On
that thread, Mr. Pelsar and I went around about whether Bush's America is a suitable model for a democratic society. I say it is not, but that isn't the subject of this discussion.
During the course of that discussion, I came to suspect (and only suspect, as I have not read Sharansky's book) that Sharansky's views are naive. In any case, the
Mother Jones interview characterized his views as a dichotomy of free societies as opposed to societies based on fear. Some observations on this are:
- that Mr. Sharansky, as a former Soviet dissident, ought to have a very good idea of what a dystopia looks like;
- that the world is not so neatly divided into free and fear societies, that the difference is one of a quantity of freedom and tyranny passing into the quality of a free/fear society. A discussion of the Hegelian problem is relevant in this matter.
- that in the brief interview with Mother Jones, Sharansky did not define democracy. By democracy,does he mean democracy as I would define it, a state based on universal and equal citizenship? or does he mean it as a neoliberal would define it, where it is confused with unbridled global capitalism? or does he mean something else entirely?
Accordingly, one might reject Sharansky's thesis that "promoting democracy is a matter of security"; it should be enough for Israel that a credible Palestinian regime would sign a non-aggression pact with the Israeli government.
Israel desperately needs to disengage from the occupied territories. She cannot survive herself as a Jewish democracy if she is going to absorb land on which non-Israelis live. The Palestinians have made it clear that they do not want to be either equal or second class citizens of Israel. They have their own national aspirations and have demonstrated for forty years that they are willing to die for them. There may already be more Arabs than Jews living west of the Jordan River, so Israel could not long remain a Jewish state if she remains democratic, nor a democracy if she chooses to remain a Jewish state.
There may be flaws in Sharon's disengagement plan, but that plan addresses those problems better than does a thesis that claims Israel must insist on a democratic Palestine, by whatever standard of democracy one chooses.
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