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The last days of democracy This may be the last hurrah of 54 years of democracy in Israel. The elections next week are not about war and peace or even about the economy, social policy or clean government. They are about the very existence of the democratic regime in Israel. For years, many people claimed that the fact that we were able to maintain a democratic regime while being engaged in a conflict with the Arab world bordered on a miracle. The miracle business is in a deep recession just now. Israel, like all other countries, is poised on a continuum between democracy and dictatorship. There is no regime that is 100 percent compatible with the ideal of liberal democracy. It's all a matter of dosage. A large number of Israel's citizens were raised and educated in authoritarian regimes. They have a most pitiful conception of individual rights, the rule of law, freedom of scientific creativity and freedom of expression. Until a few years ago, Israeli society was moving in the direction of democracy. In the last two years, we have changed direction. After the elections we may cross the line on the road to despotism. It won't happen to me It sometimes seems that a dictatorship is easily identifiable. That's a conceptual error. Regimes of that ilk always disguise themselves as decent democracies. Even Saddam Hussein maintains an election-simulating procedure. The countries of the Eastern Bloc styled themselves "people's democracies." There is a huge disparity between the information we get as students of history, observing those regimes from the outside, and the information received by their citizens, who are fed information and ideology that justify the regime and induce identification with the government. None of the rulers of these countries will appear before his subjects as the "bad guy." The result is that many in Israel have lost the ability to identify the direction in which we are being swept. Even in a despotic regime, only a small section of the citizenry is threatened by the government in day-to-day life. And that will always have an appropriate ideological mask. The government arrests and executes "enemies of the state," "agents of imperialism," "Communist spies," "terrorists." The majority of citizens live under the delusion that it will never happen to them. After all, they do not belong to the gang of subversives. The Ze'evi heritage In the past two years, Sharon and his allies have been breaking the rules of the game. Events in the territories have wrought a change in the concepts of Israeli society. The Palestinians there have been totally deprived of their human rights. With the possible exception of a few backward states, there is no country in the world where people live under a tyrannical regime such as we have introduced in the territories. Even in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the police do not deny citizens access to hospitals. The majority of the media is hiding from the country's citizens the price that the Palestinians are paying in the struggle. Palestinian suffering exists only in the writings of Ha'aretz reporters Amira Hass and Gideon Levy. The press is subject to a political steamroller. Most of the media is being "rhinocerized," as in the Ionesco play. Both parts of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, radio and television, have been enslaved by a conception. Authoritarian politics has long since crossed the Green Line in the reverse direction. The education system is undergoing nationalist brainwashing. Rehavam Ze'evi, the man who was an outcast at the outset of his political career, has been accorded a special day of mourning on which his "heritage" is studied, like that of Yitzhak Rabin. Under Limor Livnat, the Council for Higher Education, an autonomous academic body, has become a unit of the Education Ministry she heads. The public administration is inundated with failed political appointees. After the elections, brutality will have a field day. In earlier Knessets, the politicians of the right discovered that they have the power to amend laws as the fancy strikes them. MK Yisrael Katz (Likud) amended a clause in a Basic Law solely to get MK Azmi Bishara thrown out of the Knesset. The ruling coterie found that they can stick it to the courts and to the rules of the democratic game. If the Bus 300 affair - involving the summary execution of two bus hijackers and a cover-up at the highest levels of the Shin Bet security service - were to occur today, Ehud Yatom, who was one of the Shin Bet agents directly involved, would become a national hero and be elected to the Knesset. Come to think of it. Benny Begin the leftist The last option of a just hearing is the High Court of Justice. It's doubtful whether that shield will hold up after the elections. The Israeli right is fed up with this whole justice thing. For the right, the judicial system, like all the elements of the democratic regime, is superfluous. The judges, in its conception, are a gang of left-wingers. It's hard to believe that the judicial system will be able to withstand the pressure it is going to face. The judges are only human, after all. The right-wing consensus affects them, too. But kowtowing will not help them. The more arbitrary government becomes, the more its victims need the aid of the courts. The more people turn to the High Court of Justice, the weaker it will become. Everything is justiciable, Aharon Barak, the president of the Supreme Court, has said. The spirit of government is not justiciable. The Israeli right is today unwilling to tolerate dependence on the courts. After the elections, the justice system is in for some tough times. The right will make an effort to pulverize it. In previous Knessets, legislation was enacted to bypass the High Court. In the outgoing Knesset, an attempt was made to bypass it with the aid of a constitutional court. After the elections the politicians will be more energized. The committee that appoints judges will adjust itself to popular demand. Judges will be appointed by the same criteria under which officials are appointed in the Broadcasting Authority. Without the High Court and without B'Tselem, as Yitzhak Rabin said in one of his less successful pronouncements, referring to the human rights organization. People who espouse a democratic worldview are already considered leftists. "He thinks too much; such men are dangerous," Julius Caesar observes in Shakespeare's play. It's not by chance that Benny Begin, the well-known left-winger, dropped out of politics, or that Dan Meridor has one foot out the door. It's highly unlikely that the left can win this election. It may be the last democratic election. In the current campaign, the right tried to dictate the outcome by means of the wholesale disqualification of Arab MKs. That exercise was blocked by the High Court of Justice. We have no idea what the Supreme Court will look like in the next elections and who will uphold its directives. It's quite possible that the techniques that were tried out on the Arabs will be implemented against Jews, too. What was good for Ahmed Tibi this time will be good for Yossi Sarid next time. Tough times lie in store for us. The least we can do next week is to vote. The left-wing and centrist parties are on the democratic side of the map, though if we are to believe the polls, there is little prospect that the left-center bloc will succeed in blocking Sharon. What is therefore more important is who will wage the democratic struggle after the left-center loses the elections. We need a determined, ideology-based political leadership that will do battle over the image of the state. Not politicians who can be bought with the aid of a well-upholstered Volvo. Meretz, Labor and Shinui are options, but there are substantial differences between them. Voting for Shinui is like buying a lottery ticket. We have no idea what its candidates think or how they will face up to the anticipated political pressures. Probably even Yosef Lapid, the party's leader, doesn't know. The problem with the Labor Party's candidates is the opposite one. We know only too well how they will cope with the anti-democratic thrust. We saw them in the past two years. Meretz is preferable to both of them. Its candidates are veteran warhorses who fight resolutely for their worldview. They can't be bought, not even by a buddy-buddy embrace that will yank them tight up against the overgrown and violent body of the consensus. By Arie Caspi