Party-Banning In Israel

James Kirchick mounts a semi-defense of Israel’s move to ban the party’s two Arab political parties. He notes, among other things, that Israel has banned parties in the past including most recently Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach Party that was running on basically an ethnic cleansing platform:

The standards for operating a legal political party in Israel are hardly unreasonable. The four offenses that could lead to possible banning are:

* Any rejection (in the party’s goals or activities) of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state.
* Any incitement to racism.
* Any support of the armed struggle of an enemy state or terrorist organization against the State of Israel
* Any hint of a cover for illegal activity.

The case for banning these two Arab parties may not be as strong as it was for the outlawing of the Kahane movement, but this decision did not just come out of nowhere. In the United States, if the Ku Klux Klan were to form a political party, advocating the dissolution of the American government and inciting violence from within and without, it would be banned, and rightly so.

I think this conflates some different issues. Obviously the United States would ban organizations that are dedicated to the incitement of violence or that are part of a conspiracy to effect the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. We would not, it seems to me, ban organizations merely for advocating or inciting racism. But America is an outlier in terms of its strong stand in favor of free speech in this regard. I think we’re right and the European and Israeli approach is wrong, but the Israeli approach is hardly outside the bounds of institutional set-ups that count as democratic. Rejecting the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish state seems like a different matter to me. Israel is one of a number of democracies that combines religious tolerance with an established state religion (pretty much all of Protestant Europe, e.g.) and also one of a number of democracies that relies heavily on ethnic origin as a criteria for immigration (Germany, Finland, etc.) both of which are important parts of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. If you ask me, that’s fine. But by the same token, it’s hardly beyond the pale for a political party to think that those kind of policies should be changed and if that means calling into question Israel’s existence as a specifically “Jewish state,” as opposed to a state where lots of Jews live, I don’t really see why that should be illegal.

More broadly, though, I agree with Kirchick that the pragmatics of this are hard to understand. Israeli Arab public opinion isn’t a small, violent conspiracy that you can ban and extinguish. It’s a real issue that Israel needs to grapple with.