Simon Schama has a slavering interview with Tzipi Livni, the champion of Gaza, at the Financial Times. Says my tipster: go straight to the last paragraph, where you’ll see she “champions” a new “international standard” for elections–which would outlaw “in Muslim countries” anyone using “democratic means” to “overthrow democracies.” It is an implicit reference to Muslim Brotherhood in the previous paragraph. I suppose Israel will now define democracy for the world.
That, she explains, is the true conflict at the heart of the Middle East, one even bigger than the enmity of Jew and Arab: the genuinely irreconcilable clash between theocratic and autocratic regimes, and liberal democracies. Right now, and for a little time perhaps, an Israeli party of reason might be able to make the peace with its Palestinian counterpart. Evidently there has been something like a meeting of minds across the “security fence”. But not forever. No one knows which side – Islamic militancy or democratic secularism – will emerge from the Arab spring. But that uncertainty only makes the need for an early settlement more, not less, pressing.
Not least because Israel, too, has a domestic cultural conflict on its hands that is undoing assumptions about what kind of Jewishness the Jewish state is supposed to embody. Between the Jerusalem ultra-orthodox Haredim, for whom the only true Jewish state is one based on rigid obedience to halacha, the precepts of the religion, and those whose Israel is pluralist and secular, there is as wide a gulf as between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Tweeters of Tahrir Square. The two crises – of the outer borders of the Jewish state and its inner identity – Livni sees as organically connected. It says something about her forthrightness as well as her optimism that Livni wants a written Israeli constitution that would make a clear demarcation between synagogue and state.
But then she is a great believer in the strength of principle, championing an international code of practice to govern elections in newly born democracies. Recalling that in Israel the expulsionist Kach party was disbarred from participating in elections, she wants the same principle to apply to parties in Muslim countries that use democratic means to overthrow democracy. Hitler, she remembers, came to power through the ballot box. “This would not be patronising or imperialist,” she says. “They can all do what they like. But if they want to participate in an international community they should abide by those conventions.”
