The making of a police state

The state of Israel has long been an object of admiration by the American polity and there are many things to admire. Americans see many of the characteristics that they cherish in their own country in Israel. Here is a country carved out of a hostile land in a hostile environment by an energetic and tenacious people who have seen repression and persecution in their home lands. This admiration was manifest after 9/11 when the Israeli security forces and methods were held up as model of how the US should organize itself in order to prevent a reoccurrence of this horrific event. I remember numerous Israeli “security experts” opining in the media about the steps that we needed to take to deal with the threats posed by Islamic extremists. Maybe we should ask ourselves: “What lessons have we learned from our teachers”? When my friend Diane described her experience of crossing the Allenby bridge from Jordan to Israel a couple of years ago, she said “Now I know what it is like to live in a police state”. After two weeks of wandering around this part of the world, I know what she was talking about. The ever present police and defense forces manning established and “flying” check points, the efforts of interrogators to intimidate, the never ending stories of arrest and imprisonment without trial for the acts of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the holding of the wrong political views or being of the wrong ethnic group or religion raise the questions: What is going on here? How did this happen? How does a liberal democracy morph into a police state? What are the characteristics that allow this to happen? I used to feel that this couldn’t happen in a democracy. I was willing to accept some restrictions on my personal freedom and privacy in order to be able to go on with my life in a secure environment. The US is a democracy. If our government went too far in this direction all we had to do was go to the polls and “throw the bums out”. Only the people on the “wacky left” at the ACLU worried about such things. Why hasn’t this worked in Israel? Why didn’t the Israeli polity rise up and say “enough is enough”? We are not going to live like this and we are not going to treat other people like this. Some of the characteristics of Israeli society that I have observed may help shed some light on the answers to these questions. It seems to me that living in an environment where there is an ongoing threat of random or intentional attack has given the Israeli people an overriding concern for security. They have also developed as a people a xenophobic fear of the outsider, the other. Part of this other is an unstable internal population made up of second class citizens and immigrants with no status or permanent ties to the society. There is also a large degree of political apathy in the society. (I can have no effect on the outcome so why bother) In an election that was billed as one of the most important in Israel’s history, one that would dramatically affect the future of Israel only 60 percent of the electorate expressed their opinion. As I think about this, I find myself saying “hmm, this sounds familiar” Be careful who your teachers are.