From Law to Lore: How German Idealism Hijacked Israeli Democracy

To My Esteemed Colleague, Jurist and Proponent of Tyranny—Warm Greetings,

In the wake of our correspondence, and in response to my recent article on the Israeli regime—wherein you alleged various shortcomings—I found myself perplexed. It has become clear that these so-called flaws are neither factual nor open to interpretation. Rather, they stem from the imposition of a parallel conceptual framework—alien to both Israeli and Western jurisprudence—onto the fabric of the article.

Since your most recent letter lacked any substantive legal or constitutional insight, I had hoped, at the very least, to encounter a modicum of conceptual novelty. Accordingly, I posed several questions regarding the deficiencies you claimed to have found, requesting clarification through direct reference to quotations from your own reply to the article, which I hold in my possession.

To reiterate, my questions were as follows:

What precisely is the "democratic essentialism" to which you alluded? What is the “complexity” you attribute to democratic governance? How do this “essentialism” and “complexity” relate to the character of liberal government or to Israeli “democracy”?

You employed the term “reasonableness” and invoked the notion of “constitutional interpretation.” Is there, in fact, a constitution in Israel? Does either statute or constitution articulate a principle of reasonableness? You also referenced the right to petition—so, who, if anyone, is authorized to empower the Supreme Court to expand this right?

Would you care to explain how terms such as “diversity” and “sensitivity,” as employed in your response, are essential to “democratic functionality”? And while we are at it, what precisely do you mean by this “functionality”?

You posed the rhetorical question, “Who will restrain tyranny?” The answer, plainly, is the law—not a judicial interpretation that strays from the statute’s language.

You spoke of a struggle for liberal democracy. Yet in Israel, there is neither equality of rights nor freedom of expression. Consequently, I am unconvinced by your strategy’s efficacy.

As you will recall, you have yet to address any of these questions.

Though I am not a jurist, as you are, I am a historian and political thinker. And your conspicuous silence resounds to me as confirmation of the self-evident. A direct and unbroken line stretches from your reticence to the subject of my recent academic inquiry—German Idealism: a remarkable intellectual domain in which abstract concepts prevail over legal structures.

More specifically, your position aligns with the thematic domain of the Hegelian worldview—one that rejects the axiom of inalienable natural liberties and property rights, as enshrined within contractual-majoritarian constitutional frameworks foundational to liberal democracy. This, I argue, is also the spirit animating the Israeli judicial regime you appear to champion.

As is well known, the Hegelian method subordinates the formalism of a rights-based social contract and individual liberty within representative democracy to the teleological pursuit of the “Absolute Spirit”—Die Absolute Geist. Abstract though it may be, this “Spirit” is defined—unsurprisingly—by a self-appointed enlightened class.

Another Hegelian, Karl Marx, similarly dismisses the social contract and natural liberties—as well as representative democracy and the sanctity of property rights—in favor of concepts such as “equality,” “class,” and “history.”

Might it be that you, too, invoke emotionally charged terms—such as “sensitivity,” “diversity,” “complexity,” “essentialism,” “reasonableness,” and “justice”—as instruments by which an unelected, self-designated elite may undermine the structure of liberal democracy, prioritizing abstract interpretation over the plain language of law?

Might it be that formerly revolutionary terms—“exploitation,” “alienation,” “ignorance,” “oppression,” and “discrimination”—have now been transmuted into reactionary ones: “fanaticism,” “Kahanism,” and “threats to democracy”? Have they become rhetorical war drums, beating out a slippery slope geometry that bends history to the whims of judicial elites gripped by fear—particularly of religious or national identities?

Is it, once more, the case—as so often in history—that idealist elitism, anti-liberalism, and a conceptually opaque anti-realism converge to dismantle the cornerstone of liberal democracy: rule by the people under law?

Is it again the case that, in the name of abstract purity, the intersubjective realm of the open society is being stripped of its sovereign right?

The fundamental issue is not your refusal to provide a clear and substantive response, nor even that you are not, in truth, a democrat. Rather, the deeper problem lies in your historical and philosophical ignorance concerning the nature of late modern liberal democracy. You mistakenly perceive yourself as a man of the people’s written law, when in fact, you are a servant of the elite’s abstract constructs.

You are no English common law judge. You are, unmistakably, a German Idealist.

And if you are prepared to curtail your fellow citizens’ natural right to self-determination—according to their own values—in favor of a cloistered tyranny wielding their tools against their will, all under the guise of law and abstract justice, then, as our democratic allies across the Atlantic declared in 1917, perhaps it is time to roll back the Huns and purchase liberty bonds, on our way to returning the barbarians beyond the Rhine.

With utmost sincerity,

Yair