If Gaza dies, Western democracy dies

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Perhaps what has kept the West from stopping the genocide Israel is carrying out is that Israel has stripped the proverbial emperor bare. We have turned democracy into a sovereign that cannot be criticised without risking punishment and anathema.

Israel is said to be “the only democracy in the Middle East.” The sole state that somehow embodies Western values in a region ruled by autocrats and monarchs, we are told.

Assuming that is actually true – today Israel looks more like a clerical democracy, if not an outright theocracy – what is happening shows that our values, our ideals, our “way of life” are committing genocide.

Put like that, it sounds like an oxymoron. Democracy and the Western values forged in the immense tragedy of the Second World War cannot be genocidal.

Yet in the not-too-distant 20th century, the West – Western democracy – already turned into a monster. The Fascists won the elections of 1924 in Italy and then passed the racial laws. Hitler won in 1933, then burned the parliament and built the concentration camps that soon became extermination camps. The worst genocide humanity remembers – against Jews, socialists and communists, people with disabilities, homosexuals and Roma – was also the product of a democracy.

The naked emperor is now Israel: not exposing its private parts like in the fable, but rather revealing the incompleteness of our democracy – or what we in the West call “democracy,” but is not really so.

There’s a reason why, after stating in its first article that Italy is a democratic republic, the Italian Constitution adds in Art. 2 that the Republic “requires that the fundamental duties of political, economic and social solidarity be fulfilled,” and in Art. 3 that “It is the duty of the Republic to remove those obstacles of an economic or social nature which constrain the freedom and equality of citizens, thereby impeding the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic and social organisation of the country.” The implication is that, if such obstacles are not removed, that would render the Republic undemocratic.

The same reasoning applies to the constitutions of all that we call “Western democracies.” Tocqueville, Rousseau, the Déclaration of 1789 and the 19th century philosophers have all made similar points.

But has the West managed to build true democracies by guaranteeing equality and removing the obstacles that actually limit freedom and equality? No. We do not live in a system that equally values each different identity through guaranteeing civil liberties – the freedom to be what one wishes – and that reduces economic inequality through social and labour rights, pursuing equality in the sense of the removal of obstacles to full human development. Many civil and social freedoms are lacking, albeit to different degrees, throughout the West. Even worse, they are now being dangerously curtailed.

No honest person could therefore claim that what we call Western democracy – and, therefore, Israeli democracy as well – is fully a democracy. One could even argue it is not really a democracy at all.

On one hand, this opens a hopeful prospect: it tells us that the collective effort to change the system, abruptly halted in the early 1980s, simply needs to resume. Those were the very years that marked what many call the “crisis of representation”, which is in truth a lack of democracy.

Unfortunately, Europe and Italy still refuse to see that the emperor is naked, that politics – another word for all of us – has not returned to the path abruptly reversed by Thatcherism and its mantra of “There is no alternative.” Europe and Italy do not grasp that the genocide must be stopped, just as Fascism and Nazism were stopped, so that we can reverse course and start building democracy for real. If we allow Gaza to die, we will be killing Western democracy.

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Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/se-gaza-muore-muore-la-democrazia-occidentale on 2025-05-27