Israel is a parliamentary democracy, meaning that the citizens elect a parliament which is then charged with making decisions about the future of the country based on the will of the electorate as shown in the elections. The leader of the largest party in the parliament is elected prime minister and charged with appointing the executive branch of the government to carry out his policies.
In 2003, one major issue in the election was the plan put forward by Labor Party leader Amram Mitzna to unilaterally disengage from the Gaza Strip. Likud leader Sharon campaigned heavily against that idea. The result of the election was that the Likud under Sharon received more than twice the number of votes that Labor under Mitzna did. Sharon became Prime Minister, and Mitzna resigned as party leader even before the final vote count was made official.
By the rules of parliamentary democracy, the people had chosen the Likud's platform and Sharon was charged with building a government to implement that platform. But somewhere along the way, Sharon changed his mind, and adopted the platform that had been rejected by the voters.
He called for the Likud party to hold an internal referendum of its party members in an effort to change the Likud's platform to match his new policies. In May 2004, the Likud did vote, and defeated Sharon's plan by a 60-40 margin, reinforcing the voters' decision in the election of 2003 against the Disengagement Plan.
Yesterday's Knesset vote against a public referendum on the issue was disappointing for those who oppose the plan. And it was disastrous for Israel's democracy. The vote basically allows Sharon to trample the will of his own party members, and of the nation's voters, and implement a plan that is already causing a huge rift in Israeli society.
Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu today spoke at a conference in Jerusalem, and said that he was very disappointed by the vote for the same reason. But, he added, "The essence of democracy is that the loser, and not the winner, accepts the results."
Rather than being the result of democracy, Ariel Sharon's Disengagement Plan shows that he cannot accept the results of a vote, either as the winner or as the loser. In the 2003 elections, the loser did indeed accept the results. Amram Mitzna resigned his party's leadership, and has been relegated to the back benches in the Knesset. It was the winner, Ariel Sharon, who did not accept the results of the election. Instead, he adopted the loser's losing proposition as government policy over the objections of the voters.
In 2004, Sharon again did not accept the results of the vote – this time as the loser. His own party voted against the Plan, yet he has proceeded to implement it anyway, despite their wishes. The result is a badly and painfully divided country, to the extent that it currently poses and existential danger to the future of the Jewish nation.
While a new referendum would have given the public the opportunity to decide in a democratic fashion about whether to implement the Disengagement Plan, such a vote is ultimately not necessary. Two such votes have already been held, and the Plan lost both times.
Since the Plan's proponents cannot respect democracy, and indeed don't even fully understand the concept, the Plan's opponents must use the tools that are the elemental basis of the system in order to defeat the tyranny that is developing under its guise.
The Likud party, whose own platform is being ignored by Ariel Sharon, must remove Sharon from the leadership of the party, and thus from the office of Prime Minister, and replace him with someone who will implement Likud policy – the policy most recently chosen by the voters. If the loser in a democracy must accept the results, certainly the winner must do so as well. Sharon has failed to accept the results of the 2003 election or the results of his own party's referendum. As such, he is unfit to lead a democratic party or a democratic country.
Copyright 2005. All rights reserved. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission of the author only.
