the mid-20th century, the more authoritarian a society is, the less democratic it can be.1 It’s an inverse relationship; and the more democracy is absent or is weakened, the greater the chance authoritarianism will come in to fill the vacuum.
Robert Altemeyer reminds us:
“[A]uthoritarians see the world more sharply in terms of their in-groups and their out-groups than most people do. They are so ethnocentric that you find them making statements such as, ‘If you’re not with us, then you’re against us.’ There’s no neutral in the highly ethnocentric mind. This dizzying ‘Us versus Everyone Else’ outlook usually develops from traveling in those ‘tight circles’ we talked about [earlier], and whirling round in those circles reinforces the ethnocentrism as the authoritarian follower uses his friends to validate his opinions.”2
I had latched onto this passage for the final clause here, which describes social proof. But Altemeyer is putting social proof in the context of ethnocentrism, and there’s no denying that Israel is a highly ethnocentric culture.3 It’s indisputable.
All of these things line up and equal authoritarianism.
I think the tagline, the slogan, the advertising motto that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” blinded me to all of these characteristics that put the lie to that spin-laden statement. Israel may have a façade of democratic norms, but the very fact that those are reserved for those deemed officially “Jewish” — not “Israeli” on official documents! — reveals the depths of the deception of this campaign to convince (Western) audiences that Israel is in the same category as democracies around the world.
It’s fake. It’s an advertising campaign.
Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961). W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.: New York.
Robert Altemeyer, The Authoritarians (2006), p. 87.
“The meaning of ETHNOCENTRISM is the attitude that one's own group, ethnicity, or nationality is superior to others.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “Ethnocentrism.”
The fatal flaw of Western liberal democracy is that it’s perfectly possible to have a society where only a small percentage of the population is enfranchised or where slavery exists and said society can still be considered “democratic.” In Classical Athens, the gold standard for the Western democratic tradition, only about twenty percent of the population were citizens. The other eighty percent consisted of slaves, various categories of foreigners, and women. We often forget that a huge number of noncitizens had to work anonymously and thanklessly so Socrates could gadfly about the forum. This is why I think terms like authoritarianism have no meaning. In any society, the people who aren’t considered part of “we the people” are going to feel the hand of the state much more strongly than those who are in that group. Freedom often means the ability for real, legal persons (ie the people who actually matter and have rights) to assert their power over legal non-persons. This explains why so many Americans still think that not being able to discriminate constitutes a loss of freedom and why the idea of Arabs being equal to Jews is considered to be an unacceptable notion in Israel.