Is Full Democracy Ever Feasible?
On the challenges presented by nationalist religiosity for a more equal world
At the end of July, Gilad Erdan left his post as the Israeli ambassador to the UN. In that role, he was notorious for pulling stunts criticized by Israeli officials and Jewish interest groups, along with the international community. Soon after October 7, he wore a yellow star to draw a parallel to the Holocaust, to the sharp condemnation of Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust memorial), which called this gimmicky use of history a “disgrace to both Holocaust victims and Israel”, because it elided the very different political contexts in which these crimes occurred.
Erdan’s stunts continued after leaving his post, though, with his latest happening this week around the International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to Victims of Terror. While touring an exhibit created in 2022, which thus used events from dates prior to its launch, Erdan misled his audience in a video posted to X, giving the impression that the exhibit was in fact current to late 2024 but had expressly elected to exclude the civilian casualties of October 7, 2023.
The crux of this video, though, was his call for the UN to be destroyed, stating:
There is no place more corrupt and morally twisted than the UN. And we must all unite to spread this message worldwide, demanding the closure and dismantling of this organization and the establishment of a new body that truly represents noble values.
As he said in an i24 interview soon after, as reported by Haaretz, the UN needed to be “wiped off the face of the Earth”.
This kind of hyperbole has been necessary for Erdan in his diplomatic role from the start of Israel’s siege on Gaza. For Tough Times Tuesday, I mentioned that Israeli kibbutzim are still struggling to shake off the propaganda first reprehensibly foisted on their grieving communities by messianic and secular warmongers, who whipped up global outrage through sensational falsehoods about the atrocities that day—at cost to the real lives and memories of people murdered on October 7.
To those communities still struggling to shake off the terrible yoke of wartime propaganda is lately added the very brave Noa Argamani, a hostage saved through Israeli military action on June 8. As The Jerusalem Post reported this week:
Despite media reporting that she was beaten by Hamas, Argamani went to social media on Friday to say that her words had been taken out of context. She said she was not beaten and her hair was not cut. “I said, I had cuts all over my head and I was hurt all over my body.” Argamani emphasized that her wounds came from the collapse of a building after it was bombed by the IAF. “As a victim of October 7, I will not allow myself to be victimized once again by the media,” she said.
But the work of warmongers spinning sensational lies around real trauma would not have been possible if the UN had been allowed to do what it always strives to do in these situations: visit the sites of violence themselves, and document atrocity through international standards. Instead, the UN was initially refused access to these spaces, under claims by Israeli officials that it couldn’t be trusted, because the UN had earlier accepted a Palestinian bid for investigation into Israel’s wartime actions in 2014—at the time, the most brutal Israeli campaign in the region in years.
In other words, because the UN agreed to review other possible sites of wrongdoing, Israel explicitly refused its commission access to this one—even at cost to clarity for the victims’ families and communities. Israeli women’s groups were left pleading for weeks for a domestic investigation into any sex-based offences, because wartime propagandists had no problem using the idea of violence against women for political points, without bothering to do right by any potential victims themselves.
(And as late as April of this year, Israel was still denying the UN Commission of Inquiry proper access for critical documentation purposes.)
Israel’s refusal to let the UN carry out its inquiries was an incredibly good wartime strategy, though, because everyone knew the UN would not be party to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans for a sweeping siege on Gaza in pursuit of what he’d later call “total victory”, along with emboldened settler violence in the West Bank.
And if the UN wasn’t going to shut up and let Israel wage whatever retaliatory war its far-right government wanted to? Then it had to be spun as the enemy. No stats it produced, no reports it put out, no statements it made about the situation could ever be accepted in good faith. Every subgroup now had to be attacked for its UN association, and presented in spin cycles as giving direct, intentional, and nefarious aid to the enemy, to rally whatever wartime allies elsewhere that Netanyahu could.
Women in particular were turned into props by this manipulative tactic in the first few months, because while any potential crimes against them went un-investigated for weeks, followed by a whole new wave of propaganda (e.g., the NYT scandal), Israel was able to accuse the UN of bias for not issuing a prompt enough condemnation for acts of violence against women while it was being denied direct access. Everything could only come through IDF, or after other government screening processes for media release. And since there were also people who wanted to “false flag” the whole event, claiming that nothing awful had happened to civilians that day (also a flat-out lie), it was very easy to lump anyone expressing caution and a desire to see more proof into the category of “deniers” and therefore Hamas sympathizers.
(Even if, again, the terrible crushing truth is that many claims about October 7 were utter fabrications, lies weaponized for the war effort at extreme cost to all the real stories of suffering and loss. People were right to be cautious about repeating the most sensational statements out of Israel’s PR teams, in the absence of more corroborating evidence—and still are. Armies at war will never tell the whole truth.)
And this is where someone like Erdan served perfectly in Netanyahu’s war, by creating hyperbolic soundbites of outrage at strategic intervals to distract from and undermine whatever calls the UN might make for ceasefire and aid to people in Gaza and the West Bank. By howling about UN corruption every step of the way, Erdan helped secure for Israel a significant cohort of Westerners who quickly understood that, in order to be seen as supporting Israel, they had to condemn the UN, too.
So, they did.
In this way, the US’s unwavering support for Israel’s current, far-right government hasn’t just put it at odds with most everyone in the international community; it’s also managed a feat that the US’s own far-right has been trying to pull off for years:
It’s made stronger nationalists—and anti-globalists—of many fellow citizens.
