This Is Not Israeli Democracy’s Swan Song: An Ethnographic Phenomenology of the Jewish State’s “Post-Ironic” Protests

People Like Us

Israeli public intellectual Paul Gross was clearly right when he wrote in Fathom, last November, that the latest electoral defeat for the center-left in Israel “feels different” to the losers. It feels that way, as well, to many of his sympathizers in the United States, self-described “American liberals and liberal Zionists,” for whom this crisis is “a crisis for us, too, and for people like us.” People like them view what’s happening here now, in the Jewish state, as in their own words, “by definition a threat to stability.”

And why is that? Because, understandably, the liberals feel their monopoly on power, exercised through the deep state—or Israeli “deep shtetl”—slipping from their grasp, after decades of Ashkenormative rule by judicial fiat. As John Goodman sang in David Byrne’s 1996 film True Stories, “We don’t want freedom, we don’t want justice, we just want someone to love.” And that someone is themselves—in their ideal, Platonic form as moderate managers with correct opinions about everything.

Hooked on a Feeling

I will not go into every detail of the much-bruited proposed changes to how Israel’s heavy-handed Supreme Court has operated until now—wielding authority far in excess of any similar body in any comparable country in the developed world. Instead, I want to focus on that very sentiment itself, which is abroad in the Land these days—or what historian Raymond Williams termed the “structure of feeling” that Tel Aviv’s culture of ongoing, ritualized protest signifies, embodying as it does so much subjectively intense, objectively half-hearted self-referential virtue signaling.

Let it suffice, therefore, to begin simply by noting that everyone knows change is necessary—there’s general consensus about this from left to right. The real disagreement is over what kind of change, how, when, by whom. My own view is that it should be now, by the government we just elected at the polls, according to the proposal currently on the table. Why? Because that’s what elections are for; elections have consequences; and “if not now, when,” to coin a phrase.

Look, for comparison: Whereas members of SCOTUS are appointed by the sitting American president and ratified by the Senate (all democratically elected officeholders) in a process notoriously open to public scrutiny; Israel’s deciders, by contrast, are anointed by a small, cloistered committee, a majority of which is composed of non-elected officials, either SCOTSI initiates themselves or members of the bar. While America’s conflict-resolution mechanism of last resort is primarily an appellate court that rarely strikes down laws passed by Congress, Israel’s ultimate body has original jurisdiction in reviewing challenges to laws passed by the Knesset (Israeli parliament). Nor is there any question of “standing,” so that in effect any law can be challenged at any time, including Basic Laws (Israel’s functional equivalent of a constitution). As a result, Jerusalem’s Supremes have nullified twenty-two pieces of legislation in the past thirty years, since 1992 changes to the Basics that granted such far-reaching powers to their better judgment.

These three essential characteristics of the Israeli Supreme Court have turned it into a government within the government, on the one hand shielded from democratic processes and on the other invested with veto power over all legislation. This shall not stand.

So, then, how does it feel to realize it? As a participant observer conducting research at the protests against change that have been, already for a couple of months now, gripping the nation, it looks to me like “post-irony” has come to Israeli high culture. Everything bad from America gets here eventually. In this case, by American-style post-irony I mean a deeply ambiguous subjective mood of inflamed “belief” that’s not quite believed in—and so all the more fervently asserted. As if the faithful were yet trying to convince themselves of their own deepest convictions surrounding matters of primary relevance to their personal/collective sense of identity.

Standing at the Gates of the West

For example, “Academia Stands at the Gate of Democracy in Israel” read maybe the most revealing sign at the rally I attended in Tel Aviv with friends last Saturday evening, motzei Shabbat, as we say, or after the end of the weekly Jewish sacred day of rest most Tel Avivians barely acknowledge anyway. Marveling at the unabashed self-regard on display, I asked myself if the progressive professors against progress really didn’t understand the (post-)irony peeking out from beneath their choice of slogan. The whole point of proposed reform is that the “gatekeepers” should step aside and let freedom ring!

Moreover, in what has quickly become a kind of unheimlich ceremony—ever since newly appointed Justice Minister Yariv Levin introduced a proposal to limit the authority of the Court to dictate what counts as legislation—the “City that Never Stops” pauses to contemplate the “end of democracy,” the “end of Israel” as we know it, the end of the world it would seem, and then calmly returns home to get ready for the start of the work week on Sunday. Start-Up Nation’s polite upstarts only mean to protect “democracy,” remember—not bemoan the failure of their own self-interested grip on the levers of power.

Indeed, the rallies on the whole have been rather dignified affairs, given the purportedly outsized stakes. Young and old alike—whole families, parents, grandparents, and children together in lots of cases—stand around chatting, smiling, grimacing, grumbling, shaking their heads and affably declaring that “fascism has come to Israel.” “We will be like Trump’s America, Orban’s Hungary, Nazi Germany.” Now let’s go to bed or maybe grab a bite first. Sushi, anyone?

