Israel Is Not a Democracy — and Maybe That’s Not So Bad

I don’t support Benjamin Netanyahu. Still — the Supreme Court should not have intervened in the dismissal of Ronen Bar. Legally, it had no authority to overrule that government decision.

The court's decision proved for the thousandth time that Israel is not a democracy, but a jurist oligarchy — something obvious to anyone who's lived here for more than five minutes.

We can lament the undemocratic state of Israel, or we can face the truth: Israel was never a liberal democracy — and perhaps that’s not a coincidence.

Institutions — the government, the Knesset, the Supreme Court, the Shin Bet, the Manufacturers' Association — all operate instinctively to expand their power or prestige. Meanwhile, the fools who accuse the court of "stealing the country" forget that it was the political right that willingly handed it over — first after the 1977 political shift, and then again after Rabin’s assassination. Only now, decades later, do they ask for it back.

But there are no refunds.

Israel isn’t built for Western-style democracy. Like in Russia or the Arab world, the prevailing political culture here worships power. The only difference is — we still pretend otherwise.

The right believes it’s democratic because it wins elections. The left believes it’s democratic because it "defends values." In reality, even the kibbutzim — romanticized as islands of equality and cooperation — were run like Soviet kolkhozes: assemblies, yes; liberty, no.

Are we more humanistic than the Arabs? Certainly. Are we more democratic than the Russians? Absolutely. But that still doesn’t mean that every side shouting “Democracy!” at the other has any real understanding of what the word means.

What we have is a political tradition that blends remnants of British Mandate institutions, diasporic Jewish culture, a delayed adoption of radical Western legal trends, and a Ben-Gurion-style ethos of “mamlakhtiyut” — a soft form of blind obedience to the official civic and state apparatus.

Democracy? Not with our appointment committees. Not with the Likud primaries. Not in the Supreme Court. And certainly not in our business or civic culture.

But it sounds good as a chant at protest rallies.

The real problem is that this entire narrative is draining us. We’re chasing our own tails trying to become something we simply are not.

So why chase a fantasy, especially when that pursuit only creates psychological and social exhaustion? Who benefits from this lie? What existential void does it fill?

Israeli society is exhausted from chasing an imagined democracy. And just when that fatigue reaches its peak, former establishment figures emerge and proudly stitch a hyphen between “Jewish-Democratic” — as if it were some retro slogan from Marxist-Leninist manifestos of the 1930s.

Maybe if we let go of this delusional dream, we could finally start building something that actually fits — our culture, our history, our reality.