Reviewing The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel (October 2025)

In her 2023 book, The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel: Promise Unfulfilled, Dahlia Scheindlin, a Tel Aviv-based political analyst, raises questions about the degree to which Israel can claim to be both a liberal democracy and a Jewish state. She argues that the democratic foundations of Israel, even those pre-dating the State of Israel, were weak and compromised. The book’s title, drawn from these words from Immanuel Kant—“out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made"—alludes to Scheindlin’s thesis. In a way, this suggests a defensiveness on the part of the author, but over the course of the book, she presents compelling historical evidence that supports a critical though not lethal assessment of Israel’s experiment with democracy. In her concluding paragraph, she restates her assertion that “Israel will not become democratic until realizing that the problem lies in its very roots,” but then she pulls back from utopian envisioning and says simply, “we can do better.”

Nevertheless, throughout the book, Scheindlin consistently holds Israel to a high standard. For her, it isn’t sufficient that Israel is said to be the only democracy in the Middle East. And from her occasional but brief digressions into the world’s 21^st century illiberal democracies, it is clear that she believes Israel should aspire to the ideals of democratic governance despite—and in fact because of—the backsliding of many Western democracies. Earlier on in the book, her critique of Israel could just as easily have been applied to the U.S. where religion overreaches into politics, majoritarianism steamrolls ethnic diversity and consolidation of authority in the state executive is driven by a lust for power and immunity from criticism and countervailing powers … not least, from criminal prosecution. Therefore, notwithstanding her stated disavowal of utopian democratic expectations, she is hard-pressed in current times to find a useful liberal democracy exemplar, one that has successfully pushed back against illiberal populist and authoritarian threats. Hence, her somewhat idealistic assumptions.

The early decades between independence and the Six-Day War were characterized by many of the democratic challenges that continue to confront Israeli democracy. For instance, “the military regime governing much of the Arab population is not marginal to the story of democracy in Israel—not in the early years, or even in the decades after it ended.” And from the beginning, “[t]he practice of achieving religious concessions by threatening coalition stability . . . became routine in Israel and represents a pronounced feature of Israeli politics” demonstrating how religious parties have maintained disproportionate political influence.(1) Third, “The missing bill of rights is a gaping hole in the democratic foundations of Israel’s early decades,” and a complete and undisputed bill of rights remains elusive. Fourth, though Arabs had voter franchise during the military regime (from 1948-1966), “Electoral participation for Arabs lacked any of the civil liberties associated with a ‘free and fair’ process,” effectively rolling back universal suffrage. Fifth, the role of the judiciary has from the outset not been recognized as a legitimate arbiter of the rule of law, and its status remains uncertain. Sixth, Scheindlin writes that

One of the least visible elements of the regime left an enduring, collective psychological imprint even decades later: surveillance. Informers were essential to the regime. The military government coerced, bought, bribed, and blackmailed informers by dangling vital resources that citizens needed to survive, such as movement permits, jobs, and privileges.

One highly significant area where there appears to be longstanding and deep consensus among Israelis is in the view of the state’s role in the economy. As Scheindlin notes, by the 1992 election, “the economy had become significantly more liberal, less statist, and more privatized since the mid-1980s, the major parties still supported the basic welfare state that put Israel in the camp of social democracies, rather than American-style capitalism.”

Probably the most contentious aspect of this work is the inclusion of the Occupied Territories. Early on in the book, Scheindlin makes clear that she is writing about Israel and the Occupied Territories as one entity and not just ‘Israel proper.’

[W]hen evaluating democratic practice in Israel, I have chosen to consider all people and territory under Israeli control. This is not an arbitrary decision—I believe that the historical analysis of Israeli policy demonstrates that the control of the land and population of the Occupied Territories is inseparable from Israeli governance and society.

With this decision, Scheindlin enlarges the scope of her analysis to include direct comparisons between the democratic freedoms granted to Israeli citizens and denied to Palestinian non-citizens. At the time of publication, Scheindlin notes that “Israel’s population is over 9.7 million, and it controls, directly or indirectly, over 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem through various undemocratic mechanisms.” In her view, the occupation is largely, but not entirely, responsible for Israel’s democratic deficit.

There are, of course, other contributing causes. One not mentioned so far is the level of income inequality and poverty in ‘Israel proper.’ Scheindlin writes that, Netanyahu, the leader of Likud, has been shrewd in exploiting populist anger and frustration with the elites, particularly those traditionally associated with the Ashkenazi-ruled Labor Party. Netanyahu is himself one of those elites albeit as a leader of the rival Likud Party.

The losers of this growing inequality, not surprisingly, were those who had historically found themselves at the lower end of the Israeli economic and social structure. Among Jews, this largely meant Mizrahi Jews and the ultra-Orthodox—both groups that vote mostly for right-wing or religious parties.

Scheindlin cites OECD statistics that describe the levels of income inequality and poverty, but regrettably she uses dated information (from 2013 and 2014). The most recent online statistics from the OECD show that Israel's income inequality and poverty levels are above the OECD average.(2) Compared with North America, these figures indicate that Israel does not perform as well as Canada but does best both the U.S. and Mexico. It is important to keep in mind that these OECD statistics apply to the State of Israel, thus excluding economic data for the Occupied Territories, which would worsen Israel’s economic inequality data.

Scheindlin’s book ends in 2023 just as the fierce debates and massive public protests over judicial reform were taking place in Israel. “The demonstrations snowballed to hundreds of thousands who turned up every Saturday night, in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other cities and towns throughout the country” to protest the Netanyahu government’s plans “to gut judicial independence, stack the judicial appointment committee with coalition figures, and ban judicial review of Basic Laws.”

And then the events of 10/7 happened. The story that she tells of Netanyahu threatening to rein in the Supreme Court despite mass public outrage—although welcomed by Israel’s religious right and those opposed to an assertive Court inclined to egalitarian overrides of Knesset laws—is unsettling given the horrors of that day and the ensuing years. The war in Gaza changed the agenda. The constitutional struggle over the conflicting assertions of power by the Knesset and the Court has been backburnered. Netanyahu has regained control over Israeli politics as a wartime prime minister, and everything else, including the corruption indictments, is secondary to the war effort. But that is for another book.

_____

Endnotes