The Israeli liberal democracy is undermined. The sixth Netanyahu government represents more than a simple transfer of power in a normal parliamentary democracy ; it is the assertion of a willingness to change the regime.
On the Palestinian side, coalition agreements affirm exclusive sovereignty to autodetermination over the entire territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. To that end, the responsibility for the occupied territories is taken away from the army, a sovereign power recognized by international law, and transferred to the civil authorities. The double fiction of a “temporary occupation“ and of the “peace process“ is thus eliminated. The supposed absence of a partner for peace is now replaced by the invocation of the divine decree.
On the domestic front, the emasculation of the Supreme Court and the submission of the entire judiciary to the government are aimed at destroying the very foundations of liberal democracy: the separation and balance of powers.The composition and program of the government make the timid comparisons with Orban’s Hungary irrelevant : what we may expect is Hungary plus religious fundamentalism ; it is a kind of Jewish Pakistan.
Thirteen years ago, we launched the founding appeal of JCall, writing that the occupation and the continued settlements in the West Bank and in the Arab neighborhoods of East-Jerusalem threatened the perennity of the Zionist project : the Jewish and democratic State that the Founding Fathers were able to create, and which has since resisted all the vicissitudes of history, would not survive the grim alternative of civil war and apartheid. The facts tragically prove us right.
Time has come to launch again our 2010 “Call to reason“. The appeal is addressed to all those, Jews and non-Jews, who have at heart the salvation of the two peoples who share this piece of land of the Eastern Mediterranean and look with dread at the political and moral degradation of the Jewish State.
“The Law is not in Heaven“, says the Bible (Deut. 30:12), meaning thereby that it has been given to men to make good use of it.
