Behind "Disengagement": The Ugly Truth
By Prof. Paul Eidelberg
Fourteen years ago, those who gave the Likud a stunning victory over Labor in the January 2003 election never expected they would be ruled by a party responsible for Oslo and rejected by an overwhelmingly majority of the electorate. They never expected a government whose parliamentary approval would depend on the support of Arab MKs, as well as on a far-left party like Meretz that wants to transform the Jewish state into "a state of its citizens." The 2003 election was an affirmation of Zionism. Ariel Sharon nullified that election and made nonsense of democracy!
The central issue of that election was "disengagement" – a euphemism for the expulsion of Jews from Gaza and other parts of Israel. The only reason why the Likud trashed Labor in that election is because Mr. Sharon campaigned against Labor's disengagement/expulsion policy. Whereas Labor won only 19 seats, the Likud won 38 – a disparity unprecedented in Israel's history. Yet the new Sharon government, with Labor chairman Shimon Peres as Sharon's viceroy, was hell-bent on creating an Arab state by expelling Jews from Judea and Samaria!
To appreciate the extent of Sharon's betrayal of the nation, let us tally the number of seats won by parties that opposed disengagement/expulsion on security and Zionist or religious grounds:
Likud — 38 seats
Israel B'Aliya — 2 seats (which subsequently joined the Likud)
National Union — 7 seats
National Religious Party — 6 seats
Shas — 11 seats
United Torah Judaism — 5 seats
The above electoral results produced a Knesset with 69 of its 120 members opposed to disengagement/expulsion! But there is more to be said about Sharon's betrayal of the nation. In that 2003 election, Shinui, which won 15 seats, spoke against unilateral disengagement (but subsequently yielded to Israel's Machiavellian prime minister).
And so, thanks to Sharon, Israel obtained an ostensibly democratically elected government committed to a policy that was decisively rejected by the electorate! But how can one rightly attribute this undemocratic state of affairs to the treachery of one man?
Such treachery could only occur in a country lacking institutional checks and balances, a country whose system of government is intrinsically susceptible to dictatorship. Yet there is not a single party or faction in the Knesset that exposed this despotic state of affairs; and none called for systemic institutional reform to reverse the disastrous course of this nation. Why not? Because every party has a vested interest in preserving the existing system! No less than the illustrious Alexis de Tocqueville defines this system as "democratic despotism" – a system that enables a democratically government to ignore public opinion with IMPUNITY!
What perpetuates this despotic system is a simple fact: In Israel the entire country constitutes a single electoral district in which fixed party lists compete on the basis of proportional representation. The result is party dictatorship on the hand, and, on the other hand, a Knesset whose members are not individually accountable to the voters in constituency elections. This renders the Legislature, the Knesset, subservient to the Executive. i.e., the Government, above all, its Prime Minister. And now, the Prime Minister, instead of being primus inter pares, can dismiss cabinet ministers as if he were a President of the United States. (In America, however, the late Mr. Sharon would have been impeached long ago for malfeasance of office.)
Therefore, those who opposed the expulsion of Jews from their homes in Gaza, but who remained silent about the grotesque structure of a government that made Ariel Sharon the Labor's Party's surrogate prime minister, are not innocent. Lacking the guts to reveal that Israel is not a genuine democracy, hence, that Israel is in need of "regime change," those who opposed the crime of Gaza – called such by Benjamin Netanyahu's father (!) – will only perpetuate democratic despotism and thereby facilitate the policy of "disengagement" they rightly called evil.◙
