Lebanon and Israel have two big features in common: They are really small in geography and incredibly diverse in population — religiously diverse, ethnically diverse, politically diverse, linguistically diverse, educationally diverse.
When your democracy is really, really small and really, really diverse, there’s only one way to maintain stability — all the diverse actors must respect the principle of “live and let live.” Or, as the Lebanese described it each time some faction there breached that principle, plunged the country into civil war and then had to re-establish balance among sects, “no victor, no vanquished.” Everybody has to abide by certain limits on their reach.
Over the last two decades, though, Lebanon’s pro-Iranian Shiite militia, Hezbollah, whose name means “the party of God,” trashed that principle. It used its superiority in arms and warfighters, and the backing of Iran, to impose its authority on all the other Lebanese parties and sects. Instead of “no victor, no vanquished,” Hezbollah imposed the principle often associated with African dictators — “it’s our turn to eat,” meaning democracy be damned, it’s our turn to get more than our fair share of state resources, operating unchecked by any independent authority (such as a judicial system).
For all the many differences between Lebanon and Israel, Netanyahu’s coalition is its own Party of God, and it decided that this was its turn to eat — even though it won last November’s election by a mere 30,000 votes out of 4.7 million cast. So it broke the live-and-let-live principle and immediately began transferring unprecedented amounts of new money to ultra-Orthodox religious schools — without requiring them to teach math, science, English or democratic civics — and appointing ministers with criminal records and pouring government resources into expanding Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank in order to unwind the Oslo peace process. This was all done while trying to neuter the Supreme Court’s ability to stop any of it.
This sort of resource/power grab is unprecedented in Israeli politics, and it is all the more galling when you consider that it is being done, in part, by ultra-Orthodox parties whose members pay the least amount of taxes and serve the least in the military.