Visions of democracy: are politicians misusing the ‘power of the people’?

What is democracy? To what extremes should one allow democracy to sway before seeking its fall? It seems states have been calling themselves democracies, subduing their ill-doings by way of the all too lenient definition of the simple Greek phrase "power of the people".

Lately this question seems to repeatedly whisper itself in my head. Perhaps this is due to the constant deterioration of the political situation in Israel, the country over which I, amongst many others, am supposed to have some power.

My frustration partly derives from what seems to me a constant failure of a prevalent liberal myth, namely the natural inclination of democratic nation states towards peace. Why, I ask myself time and time again, is my country killing any chance of future peace, building more and more settlements, tearing the land designated for a Palestinian state apart, devastating any hope of a cohesive Palestinian territory, severing the yet to be born body of the already dead dream of a state?

What do the people opposing a settlement freeze think will happen when a Palestinian state is no longer possible, when it is officially incorporated to Israel? How will Israel continue calling itself a "Jewish democracy" when there will no longer be a Jewish majority?

This question is called by the centre-right Israelis the "Demographic threat". It is the main reason for which during the past ten years many right-wing leaders (for instance Sharon and Ulmert) have come to understand Israel cannot afford to hold on to the Territories (sadly, a re-evaluation of ethics wasn't the reason for this change in views).

These questions might seem trivial to anyone who has either spent some time in Palestine or Israel or met a left-wing Israeli or Palestinian, but I bring them only as a pretext of the greater question which hangs above them, when does one stop calling ones state a democracy? Why is this question so crucial?

Perhaps because the fact that Israel is constantly referred to as the only democracy in the Middle-East seems to me to be a depoliticising statement, one which renders the very real inequality upon which Israel is based, into a distant, almost spectral problem to be dealt with using the state apparatus, namely by voting every four years.

This is to say the dangerous word "democracy" hides behind it a situation in which a great amount of people who are subjected to Israeli law (or the lack of it) have no say and no power. Using the core of the democratic system as a decoy, any real political-revolutionary tension is dismantled. By way of a simple simulation of equality such as the act of voting, any direct, desperate, action is taken out of consideration.

This essay may not have produced a definition of democracy, but hopefully it has raised some of the problems inherent in its meanings, and its ability to restrain any chance for direct political action when it is used as a tool through which to dictate from above.

Boaz Levin

Boaz Levin lives in Jerusalem and studies at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.