Prime Minister Ariel Sharon addressing the Knesset plenum during the festive sitting, 2002

Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg:

Members of the Knesset, I hereby open the special sitting on the subject of “Democracy at Times of War” to mark the fifty-third birthday of the Knesset,.

Mr. Prime Minister, I wish to apologize on behalf of the President of the State, with whom I spoke. Due to delays that are not in the hands of the Knesset or the President’s Residence, your entry and the arrival of the President were both delayed. With the President’s consent we will begin this sitting, and if and when it will be possible for him to arrive, we will honor him by standing up.

Congratulations to the Knesset, congratulations to the Jewish National Fund on its centennial. It is a pretty good start.

Mr. Prime Minister, it is not the first time that the Knesset celebrates its birthday at a time of war, under fire. The continuum of wars and states of emergency caused us almost never to stop and take a look at ourselves and ask the fateful question regarding the strength and status of the Israeli democracy: Are we truly democratic, or maybe the reality of the war has sunk into to the depths of democracy and devoured it? And if so, what can be done to stop this plague?

Democracy gives off an impression of weakness. Until one decides, agrees, and executes, it takes so long, and it seems so inefficient that in trying times, and there is no tougher test than that of a war, there is a tendency to let the military win, castrate, sterilize and silence the democracy and its voices.

In Rome, at times of war, dictators were appointed over the empire to lead them during the times of emergency. The modern age has a much more sophisticated replacement: Dictatorship of the majority. At times of war, the majority is in the right, and the minority is silent. At a time of war we try and dismiss the argument, silent the voices, that they will not know, that the enemy will not hear, that the unity will not be harmed, and even if it is only cosmetic unity and the dissenter, the other, the different, the minority, is always considered a suspect, a traitor, unfaithful, a backstabber, a Trojan horse, a well-poisoner.

How then, explain to me, Members of the Knesset, how is it that democracies do not fall and all the regimes that were and are no longer, thank god, were those of dictatorship? Tyrant Spain, Fascist Italy, imperial Japan, the former Soviet Union and the Apartheid regime of South Africa.

Decorations in the Knesset in honor of Tu Bishvat, 2002

There is no escape from the conclusion that any non-democratic rule, an evil rule of silencing and oppression, plants its own seeds of destruction, and only a rule of representation and expression, of expression and argument, of civilian participation in political decisions, is a rule with a true inner source of power, that has the power to rise to its challenges and overcome its goals.

What happens to a nation that finds itself for a long period in times of war? What happens to its democratic foundations? What happens to its basic values of life? Something happens to the soul, to the people’s psychology. What was once not done under any circumstances slowly turns, with the continuous erosion of reality, to become a fact of life that cannot be disputed. The discrimination turns into a norm, the impermeability into a way of life, and any hand of the enemy, even if it aimed at peace, deeply frightens us. Trust and faith are completely eradicated from the country.

When the life of a nation is threatened nonstop, the violence turns into an inseparable part of life. What is permitted to individuals in the battlefield turns into a common phenomenon, for all those who live outside the barracks. Wherever we turn we face violence – from the bombing in the street, through stories from the reserves and on to the way our souls and the souls of our children are being shaped, as combat soldiers who fight an endless war, and the suppression of an alternative way of thinking to that of the majority becomes a daily habit.

From now on we say: Democracy is tested not at times of peace and calmness. True democracy is being tested in times of crisis. Does the democratic lifestyle hold enough to fit the other, the different, the objector, the minority, even when the society’s blood-pressure soars up, or, even worse, when the blood itself washes over reality with the cruelness of the enemy?

It was proven numerous times before, Members of the Knesset, from the days of Jeremiah the prophet who stood alone against the Kingdom of Judah and up through today, that the solution for a society at war, as our society, is not necessarily found with the trampling majority. It has happened several times in the past, to us and to other societies, that the solution was found in the margins, single voices, annoying at first, who turned into a just stream that changed the policies of nations. So were the voices against Vietnam. So were the rebels of the underground movements and the Righteous Among the Nations during the dark days of the world war. So are the fighters for human rights, the objectors to Stalin and his heirs, and so are we, the protestors against the war in Lebanon, here in this country.