As a country that is always used as a beacon of democracy in the M.E., I started thinking about what that meant in lieu of the recent elections.
Certainly, there would be no one elected to be PM that wasn’t Jewish. There may be different sects of Jewish people, but I can’t imagine a Catholic, Protestant, (or any christian faith for that matter) being elected there ever (and we can forget about their traditional enemy in the region).
So, what is Israel in reality? Yes, they have elections, but so did the USSR and a number of other countries (Cuba is a current example) that had/have a result predetermined by the party of power.
I personally believe it is closer to a theocracy than a democracy, but I’m interested in the opinions of the TM.
I have, and I found it to be substantially different from the image you appear to have of it. It’s an overwhelmingly secular society, much more so than the U.S.–we’re talking about one of the first countries to allow gays to serve openly in the military, here! The popular foreign perception of a warlike Jewish people of Israel against a radical Islamic people of West Bank/Gaza obscures the fact that the state of Israel is a melting pot of different groups (Jews, Arabic Muslims, Arabic Christians, Western Christians, Druze, etc…), whose individual constituents live, work and play together on a day-to-day basis without incident. The divide is racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, rather than religious.
There’s a saying there that I’m going to muck up badly: “There are two ways to be Jewish–one is to pray, and the other is to order Coca-Cola in Hebrew.” The point being that the vast majority of Israeli Jews realize their Jewish identity not by observing the tenets of Judaism but by living and working in the Hebrew language and culture. Israel is a particularly safe and easy place to be an observant Jew–there are neighborhoods in Jerusalem where everyone is Chasidic, with the big braided sideburns and everything, plus it’s almost impossible to get non-kosher food anywhere in the country IME–but most Jews I met there were atheists or agnostics, just like most Jews everywhere else.
It’s a culture dominated by Jews, to be sure, but when I say Jews, I mean descendants of the 13 Tribes of Israel, not religious people who are members of the Jewish faith. Their PMs have all been Jewish, to be sure, but that’s their cultural majority; they’ve only been around for some fifty-odd years, and it took us 232 years to elect our first president from a racial minority, plus we still have yet to elect an openly non-Christian president and we took a damn long time to elect a non-Protestant president. In fact, this is a category in which the Israelis have a leg up on us; their Knesset (Parliament) has a strong Arabic presence, AIUI, while ours is still dominated by our majority (whites, particularly white males).
The comparison to the USSR and Cuba is particularly bizarre. Israel is far from a one-party state; to the contrary, it’s probably the only place in the Middle East where it’s totally safe from a legal/police standpoint to burn flags, curse the local deit(y/ies), and shout whatever political slogans you want, no matter how unpopular they are. There are at least three major parties representing a wide range of political opinion. Their politics in general are skewed to the right, but so are ours, and anyway, they live in a situation where all of their immediate neighbors have plotted their total demise in the recent past and most will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Going back to the wide range of political opinions, when I was there, there was a big hit by Hadag Nachash (“Fish Snake”) called Shirat Hasticker (“The Sticker Song”) (video with subtitled and translated lyrics here) which summarized a wide cross-section of political beliefs mostly found on bumper stickers. As you can see in the translated lyrics, there are a lot of opposing views which are very prevalent in Israeli society. How many opposing views do you think were expressed on bumper stickers in the USSR?
Actually, if you look at the latest election, while the right wing definately won (unfortunately, IMHO), the *religious *right suffered a major setback. The big winner of these elections was Avigdor Lieberman, whose party, while hawkish and fiscally conservative, is also socially liberal and in particular, opposed to the religious establishment - reflecting the opinions of his hundreds of thousands of Russian immigrant voters.
I wouldn’t count Jefferson. He wasn’t very open about his disbelief until after his Presidency, AIUI, and he would have called himself a Deist, which at the time was considered very distinct from “freethought”.
I could be botching that, but the point is that Jefferson wasn’t elected as an open agnostic, and even if he had been, he’s practically a god himself here for his contribution to our democratic philosophy.
I don’t see why you can’t have a democracy that also happens to be a theocracy (I am not saying that that is what Israel is), just as I don’t see why you can’t have a democracy that is communist. The usual interpretation these days of “democracy” is that it is a government whose members are elected by the people. If the majority of the electorate is rabidly religious and feel that the most appropriate leaders for them are members of the clergy, then you will have a democracy that is also a theocracy.
