Hannah Arendt and the Crisis of Israeli Democracy

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Mihaely analyzes late texts by Hannah Arendt dealing with the protests against the Vietnam War in the 60s. Mihaely looks through them at the political reality in Israel as reflected during the protests against the Netanyahu government to show that Arendt spoke from her time to our time in the deepest sense of our understanding of the meaning of politics in general. Against the hegemony of the Western tradition of political thought that reduced politics to the question of "who controls whom?" Arendt brings with her--inspired by the American Revolution--a republican spirit of self-government. Based on her distinction between power and violence, power does not stem from the government but from the opinions of the citizens. Since governments today, in the degenerating representative system of liberal democracies no less than in authoritarian regimes, replaced their power (i.e., public trust) with repressive bureaucratization of political life which eliminated the relationship with the citizens, the only way out is a revolution that will introduce a new model with horizontal power. This goal alone, Arendt claims, justifies violence. Therefore, Netanyahu's claim that the violence of his supporters is justified by the violence of those protesting against him is not acceptable.