Mordechai Nisan
Newsmax, Feb. 6, 2023
“After dragging important Israelis through the public mire and their human rights quashed, nobody was accountable for this grave injustice.”
Like most things about Jews, their politics in Israel are also unusual, different, and idiosyncratic. While much of the modern appurtenances of democracy apply to the political conduct of public affairs — human rights, free elections, with a robust party system — there is a noticeable streak of anti-democratic impulses in the body politic.
Labor party stalwart Yitzhak Ben-Aharon commented on that dark night on May 17, 1977, when Likud defeated the Labor Party, that, “If that is the people’s decision, then we have to change the people.”
The principle of majority rule was operative in a coarse, pugnacious way exposing the highly problematic veneer of democratic politics.
Then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 shoved through the Oslo Accords in the Knesset with a bare 61-vote majority (of 120 Knesset members) and co opted — “bought off” — politicians while relying also on anti-Zionist Arab votes.
Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in 2005, committed himself to accede to the results of an internal Likud party referendum on the issue of his disengagement policy from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria. … [To read the full article, click here]