“Theocracy” means basically law by religion. I don’t know a whole lot about Israeli law, but I’m not aware of large swathes of it that are written or administered by rabbis.
As far as religious precepts/entities as such influencing Israeli law or policy I could say:
The raison d’etre of the whole state is often or sometimes justified by Biblical history-type principles. But that’s as much a foundational “creation myth” as an operative policy on a day to day basis. At this moment, Israel exists like any other state because of bureaucratic momentum, not religion.
Sometimes certain governments have looked to ultra-Orthodox parties for political support (not unusual for a smaller group to wield disproportionate power in a multi-party system). In exchange, the governments have sometimes played ball or turned a blind eye to settlement policies/abuses that were priorities for the ultra-Orthdox, and were likely (from the ultras’ perspective) biblically driven.
The Law Of Return, which is religiously/ethnically based, is the only specific Israeli law of which I’m aware that operatively treats people differently based on a religious distinction (it’s moderately to fairly offensive for this reason, to me, but then I’m not an Israeli so MHO is kind of a so what?).
Doesn’t sound much like what I think of when I hear about “theocracies” or government-by-clergy.
Family law is primarily religious. Marriage, divorce, custody issues, and so on, are regulated by the Rabbinate, sharia courts, or the Christian churches.
To answer some of the questions without polluting with quotes, I’ll take a stab at a number which I thought were relevant to this discussion.
I have never been to Israel, for what it’s worth. I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem for the question, but if it is, I figure full disclosure is important.
As for the US (and a number of other countries) being a theocracy, under the definition I’ve proposed, I think it’s a fair question, especially for the US. From my point of view, however, I think the religious aspect of a US presidential candidate is often driven by what the party masses want to see their candidate have. Joe Lieberman, a jewish senator from CT, was on the Democratic national ticket, so I don’t believe that there is a hard and fast rule of “must be christian”, although our history indicates otherwise. Kennedy was Catholic, which seemed to send a number of people into a lather because of the idea that he would have to answer to the Pope, but I don’t recall that issue ever came up in the approx. 3 years of his presidency.
If, as Huerta88 states, “theocracy is basically law by religion”, perhaps very few countries meet that criteria. Perhaps the Taliban in Afghanistan is one example that ran the country with religious underpinnings.
Of course I realize that Israel has a jewish majority.
The OP was not meant to inflame; I wanted to discuss the idea of Israel as a de-facto theocracy, not hammer Israel for electing Jews to the top spot of their country.
Perhaps I worded the question incorrectly. I think it is possible that a jew will win the presidency someday in the US, however I don’t think a christian or muslim would ever win the top spot in Israel. Christian sects are the vast majority in this country, but someone like Lieberman can come very close (or for some people, actually won) the 2nd slot in the US government. Even if Israel elects an agnostic, it’s not an election of a person that is in fundamental disagreement with the religion of the population at large.
And yes, I agree that the “comparisons” of the USSR and Cuba were incorrect. I was going for the idea of a democracy with no real choice, not indicating that Israel is ruled in any form or fashion like those two communist examples.
SFP
Still jealous of Hostile Dialect’s Narcissist sign-off.
I dont think the question is worded incorrectly as much as the notion of the word democracy is abused and misused. My guess at what you are asking is - as it was an issue for me - how can a country be called democratic and still harbor certain attitudes and perform certain actions in contrivance to the word. Then, I remembered a quote written at the time “democracy” under question was born:
So, there you have it. The discussion will lazily steer toward the definition of the word (mostly because it is premature to accuse you of malicious intent) and your original intention (as guessed by me) will go unanswered. Which means, saying “it is the only democracy in ME” will be a powerful argument for a continued bloodshed.
Huh?
Why would any free country elect a president who is “in fundamental disagreement with the population at large”? We’re talking about democracy—If the population dont agree with you, they won’t vote for ya.
In Israel, the “population at large” is Jewish, and proud of it…why shouldn’t they elect a leader who acts and thinks like they do?
Anything else would be undemocratic, and based on dogmatic obedience to a leader.
Ya, know…kind of like a theocracy
The problem is not the word “democracy”. The problem is your idiosyncratic use of the word “theocracy”. Democracy may be a weasel word, but theocracy is pretty well defined. And once again wikipedia comes to the rescue:
The key point is civil law being enacted and enforced by and in the name of ecclesial authorities. With a few exceptions (and thanks Captain Amazing for pointing out an additional one), this does not appear to be how law gets made or enforced in Israel.
