Philosophy professor Sam Fleischackers excellent defense of the personal sanctions letter, calling for sanctions against Israelis who influentially promote the Occupation of the West Bank. He argues convincingly against the canard that personal sanctions constitute impermissible coercion. I am one signatory of the original letter, which can also be found at the same site. ... Dear Yehuda [Kurtzer], I appreciate your thoughtful and heartfelt response to the statement I and others signed, calling for personal sanctions to be placed by the US administration on Israeli leaders who use their office to try to entrench the Occupation of the West Bank. But I’d like to take issue with some of your points — above all, with the idea that measures of the sort we propose amount to giving up on democratic debate, and substituting coercion in its place. “When did we all agree to substitute coercion for persuasion?” you ask, arguing that relying on persuasion alone is basic to democracy. But in the first place, this dichotomy is too stark. Democracies regularly adopt policies in response to pressure tactics — the giving or withholding of campaign contributions, acts of civil disobedience, public shaming campaigns — as well as persuasion. And those policies themselves, of course, involve coercion of a variety of kinds: from a loss of government funding to fines and imprisonment. In the second place, there is a world of difference between laws and policies that affect people all of whom are already members of a democratic polity, and laws and policies that affect people who are outside that polity but under its control. Your argument turns, I think, on a conflation of these things. You write: [T]o try to punish rather than persuade signal[s] a deep failure of imagination, and negate[s] the very values these scholars have worked hard to uphold. Michael Walzer, one of the signatories and a longtime colleague at the Shalom Hartman Institute, has written about the fundamentally intertwined nature of pluralism and democracy as characteristics of “the American Idea.” In his argument against fundamentalism, Walzer suggests that in a thriving democracy, policy emerges from “freewheeling debate” and open debate on ideas. Implicit in Walzer’s argument is the corollary as it comes to the outcomes of such debates: namely, that losing an argument is still an act of participating in a democracy. Civil society loses its moorings when dissenting voices – after they have been given a legitimate airing – insist on destabilizing the society because of their failure to win the day. Your quotes from Walzer come from an article he published in the Atlantic, in 2007, as part of a symposium on “The American Idea.” He began that piece by identifying the “American idea” with the thought that people of different religions, ethnicities and races can “live together in a single commonwealth” and govern that commonwealth democratically, participating equally in the decisions about what it should do. Then he said: The greatest threat to pluralism and democracy in the contemporary world is the belief that virtuous government requires religious homogeneity and clerical dominance: a single faith and a single version of God’s law. Religious fundamentalists hold that believers, heretics, and infidels cannot govern themselves as equals, and that state policy cannot be the result of an open competition and a freewheeling debate in which everyone participates. But what Walzer clearly means here is just that those who participate as equals in a freewheeling public debate, and a decision-making process that arises from that debate, should be willing to yield to others when they lose an argument. If a group loses a public debate over gay marriage or school vouchers it should indeed accept that loss gracefully: only then can it expect its opponents to accept their losses gracefully should it win the next round of the democratic process. The situation is very different if we are talking about what should be done when some people are excluded from the democratic process altogether: when there is no democracy for some subjects of the commonwealth, and the losers in a public debate over this, if there is one, are those who are trying to secure democratic rights to those subjects. This point is of course crucial to debates over the Occupation. Those of us who signed the personal sanctions letter agree with you that debates over policies within democratic Israel —Israel within the Green Line — should be determined wholly by the participants in that democracy, not by outsiders. It is also important to us to stress that Israel within the Green Line is a democracy, and should be trusted to overcome even its flaws in that respect by itself. But the same does not go for Israeli rule beyond the Green Line. There coercion replaces democracy, and an agreement among Israeli voters that the Occupation is acceptable does not legitimate it. All the more so, the entrenchment of that Occupation by Israeli leaders, regardless of what the voters think, cannot legitimate it. Coercion of the coercers, in this case, may be entirely appropriate. Again, even as regards everyday issues, it is not true that policy in a democracy arises solely from “freewheeling debate.” Among the powerful, money and connections and clever lawyering and quiet horse-trading shape a good deal of policy. Among the less powerful, strikes and acts of civil disobedience and boycotts are used as ancillary tools to discussion (think of the boycott on Arizona, after it passed a harsh anti-immigrant law a few years ago). But strikes, street blockages, and boycotts are all exercises of coercion, to some extent. They may however be necessary, given asymmetries of power. For the powerless to rely simply on persuasion, while moneyed and otherwise entrenched interests get their way regardless of public debate, would be for them to resign themselves to living forever with injustice. No struggle for workers’ rights, women’s rights, or the rights of African Americans could have succeeded by talk alone. This is especially true where the struggle is over the right of a group to participate in democracy at all. The sit-ins and boycotts in the American South, in the 1950s and 60s, aimed to end social segregation of many kinds, but its overall goal was to ensure that black people could vote, and participate as equals in public debate. Civil rights activists were also utterly unwilling to allow their success to depend on whether the majority wanted black people to be equal citizens. The same goes for activists against British colonial rule in India. There, the effort to secure democratic rights took the form of trying to set India up as an independent state, rather than to incorporate Indians into the British electorate, but there was a similar understanding that democracy among Britons alone could not legitimate British rule over India. Making