Citizens in a Democracy Must Be Allowed to Criticize Israel
If you cannot say what is true about Israel’s horrific actions in the world, you do not live in a democracy, writes fascism expert Jason Stanley.
This post was originally published by Jason Stanley on his Substack, ‘Front Left.’ Zeteo is republishing it with his permission.
When I was in Ukraine in May of 2024, a Ukrainian public figure said to me, “the Americans and Europeans think that Eastern European autocrats admire Putin the most. This is false. It’s Netanyahu who they look up to.”
The point my Ukrainian friend was making is that everyone in the world knows that Putin is a brutal dictator and Russia is an autocracy. Everyone in the West is free to criticize Russia; there is no sanction or threat in so doing. But somehow you are required to say that Israel is a democracy even though it is a country that practices apartheid, and its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been in power for almost as long as Vladimir Putin. There is real risk in stating the truth about Israel in the West; there is no risk at all in stating the truth about Russia in the West. Netanyahu is therefore the one with more power.
And yet it is essential in a democracy that its citizens are allowed to criticize the actions of any state, whether it is their own or another. Given that Israel has so much geopolitical weight in the world today, if citizens face threats and career sanctions for stating what is true about Israel, they cannot participate in a full public conversation about policy decisions. Such a country is therefore not a democracy, a state in which all citizens can freely participate in important policy decisions and debates. If you cannot say what is true about Israel’s actions in the world, you do not live in a democracy. Too many citizens live in countries whose democratic status is threatened in this way.
According to a New York Times article published on March 2 entitled “How Trump Decided to Go to War,” the decision to go to war was “spurred by an Israeli leader determined to end diplomatic negotiations.” The article stated the obvious. There is no clear strategic interest at stake for the US behind its massive attack on Iran, nor has the administration been able to provide one. Iran poses no threat to the United States. Iran was not about to produce a nuclear weapon. Iran was not about to produce missiles capable of reaching the continental US. The Trump regime has provided shifting explanations of the decision for this massive attack. But the best explanation is the most obvious one – it is in the strategic interests of Israel to destroy the Iranian regime. And the Trump regime is, for some unfathomable reason, prioritizing what is in Israel’s strategic interest over what is in the strategic interests of the United States.
If we assume, as seems clear, that the attack on Iran is for the purposes of Israel, then we can also make a prediction about the future. If Iran becomes a democracy, its citizens will no doubt remain opposed to Israel’s actions against the Palestinians. Thus, Israel will likely seek to prevent Iran from becoming a democracy. The goal then, as Marcus Stanley of the Quincy Institute has pointed out on X, would be regime collapse, rather than regime change (full disclosure – Marcus Stanley is my brother). It is in Israel’s interests to replace the states that challenge its domination over the Palestinian people and occupation of Palestinian lands by failed states, rather than democracies. For example, Libya is hardly in a position anymore to lend its weight to the cause of Palestinian liberation.
I have seen from my own country how democracy has been attacked by sanctioning speech critical of Israel. When Donald Trump came into office, he targeted universities with enormous fines and many other harmful tactics for allowing protests critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza. It was a broader signal to universities that speech critical of Israel would be carefully monitored. The “Israel exception” was the primary method the Trump regime used to attack universities, which are core democratic institutions. No democracy can allow such an exception.
In any true democracy, it should be allowable to point out what seems to me to be obvious – the United States is, for some reason, doing the bidding of the State of Israel, lending its military to its causes, and sanctioning criticism of its actions domestically. Understanding this is essential to predicting what will happen in the Middle East. Given Israel’s geopolitical power, open discussion of its influence in the world today should be a free part of every democracy. Repression of such discussion is a way to dismantle democracy.
Finally, if it is not permissible for ordinary citizens in a democracy to point out situations in which Israel is responsible for world events, then it will be left to antisemites and fascists to state these truths. The speech prohibitions on Israel do not then merely threaten democracy; they threaten to make Nazis and those with sympathy for their ideologies into the only ones who are allowed to state these truths. In other words, restrictions on speech critical of Israel lend unwarranted legitimacy to antisemitic ideologies. For the sake of both democracy and Jewish safety worldwide, it is therefore essential to allow citizens to freely criticize Israel without fear or sanction.
Zeteo contributor Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd-Associates Chair at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. He’s also the author of seven books, including How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.
For more of Jason’s writing, subscribe to his Substack, ‘Front Left.’
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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If you criticise Israel in Germany, you are an antisemite. If you don't answer the new Israel-connected questions in the citizenship test correctly, you might be denied citizenship.
I ask myself: is Germany still a democracy...?
(the questions
have been added to the test AFTER october 7 and the start of the genocide....)
It is entirely possible to be against Netanyahu/Trump and this obscene... (and in the case of America ILLEGAL) Mid East war and NOT be antisemitic. Period. End of story.