Security and Defensive Democracy in Israel: A Critical Approach to Political Discourse, by Sharon Weinblum

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dubi Kanengisser, University of TorontoThe attacks of 11 September 2001, and the era of the on Terror they ushered in, led many democratic countries to enact laws that curtail democratic freedoms in order to protect the public from terrorist attacks. From the US PATRIOT Act to Canada's own Anti-Terrorism Act, the underlying rationale of all these pieces of legislation is that a balance must be struck between democratic freedoms and security. By implication, then, democratic rights pose a threat to security, which must be mitigated. Sharon Weinblum, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford and an associate researcher at the Universite libre de Bruxelles, problematizes these assumptions in her insightful book and investigates how the discourse of threat and insecurity transforms the very definition of democracy. exceptional emergency situation that is used to justify limitations on democratic freedoms surreptitiously becomes a permanent state, and the limitations on freedom become not an unfortunate but inevitable imposition on democratic principle but an inherent characteristic of democracy itself.The setting for this investigation is a democratic country that has experienced continuous real and perceived existential threats since its inception. Born into the world in the throes of a war waged by its new neighbours, Israel declared a state of emergency four days after its independence. This official state of emergency, which grants the government sweeping authorities to enact or change laws, is the basis for the Defense (Emergency) Regulations that serve as the legal framework for the occupation regime in the West Bank, and the Emergency Powers (Detention) Law that provides for administrative detentions. It has been periodically renewed by the Knesset ever since. Israel, therefore, is exceptional. As Weinblum argues convincingly, this exceptionality makes it a useful laboratory to examine democracies under the extreme conditions of ambiguous insecurity that terrorist threats generate even in the absence of actual substantial violence. Indeed, the responses already seen post-9/11 have followed Israel's example, indicating that studying the Israeli case may prove helpful in reflecting on discursive processes still taking place elsewhere in the democratic world. What George W. Bush dubbed The War on Terror, Israel called defensive democracy: the limitation of democratic rights to (purportedly) protect democratic principles and public safety, and, as Weinblum shows, the (Jewish) identity of the state.The book is structured around three themes, which also approximate a chronological order in the development of discourse in Israel redefining democracy as defensive democracy: from the curtailment of the right to freedom of speech at the height of the 2ndIntifada in the early 2000s (chapter 3); through the curtailment of the right to equal participation through the revocation of citizenship and withdrawal of the privileges of a member of the Knesset (MK), Khanin Zoabi, after the end of the Intifada in the second half of the 2000s (chapter 4); and finally to the curtailment of the right to family unification through the Citizenship and Entry Into Israel Law that was passed as a temporary order in 2003 and has been periodically renewed since (chapter 5). …