sure that everyone can vote is logically prior to making law by way of majority vote, in a democracy: we do not have democracy where people subject to law are not free and equal participants in the making of that law. We see Israel today as facing a problem of this sort. As long as Palestinians in the West Bank have no vote — which they will get, we hope, in a state of their own — they are subject to laws they have no hand in making. In practice, this results in daily humiliation, arbitrary punishments they cannot appeal, decisions about land and water, or whether they can build a home or walk in their streets, over which they have no control, and theft of their lands and destruction of their olive trees and mosques by settlers who go unpunished. It is a basic axiom of democratic politics that government officials will not treat a group fairly if they know it has no say over their continued hold over power. And Israeli actions, like the actions of the British in India and Southerner whites in the Jim Crow era, daily prove the truth of this axiom (Gershom Gorenberg’s The Unmaking of Israel spells out the details). So unless the Occupation ends, there will be no Israeli democracy, just the coercive rule of one people by another. The Occupation is thus not just one democratic issue among others, like a tax cut or health care policy, over which the winners and losers of a debate should be equally willing to accept the result. It is not as if Israelis and Palestinians together voted for an Occupation and now the Palestinians do not want to live with the result of that vote. The problem is precisely that the Palestinians have no say in the regime under which they are governed. It is not, cannot be, undemocratic to oppose this breach of democracy itself: even by way of measures that go beyond voting and talking. I hope it is now clear that there is an enormous difference between the religious fundamentalists whom Walzer chastises for being unwilling to accept the results of democracy and those who support coercive measures, where persuasion fails, to change policies that exclude a range of subjects from participating in that democracy. The fundamentalist is unwilling to subject questions about the right and the good in general to public debate, insisting instead that only he and his coreligionists have the right to decide such questions. This is fundamentally undemocratic: indeed opposed to the idea of democracy. The uncompromising defender of democratic rights is by contrast willing precisely to subject all questions of policy to democratic decision-making — except those questions that make it possible for people to have democratic rights at all. This position is fundamentally democratic: indeed flows from the idea of democracy. In the Facebook posts you wrote after your article, you made two additional points that I’d like to take up. One is that there are noncoercive measures that critics of the Occupation can take instead of the ones we proposed, such as donating to progressive Israeli candidates, supporting NGOs that promote democracy and civil society in Israel, or educating people about the Occupation. I think that these are excellent suggestions, and indeed follow through on a number of them myself: a large proportion of my charitable giving goes for instance to organizations like the New Israel Fund, Rabbis for Human Rights, the Israel Religious Action Center, and Yahel. These measures do not preclude also supporting something like the personal sanctions statement, however. And restricting what we do about the Occupation to noncoercive measures suggests that it is just one democratic issue among others, to be settled by the current majority of Israeli citizens however it sees fit, regardless of its impact on Palestinians. That is a deep moral and pragmatic mistake. It is important to make clear that the Occupation steps over the line of acceptable democratic policy, that it undermines democracy itself. Which is to say: it amounts to coercive, rather than legitimate, rule over a large population. And coercion is justifiable, even required of us, in response to coercion, according to a long liberal tradition. So measures that do more than persuade are in this case called for, in response to those who coerce, rather than persuading, millions of Palestinians. Second, you have worried that promoting coercive measures against Israeli leaders will build a wall between American Jews and Israel, which will in the long run undermine the ability of Jews here to identify with their people in Israel. I see the force of this point, and respect it. But a “Jewish nation” is for me as for most Zionists not just a country with a lot of Jews in it; it is also a country that upholds Jewish values. A country devoted (exclusively) to Russian culture or New Age spirituality would not be “Jewish,” regardless of the genetic heritage of its citizens, and an undemocratic country would not be Jewish either, I think. For me as for many other Jews, respect for the dignity of all human beings is a basic Jewish value, and for me as for many others, that value entails democratic governance, at least in the modern day. I am shomer shabbat and daven with an Orthodox community, but my democratic values have deeply shaped my religious ones, and I would drop my observance if I thought Judaism was opposed to democracy. I think I am far from alone in this (indeed, it is my religious observance, and not my commitment to democracy, that may make me eccentric among American Jews). But if so, then how long can Jews like us be expected to maintain a connection with an undemocratic Israel? Should Israel make the Occupation permanent — which looks not at all unlikely these days — why suppose that we will regard it as anything but an embarrassment, something to distance our children from and assure them that it doesn’t represent “real” Jewishness? So I see a fervent, uncompromising opposition to the Occupation — one that sees it as so deeply wrong that it cannot be legitimated by majoritarian acceptance — as essential to maintaining a Jewish connection to Israel, not inimical to it. And I rather suspect that progressives in Israel — most Israelis, at one time, and still a significant element — would agree. We help them, in their struggle for the Israel of their ideals, by saying that we will not simply resign ourselves to an apartheid or fascist Israel: and that we recognize, unlike many mainstream Jewish leaders in America, that the danger of such a horrific Israel is real, and imminent, and needs to be fought, with every weapon we can decently take up. I suspect that we don’t disagree much on these points, but I’d be curious to hear from you on that. Best, Sam Professor Sam Fleischacker Department of Philosophy University of Illinois, Chicago
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 17:51:10 +0000
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