It’s the last, not infrequent, analogy to Hitlerism, of all things, that cannot fail to be jarring, of course. For what can it mean—anyplace, but especially here—where so many are third- and fourth- if not first- or second-generation survivors of the Shoah? Although nothing new per se, it’s certainly become far more acceptable, commonplace, and “normalized” of late, to blithely suggest that we Likud voters, who supported Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent return to power as prime minister, are like those who voted for der Führer in Germany in the 1930s.

Democracy (Is Coming)

Not that I go out of my way to share heterodox views at these fun social events, except with an old friend or two who know anyway that I sided with a plurality of my fellow citizens on the occasion of Israel’s fifth plebiscite in the last four years (democratic enough for you?); voting for change in hopes of seeing ushered in a more democratic, less arrogantly paternalist, technocratic style of government. One that preserves its uniquely Jewish character rather than dilutes it; given that, unchecked, stuff like American “woke” values tends to migrate, carried by masked-up, mobile elites or so-called Anywheres, shuttling between the Jewish state and the United States without leaving their bubble. And a more secure one, given the latest wave of terror attacks that continues to roll on; the violence in mixed cities (including Aravim, Charedim, and Hipsterim jostled side by side) during the summer of 2021’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza; and unprecedented violent crime in Arab villages. Or, if you prefer, to employ a term spoken disdainfully by upscale Haaretz readers, I voted for a more “populist” regime. I’m a “fascist” who supports a corrupt “Crime Minister,” etc. But am I a Nazi?

Israel’s protests of early 2023, in other words, are, again, specifically post-ironic in the precise sense that this term-of-art has taken on lately, vis-à-vis influencer-driven subcultures in the United States—where nowadays, for example, it’s considered “punk rock” for Manhattan hipsters to convert to Catholicism. Where, in other words, earnest enough seeming people themselves appear not to know with confidence if they’re being serious or not; just how seriously to take themselves, in their stated terms; or how seriously they can expect others to take their purportedly ultimate commitments.

News of the World

The truth is that Israel’s democratic culture is strong and isn’t going anywhere. No more than Trumpism was ever going to make America into Putin’s Russia by incepting a “coup” is Bibiism about to make Israel into Iran by incepting a “coup.” Consequently, while these by now routine mass demos, reliably bringing out tens of thousands, ostensibly despairing of Israeli democracy’s impending disappearance, cannot be dismissed as just frivolous; there’s something odd about them. Because they also can’t be taken literally, either. In their palpable exaggerations, they beg to be interpreted as symptomatic.

In other words, these events are a muddle of unbound or “free floating” sincere affect and/or affected sincerity in search of a “genuine” object of veneration/disgust—plus something else. For they also manifest, at the same time and in equal measure, a nagging, barely submerged sense of chronic apathy over the likelihood that anything, ever again—in today’s post-postmodern world of anti-social media, where what actually counts for the Levantine laptop class is stuff such as the “virtual” reality of “likes” and “followers”—can ever again be found to satisfy the nostalgic longing for something more genuinely substantial, consigned unconsciously to a half-remembered/half-forgotten past.

The unimpeachable reality that an imperfect Israeli democracy remains remarkably resilient does not stop know-it-alls in fear of sacrificing some of their privilege from believing otherwise. Except that something—our post-ironic condition—does stop them. Not even LARPing Israeli elites can shut Israeli democracy’s gates. This subjective lassitude is simply that.

Tragic Kingdom

They know it, and we know it? Again, hard to say. For if it’s not liberal democracy that’s disappearing from the West (and Tel Aviv in this respect at least, if not Jerusalem, is part of Europe and the States), then it seems to be our taken-for-granted trust in its saliency to begin with. Wasn’t it always corrupt from the start, in 1619 or 1948?

With all this in mind, they call it politics for a reason. Something that unfolds according to its own messy logics, and temporality is one of them. The proposal now on offer as an alternative to preserving a broken system is the one we’ve got to accept or reject. Persons make history, but not under conditions of their own choosing. In this respect, Isaiah Berlin’s post-ironic quip comes to mind, “Jews are like other people, only more so.” And that’s the (post-)irony of it all.^[1]

Gabriel Noah Brahm is Professor of English and World Literature at Northern Michigan University and currently serves as Senior Research Fellow in Residence at University of Haifa’s Herzl Institute for the Study of Zionism. He is an American-Israeli dual citizen, with “double” and not “dual loyalties.” His forthcoming book, Israel in Theory: The Jewish State and the Cultural Left, charts the vicissitudes of anti-Zionism’s perverse libidinal economy, seen as grounded in a repression of sexual difference detectable from Simone DeBeauvoir to Judith Butler. Follow him on Twitter @Brahmski.

Notes

1. I wish to thank my old friend, Peter Minowitz, for perceptive editorial comments on an initial draft of this statement, and David Pan, for his help with another after that, in regard to how one might best condense the essence of the legal issues at stake. Michael Kochin, Gregory Lobo, Gabriele Segre, and Abe Silberstein likewise offered helpful suggestions, criticisms, and wry demurs. Agata Pawlowska was encouraging. Any infelicities with regard to either form or content, are my own, of course. I don’t know where any of these distinguished political philosophers and contemporary critical theorists stand on any of this. How could I?