Land of Israel vs. State of Israel

[Classical_Liberal]

Land of Israel vs. State of Israel

By Yitzhak Laor



Occasionally, amazement breaks out when young subjects of democracy are told that more than a century elapsed between the recognition that everyone had the right to vote and the application of that right to women. "What kind of democracy is that?" ask women who discover that, in the course of more than 100 years of democracy, women were not counted, despite the existence of parties, elections, parliamentary representation and democratic ideology.



The same amazement will be the lot of those who will read the history of the Israeli occupation, when the Likud referendum is mentioned in a tiny footnote. The referendum on the fate of the Gaza Strip - an event that aroused some sort of interest in most Israelis - addressed a few Israelis on an issue that affects millions of Palestinians, whose opinion is of no account, who are not a side in the settlement and whose president, who was elected by a large majority, has been placed under house arrest (as were many leaders of liberation movements in Africa and Asia, half a century earlier). The contradiction between the democratic mode of behavior and the denial of the Palestinians' right to that mode is the fire that burns beneath the democratic texts in Israel.

However, democracy is, among other things, the recruitment of legitimization among the supporters of the political elite for moves the elite wants to carry out. Sharon wasn't able to garner the support of his ministers? He went to his Knesset faction. He didn't win the support of the faction? He went to the Central Committee. He failed there? He went to friends. Went to friends? He met only part of them. And, astonishingly, that part wasn't alone. Alongside him tens of thousands of settlers, most of them not Likud members, fought fiercely, even with self-sacrifice, with foreign funding and with close support from the army. And it's precisely to the settlers that we have to look to see what's become of our old democracy......

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/425091.html

[Gimel]

1. One way of looking at it

To me, however, the Likud referendum was simply a vote in a political party. It wasn't a vote of the government coalition or of the people of Israel. Viewing it as a struggle between the Land of Israel and the State of Israel, is underscoring the imaginary or inner identification vs the reality conflict which confronts everyone everywhere.