Netanyahu’s perception of democracy is full of factual mistakes – opinion

Education does not prevent one of Israel’s two most highly educated and brilliant prime ministers from demonstrating embarrassing ignorance and lack of respect for facts in what he says.

By SUSAN HATTIS ROLEF
PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu announces a peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, during a news conference at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem on Thursday. (photo credit: ABIR SULTAN / REUTERS)
PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu announces a peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, during a news conference at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem on Thursday.
(photo credit: ABIR SULTAN / REUTERS)
Last Wednesday, when a bill submitted by Yesh Atid-Telem to amend Basic Law: the Government came up for preliminary reading in the Knesset, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to turn up unexpectedly in the plenum to present the government’s objection to the bill, in place of Justice Minister Avi Nissenkorn.
Why? Because he sought to personally present his objection to the amendment, which prohibits the president of the state from assigning the task of forming a new government after elections to a person indicted for a serious felony involving moral turpitude, fraud and breach of trust, or an offense defined as a crime, arguing that it enables an official (viz., the attorney-general) to remove a candidate for the premiership by simply issuing an indictment against him. Netanyahu proceeded to term the bill “an Iranian-style antidemocratic law.”
We are used to Netanyahu’s flimsy presentation of facts, not to mention total misrepresentation of facts, but this time he outdid himself and, as usual, seemed to get away with it.
Netanyahu defined democracy as a system based on the wishes of the majority and a separation of powers between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, which check and balance each other.
Not surprisingly, no mention whatsoever was made of the fact that liberal democracy is also a system that protects the rights of minorities and the human and civil rights of everyone, and secures the rule of law, which applies equally to everyone.
The mention of the checks and balances among the three branches of government was cynical on Netanyahu’s part, given the fact that he keeps doing everything in his power to weaken both the Knesset and the court system vis-à-vis the executive branch, and their ability to restrain his own frequently unbridled conduct.
The lack of mention of minority rights is not accidental. Since the last elections Netanyahu has claimed that he received a clear majority, which is true only if one disregards the vote of the Arab minority – 20% of the population.
Netanyahu also presented the immunity of MPs from investigation as a principle of democracy, bringing postwar Germany, which he referred to as “an exemplary democracy,” as an example where, according to him, not only is the right to vote defended, but also the right to be elected. “In Germany... one cannot even investigate a member of parliament.”
Well, for Netanyahu’s information, according to Germany’s Basic Law, parties that are considered a danger to democracy are illegal, and their candidates cannot be elected. In addition, in Germany, as in most other parliamentary democracies, the Bundestag can lift the procedural immunity of its members, and then they can be investigated, indicted and tried.
In order to prove that the proposed amendment to Basic Law: the Government is undemocratic, Netanyahu mobilized the Greek philosopher Plato, and Yair Lapid’s late father, Tommy.
Netanyahu began his lecture on Plato by saying: “The origin of the distortion of the term ‘democracy,’ which we are hearing here today, is in a bitter day 2,500 years ago in Athens.” He explained that on that day Plato saw his beloved teacher Socrates condemned to death by the Athenian assembly. “For Plato... this was an incredible catastrophe, and he said the following: Can we let ourselves be ruled by a mob?... We need a different system of government. And this other system is that the king will be a philosopher, and the philosopher will be king. And who will the philosopher be of course? You know: Plato. But he cannot rule alone, and therefore he will appoint 300 guardians, or in Hebrew shomrei saf [gatekeepers].”
In fact, guardians are not gatekeepers, and Plato did not advocate the appointment of gatekeepers (i.e., the likes of Avichai Mandelblit, whom Netanyahu despises). In fact, in Plato’s theory the guardians are a specially trained class, which lives a frugal and selfless life, from which the philosopher king emerges.
Netanyahu went on: “And this Platonist system was the recipe – in the modern age – for horrible dictatorships... which abused, crushed, trampled every democratic idea.... This idea, this Platonist idea, survived the Middle Ages, and was finally liquidated upon the rise of the Enlightenment and the modern democracy. And what those who laid the foundations of the modern democracy said was that not the philosopher king, not the exalted (muramim me’am) are those who rule.... It does not matter how moral, exalted, educated and accomplished we are; it is not we who determine who will rule. The people decides who will rule – the people and only the people.”
Got it? According to Netanyahu it is Plato who stands behind those who are demonstrating to demand that Netanyahu resign, and it is Plato who stands behind “Lapid and Odeh,” who according to Netanyahu submitted an antidemocratic law and organized the demonstrations against him.
I wonder what Nikos Dendias, the Greek foreign minister, who visited Israel last week, would have said had Netanyahu presented his “thesis” about Plato to him. Any serious professor of political thought would have marked it with a resounding F.
AND WHERE does Tommy Lapid enter the story? Netanyahu referred to a bill submitted by Ophir Paz-Pines (Labor) back in 2004, which sought to force all members of the government who are indicted to resign within 30 days of the indictment. The background to the bill was the investigations on charges of sexual harassment and rape against president Moshe Katsav, and investigations against prime minister Ariel Sharon. It was Tommy Lapid, who was minister of justice at the time, who replied in the name of the government in the preliminary reading. Lapid senior had objected to the bill because it gave an official (the attorney-general) the power to fire prime ministers, ministers and deputy ministers, since it is the attorney-general who issues indictments, at his own discretion.
What Netanyahu forgot to mention was that Tommy Lapid had also stated that he believed that a prime minister under indictment should resign: “Time and again, I and my party have stated that if the prime minister will be put on trial, we shall demand his resignation... even without Ophir Pines’s law.”
Lapid junior mistakenly believed that Netanyahu was referring to the second time Paz-Pines submitted a replica of his original bill in 2008, against the background of the investigations against prime minister Ehud Olmert. One of the arguments of justice minister Daniel Friedman against the bill was that Olmert had announced in advance that if he would be indicted, he would resign, which is exactly what he did. On this occasion, in the vote on preliminary reading, Netanyahu, as leader of the opposition, voted in favor of Paz-Pines’s bill.
What can we learn from all of this? That, contrary to the advice Netanyahu claims to have received from his father to the effect that to be an effective prime minister one needs to be educated (he was mocking Yair Lapid for his lack of a formal education when he said it), education does not prevent one of Israel’s two most highly educated and brilliant prime ministers (Ehud Barak being the other) from demonstrating embarrassing ignorance and lack of respect for facts in what he says.


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