Self Destructive Democracy
Or, The Most Despicable Minister Competition
Every week my friends and I conduct a small survey titled, “How did my country harm me this week.” Every week we rank the contestants and crown the winner of the title Most Despicable Minister. Quite often we have more than one winner. After all, this is the worst government ever to serve here, and its ministers compete with one another with remarkable talent. This week there is only one winner, and he defeated all others by a wide margin. This week’s despicable minister is Bezalel Smotrich. And in a paraphrase of his own words, a racist, son of a racist. He may be a very poor finance minister, but he is the most talented of them all when it comes to representing doctrines of race, expulsion, and discrimination in the name of a Superior People.
His doctrine is drawn from the most poisoned wells in Jewish culture. His statement this week against the Arab members of parliament in the Knesset committee, “Are we to blame for the fact that you murder one another,” casts a dark beam of light into his shadowed soul. For him, the Arab members of parliament and their public bear responsibility for the murders in Arab society. Let us follow this twisted logic for a moment. The rape victim is to blame for not eliminating her rapist, and the Jews were responsible for the Holocaust. This is not another outrageous slip of the tongue. It is a moment of clarity. The statesmanlike mask was torn to shreds and the ugly face was fully revealed. For him and for his government, his and not mine, there are citizens whom the state regards as its own, and others whom it sees as a problem. The first we will rescue at any cost. The others we will abandon to rapists and murderers. Let them manage on their own, because they are the ones supposedly meant to solve their own problems. Autonomous self-rule for criminal affairs. Makes sense, does it not?
When this arrogant and racist minister places responsibility on the Arab victims themselves, he is articulating his civic hierarchy. He determines that there are citizens for whose lives the state is fully responsible, even when they reside beyond its borders, himself for example. And there are citizens whose lives it abandons. This is not merely an outrageous statement. It is a worldview. One may argue about economic policy, borders, religion and state, taxation. But there is one basic test. Does the state see all its citizens as equal or not equal. When hundreds of citizens are killed year after year and the response is to blame them, the answer has already been given. Israeli democracy stands on the roof contemplating suicide, and Smotrich stands behind it, pushing.
If only that were all. Hundreds of Arab citizens have been murdered here for years. The numbers tell the story of an accumulating tragedy. Families collapse. Children grow up to the sound of gunfire. Communities walk endless funeral processions. When a senior minister explains that the responsibility lies on the shoulders of the victims, he performs a filthy and lethal political maneuver. He severs sovereignty from responsibility. In his view, the state is not the primary actor within its own sovereign territory. Interesting. He very much wants to apply Israeli law to the occupied territories yet frees himself of any legal responsibility in areas where sovereignty has been recognized and applied for nearly eighty years. With these miserable capacities he still seeks to demilitarize Gaza and disarm the Gazans. Good luck with that.
When the fight against crime in Arab society was defined as a governmental priority, resources were allocated, dedicated units were established, focused intelligence work was activated, and the numbers declined. When the minister of hatred and killings assumed his position, the priority shifted. Budgets were stripped, police presence diminished, clearance rates eroded, and the numbers surged again. This is not theory. It is a pattern. Not accidental failure but policy.
Accompanying this sick political idea is always the old cliché. This is Arab culture that sanctifies death. At another time and place I will confront who is addicted to death, him or them. For now, let us remain with the abandonment itself. Culture does not change because of an arbitrary political border. In Jordan, with the same language and broad social structures, the homicide rate hovers around one per one hundred thousand. In the West Bank the number is similarly low. Within Israel’s borders, under full sovereignty, with intelligence and security mechanisms unmatched in the world, backed by blatant violations of virtually every possible human right, the homicide rate in Arab society reaches roughly twelve per one hundred thousand. Culture did not increase tenfold at the border crossing. Policy did. And the malice of the Israeli government has soared.
Governmental neglect alone does not fully explain the depth of the phenomenon. The fear imposed by criminal organizations is not a side effect. It is a mechanism of social control. On the ground a reality has emerged in which crime organizations fill a governing vacuum. They mediate disputes, provide work for masses of young people with no horizon, collect debts and extend loans. They create a distorted order where the state chooses not to enforce law and order as required by its own laws. And the community? It is busy surviving day to day. It is not meant to organize the civic struggle for its own protection. It lacks political power and cannot overturn this terrible balance of terror. That is precisely the role of a state, any state. And if it is incapable, let it dissolve.
Moreover, the Israeli government itself stands behind this abandonment knowingly. Criminal organizations are the long arm, the proxy, of the “full right” government. What Iran does with the Houthis and Hezbollah, Israel does with crime organizations. For decades Israel developed a doctrine of managing a population deprived of rights beyond the Green Line. Excess control to suppress any organization, and zero investment to prevent independent prosperity. When one understands how violence in Arab society within the state’s borders is handled, it is difficult to ignore the resemblance. Negligible crime solving. Violent presence. Reliance on force rather than long term trust building. One fifth of the state’s citizens live in minimal citizenship, outside the full civic contract. The prime minister and his ministers are responsible and guilty. In the current Israeli situation, only international protection of the Arab minority might save it from the destruction toward which the Israeli government aspires.
There are those who argue that violence must be addressed because it might spill over into Jewish society. This is a terrible argument, revealing more than it conceals. It means that Arab citizens’ lives matter only as a protective belt for Jewish comfort zones. This is the face of the “only democracy.” The one that does not protect its citizens because it is not politically worthwhile. And that is not committed to the first principle of democratic governance. All citizens are equal, and the state must protect them because they are its citizens. Full stop.
Smotrich stood out this week and justly earned the title of Most Despicable Minister. But the story goes far beyond him. The abandonment of Palestinian citizens of Israel to make their lives here unbearable is just one stone in the structure of Jewish nationalists. A Land of Israel between the Jordan River and the sea, empty of Arabs, is the program. And upon this purified space will apply religious law in its most limited and extreme interpretation. This is what they bring to the next elections. One people, one land, one leader. Sound familiar? Not by accident.