Thursday, February 19, 2009
No democracy for the Palestinian Arabs as long as the choices are Fatah and Hamas? A long-term requirement on the part of the international community to ensure it happens despite any copmplaints? Sounds like democracy is a long way off. Our friend Daniel Halper writes in the JPost: Incentivize democratic mores
...The necessary yet absent component of any deal must be the acceptance of liberal democratic principles by all parties - no matter how many states solutions (one, two, or three) are in the mix. This should be a necessary precondition which must be accepted by all participating parties in any peace talks, and until this is achieved, the best scenario will continue to be only temporary alleviation of fighting, while, at worst, wars will continue to break out.
Israel remains the lone liberal democracy in the Middle East (though Iraq is making progress). Its minorities, including its 1,100,000 Arab citizens, enjoy the same protection under the law as the Jewish majority; its irrepressibly noisy citizens are free to say whatever they wish in politics and in the press; the government is not just elected, but political candidates are selected through elaborate primary systems - not through violence, foreign influence or coercion. Because Israelis have accepted liberal democratic principles both in the way they govern and in their cultural mores, they respect the lives of fellow citizens in a way that increases their readiness for peace...
As an oft-repeated aside, we really need to get over calling Hamas legitimately and democratically elected. You cannot have a legitimate democracy without free speech and civil protections. A vote is not democracy, even if there are no men with machine guns and pre-printed ballots at the polling places. People have to be free to share, test and measure ideas. There has to be space for new movements to develop. Without that, democracy is a fallacy.
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, p.44
You cannot have a legitimate democracy without free speech and civil protections.
More people should have read Sharansky's book on democracy; the one he presented to GWB.
He describes the institutions needed to be in place like a free and independent judiciary etc., before one can go on to applying "one man one vote".