The Alarming Spread Of Illiberalism

Anyone who has had the privilege of reading the late Primo Levi's book If This Is a Man, based on his personal experience of surviving the Holocaust, will have gained some understanding of the evil to which the Jews in Europe were exposed in the first half of the 20th century.

It follows, as night does day, that the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine figures hugely in the Jewish psyche.

The history of the recognition of the new State of Israel by the United Nations is sufficiently close in time for its citizens to be acutely conscious of the tenuous beginnings of their infant country.

The failure to implement the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 meant that the infant nation had to fight for its very survival.

The fractious truce that followed was interrupted by the Six-Day War in 1967 that led, among other things, to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, a step regarded by most lawyers as in breach of international law.

Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinian Arabs appear willing to make the compromises necessary for a two-state peaceful co-existence.

As a Gentile outsider, the creation of the State of Israel has always been inseparable in my eyes from the centuries of discrimination against Jews in Europe and the repeated instances of them being ousted from their homes and cast adrift, as long ago as when they were driven from Jerusalem in the 7th century AD.

This tragic history repeated itself all too often, even in the 1950s when the Egyptian Jews were expelled and their property sequestrated.

Israel was carved out of the British-governed Palestinian Mandate, a process that necessitated a political division of territory inhabited by both Jews and Arabs and drew artificial boundary lines that separated what had been mixed communities.

These two monotheistic peoples have occupied the territory reaching back across two millennia. Even a cursory study of the history of Jerusalem reveals that it changed hands among Muslims, Christians and Jews with dizzying regularity.

Against this deeply rooted fear of expulsion, it is only natural that Jews will take all reasonable measures to prevent any further recurrence.

The rights and wrongs on both sides of the Arab-Jewish conflict require lengthy study even to comprehend, let alone justify, and certainly lie beyond the compass of this short piece.

But what I find impossible to reconcile is how a people who have suffered such historical traumatic dispossession of homes and land cannot see that what they do in the West Bank is, substantially, meting out the same treatment to its Arab occupants.

With Vladimir Putin's Russia invading Ukraine, I have this uncomfortable feeling that the self-imposed restraints on waging war that civilized nations had voluntarily adopted as the norm since the end of World War II have been loosened – in the case of Putin's Russia, simply abandoned.

This abdication of self-discipline was already surfacing when the little Britons fed their nostalgia for a glorious – albeit irrecoverable – past, by retreating into their miniaturized tortoise shell of sovereignty, lured by the false promises of mendacious Brexiteers.

Yet further evidence surfaced when the Neanderthal Magamen stormed the US Capitol in a failed attempt to retain the delusional Donald Trump on his celebrity West Wing throne.

Anyone who reads the UK Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022 will quickly see the authoritarian influence of Liz Truss, Dominic Raab, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman in its provisions further to circumscribe basic freedoms.

How readily populism segues into authoritarianism is there for those with eyes to see.

The new Israeli government, formed with the support of populist extremists and religious fanatics, is symptomatic of this regressive momentum that exploits the lowest common human denominator.

This is the process by which the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson float to the top of the political chamber pot, giving support to the claims of autocratic regimes that decry the validity of the democratic process.

Without genuine judicial independence and adequate protection for minority interests, the basic democratic formula can all too easily translate into autocracy.

The emerging Israeli administration's declared intent to constrain the country's judiciary is a florid symptom of nascent fascism. The irony is plainly lost on them.

Yet the geopolitical forces at play make strange bedfellows.

Both the US and the UK abstained from voting on the United Nations General Assembly's resolution calling on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to give an opinion on the legal consequences of israel's occupation of Palestinian territories.

This hypocrisy does not sit well with the concepts of natural justice that inform both British and American traditions of a liberal rule of law.

Further, the primacy afforded to political affiliation rather than objective juristic excellence in appointments to the US Supreme Court marks a further and critical regression from the progressive path of this tradition.

That neither American nor British administrations can see how this undermines their moral platform is indicative of their lack of a sound philosophical grounding.

The path into a world of political wilderness is mapped by relatively small but incremental steps backward.

It is long overdue for rational people with moral integrity to shoulder the burden of politicians and transform both the reality and perception of a profession known only for its spineless corruption and venality.

Where are the politicians of whom, in Primo Levi's terms, it can be said,“This is a man”?

Neville Sarony QC is a noted Hong Kong lawyer.

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