Today, for paid subscribers, we’re going to look at how difficult it is to achieve democracy even on a national level when we’re not committed to expanding democratic action on a global level. But first, I want to call attention to one last stunt on the part of Erdan, which highlights the cognitive dissonance with which many in the West have been living since the start of this latest horror in the Middle East.
In the thread of videos following from his misleading walk through a 2022 exhibit, Erdan stops to affix a mezuzah to the door for the new Israeli ambassador. A mezuzah is an incredibly important object in Judaism; it contains two excerpts from Deuteronomy, and is meant to mark the threshold of every person in the faith.
The end of one passage in the mezuzah references the object itself:
18 Therefore shall ye lay up these My words in your heart and in your soul; and ye shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes.
19 And ye shall teach them your children, talking of them, when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
20 And thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thy house, and upon thy gates;
21 that your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, upon the land which the LORD swore unto your fathers to give them, as the days of the heavens above the earth.
Generally, the case holding these words is a simple rectangle or circle, but in the video posted by Erdan, he’s chosen a large case styled in the shape of Israel—and not just any Israel: an Israel whose borders include Gaza and the West Bank, known locally Judea and Samaria. As he declared at the time, this was to be “a reminder to everyone who comes here for a meeting, that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people, including Judea and Samaria.” These territories are part of a schism that has existed between the UN and Israel for decades, because Israel doesn’t accept all elements of the Fourth Geneva Convention (in particular, the ones involving the onus on occupying powers toward others in occupied territory), on the grounds that it disagrees with international consensus for who is sovereign in these spaces.
And when you read on in Deuteronomy, just beyond the excerpt in every mezuzah, it’s clear where such believers get the idea of their sovereignty:
22 For if ye shall diligently keep all this commandment which I command you, to do it, to love the LORD your God, to walk in all His ways, and to cleave unto Him,
23 then will the LORD drive out all these nations from before you, and ye shall dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourselves.
24 Every place whereon the sole of your foot shall tread shall be yours: from the wilderness, and Lebanon, from the river, the river Euphrates, even unto the hinder sea shall be your border.
25 There shall no man be able to stand against you: the LORD your God shall lay the fear of you and the dread of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon, as He hath spoken unto you.
Now, those of us who know a thing or two about the development of the Bible know that Deuteronomy was “found” by a high priest (Hilkiah) in service to a king (Josiah) who would leverage the cult of the war-god Yahweh (one of a few pantheon gods in the region) to solidify his reign. (There’s more on this in 2 Kings 23, for those curious about the biblical history. Essentially, this was the big turning point when Josiah purged other pantheon gods from the city, drawing on the “discovery” of Deuteronomy as proof of YHWH’s wrath at the people’s worship of other gods.)
Also, we should recall that Moses isn’t the author of the Pentateuch; he’s a fabricated storyteller whose very name, cognate with many Egyptian names (e.g., Ramses, Thutmoses—the suffix coming from the Egyptian noun “ms”, for child or son), hints at the myth’s origin. Exodus as described in the Bible didn’t happen, but there’s an echoing story in Egyptian tradition, of a leper rebellion against a Pharaoh for unjust practices. This story, set down by Manetho in the 3rd century B.C.E. and cited by Josephus, has a leader who changes his name from Osarsiph to -Moses, with no deity prefix out of deference to a monotheistic god whose name should not be uttered. But is that story true, or is it propaganda by Manetho or a later scribe? No one knows for sure: like Moses, Osarsiph can’t be pinned down to a specific period or incident, so it’s all a mess of politically leveraged mythology—then, as in the world today.
Nevertheless, this ugly bit of storytelling about god-given territory and the power to dispossess nations is embedded deep in Abrahamic canon. And just as many Christians, Jews, and Muslims now focus on the most constructive parts of their faiths—that is, the parts concerned with love, care, service, and peace—so too have many Christians, Jews, and Muslims leaned into the worst parts of these ancient myths, often without realizing (or caring) about the deeply secular and warmongering politics behind the supposedly divine verses they use as justification for atrocities today.
This is why far-right extremists in Israel—secular and messianic alike—are keen to take over as much of the West Bank as they can in the middle of Israel’s siege of Gaza.
They genuinely believe they are simply honouring their Covenant, as set down in Deuteronomy and inscribed on every door-post. And plenty of right-wing Christians are eager to see this part of shared biblical history come to fruition, too.
What, then, do we do with a world where so many Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Jewish nationalists (among others) are dead-set on fighting any approach to society-building that defies the territorial imperatives established in their founding myths?
Can we be democrats in a demon-haunted world?
Now, to be clear:
Today’s essay is not an argument for the perfection of the UN. Anyone who’s suffered through my writing on the relentless failures of the UN when it comes to climate change mitigation, or who read my piece on the history of the term “genocide” (which was undercut by other national delegates), can probably guess my position on this often frustratingly toothless organization.
Some other week, I’ll also do a proper deep-dive on global refugee status, and there address a wealth of disinformation that has preyed upon Western ignorance of international standards and generations-old refugee camps around the world. In that piece, I’ll have plenty to say about how NGO programs struggle with proper execution of their stated mandates. I am absolutely in favour of major UN reforms.
But we also have to take seriously the reality that a desire for sovereignty driven by nationalist forms of religious belief is a huge factor in global politics today.
We might think that we’re democratic, but we contain many contradictory drives.
How much democracy can we truly build for ourselves in such a world?
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