Does law get made or enforced by non-ecclesial authorities who are Jews (N.B., at least on paper, given that many Jews in Israel are viewed as pretty to very secular)? Sure (though the Knesset is not an all-Jewish body, right?). But law gets or has gotten made or enforced by people of a particular religious group at lots of times through history. Italy is goverened until now mostly by Catholics (or, “Catholics,” acknowledging the same secular trend as for Israeli Jews). Is Italy a theocracy? Was Italy or Spain or Ireland a “theocracy” in the days when the near-100% Catholic makeup of their governments, or the probable improbability of a non-Catholic rising to high office or control of government actually influenced policies on matters that in fact touched on religion (divorce, contraception)? I would argue that even if conservative, Catholic religious beliefs were being pervasively written into law (probably, to a greater degree than Jewish religious beliefs seem to be written into modern Israeli law), the answer is still “not a theocracy” because these laws were not enacted or enforced by priests.
Rather, they were enacted and enforced by Catholic politicians, responding to Catholic constituents, who no doubt indeed were influenced by their priests – but that is just retail politics – giving the electorate what they want. Even if (civilian) Israeli Jewish politicians began wholesale enactment and enforcement of laws based on Leviticus, as long as it was civilians (no doubt, under the hypothetical political pressure of some hypothetical newly-ascendant ultra-Orthodox movement), and not rabbis, doing the direct governing, there is no theocracy.
What may be confusing the OP is that people do occasionally use the term “theocratic” hyperbolically to refer to “the influence of religion being recognized politically,” or even more broadly as an ad hominem attack on any political party or policy with which they disagree and which is disproportionately agreed-with by members of some other religious group. But that’s hyperbole and ad hominem, and not very useful; it’s on a par with those whom I always see arguing that law X is “unconstitutional” because it’s consistent with Catholic doctrine and hence must “violate the separation of church and state.” Avoidance of theocracy does not require avoidance of all policies or outcome with which religious people might agree.
Finally, there is real theocracy today. Thanks to Captain Amazing, I’d be comfortable saying that in the very limited realm of domestic relations, Israel is in fact theocratic in empowering various clergy to dispositively and almost as agents of the state resolve certain family relations matters. But that’s a narrow and defined realm, it probably works out pretty well for the most part, and I doubt anyone is too upset about it. Other than that, we’ve not seen any discussion of true theocracy in Israel.
Sharia law is a different matter, and it isn’t just the Taliban. A fair number of countries observe it and allow religious officials to act as agents of the state in criminal and civil law enforcement. The moron Archbishop of Canterbury (a moron on other grounds, I hasten to add, starting with that ridiculous beard) has suggested bringing it to the U.K.
Speaking of which, final thought: the U.K. may actually be on paper more of a theocracy than Israel. Guess who’s the ultimate grand Poohbah of the Anglican Church? Hint: she’s also head of state and has her face on a lot of little papers and coins.
ETA: Damn you lemur for beating me to it, but I agree, the OP may have been using the term in a looser colloquial form, which as I’ve pointed out, is most often overheard and possibly misunderstood when someone is name-calling.
There are currently two functioning theocracies in the world IMHO - Vatican City and Iran. The Taliban under Mullah Omar would have been a third. Those are the only states where supreme power is vested in a religious figure/office.
Israel, where religious parties hold a little power and control minor judicial functions, is not a theocracy. Saudi Arabia, where a particularly harsh and retrograde version of Islam is law and clerics have great influence, is not a theocracy - senior clerics are appointed by government fiat and the royal family owns a monopoly on military force and real political power. Andorra, technically ruled under a co-dominion including the Bishop of Urgell, is not a theocracy - he has no more real power than the queen of England. Etc.
It takes more than Elizabeth’s II standing as head of the English church, the ubiquity of American Christian presidents or some version of sharia or judaic law incorporated into government functions to make a theocracy.
Let’s put it another way. A system where the government controls religion is not a theocracy. So the UK is not a theocracy, because the Archbishop of Canterbury is answerable to the monarch, Queen Elizabeth. The head of state controls the church, as Henry VIII made abundantly clear. A system where religion controls the government is a theocracy. Iran is a theocracy because the president of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad answers to the Supreme Leader of Iran, Grand Ayatollah Khameini. The church controls the head of state.
