I mentioned last week that I’m reading Nancy Rosenblum’s On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship (Powells, Amazon). The final chapter, “Banning Parties,” has a valuable discussion of the normative implications of party bans, which speaks extensively to the Israeli example.
First, contra arguments such as those contained in this typically disingenuous post by Jamie Kirchik, it draws a clear distinction between banning hate parties (which Rosenblum argues is, within certain limits, a reasonable form of democratic self-defence) and banning parties that are threats to national identity (which Rosenblum argues is not a form of democratic self-defense). Rosenblum speaks to the rationale for Israel’s ban on the Kach party, which called for the forced ‘transfer’ of Arab ‘cockroaches’ from Israel, and sought to ban Arab-Jewish intermarriage.
Rosenblum argues (p.436) that:
“Inciting hate” can be compassed within the parameters of democratic self-defense by connecting it to violence, to policies that deny civil and political rights to hated groups, or to the corruption of democratic dispositions. But when partisan appeals to religion and ethnicity do not entail hate speech, when proscription extends to any electoral appeal for or against parties on the basis of ascriptive characteristics, militant democracy fails to capture the stakes or the justification for banning.
In contrast, Rosenblum argues that the threat of existential danger to the state’s identity is not sufficient to ban a party under theories of democratic self-defence. Again, she draws heavily on the Israel example, examining previous bans on Arab parties that espoused pan-Arab nationalism and hence implicitly threatened the Jewish character of Israel, and the Arab-Jewish ‘Progressive List For Peace’ which escaped being banned by the Israeli supreme court under a 3-2 decision, because its arguments that Israel should become a binational ‘state of all its citizens’ didn’t amount to an unambiguous program and hence was not as threatening. As Rosenblum puts it (p.447):
My point is that existential justifications for banning parties are an independent standard and cannot be assimilated to democratic self-protection. Attempts to justify banning parties by arguing that a majority group has a right to self-determination do not hold up. It may be that a democratic majority or coalition elects to protect essentialist characteristics such as Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. But it does so democratically only when it is the result of democratic decisions and not by banning parties that challenge it. There may be good moral and political reasons to defend the Jewish character of Israel even at the expense of the fundamental right to political participation by parties whose goal is a multinational or purely secular state. The preservation of national identity may take priority over liberal or democratic elements. But to cast defense of identity or integrity as democratic self-defense regardless of its costs to democratic participation is sheer confusion. (my italics)
As best as I can interpret her (I may be mistaken), Rosenblum is herself deeply skeptical about the proposition that state identity should trump democracy. She argues earlier (p.440) that
Defending the identity of the state against parties that would alter it is an invitation to discrimination and exclusion. For one thing, the status quo is the baseline, precisely what parties organize to contest publicly. Preservation conflicts with interpretation and reinterpretation of political identity as part of the business of democracy.
But even if one interprets her conclusions as generously (to those who would like to ban parties that advocate for changes in the identity of the state) as possible, they’re pretty unambigous (and in my view hard to argue with). There is a genuine difference between parties that are directly promoting hate and denial of civil rights, and parties that are advocating for major changes in the character of the state. Banning the former may, under certain conditions and assumptions, strengthen democracy. Banning the latter weakens it, potentially in very serious ways.
[As an experiment, I’m opening this up to comments – but comments that don’t in my (doubtless partial view) seek to persuade and convince but instead to reiterate set positions about the evils or awesomeness of Israel/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians will be deleted, and if the discussion seems to me to be getting out of hand, I’ll close it]