“A Warning From Hungary: Why Gender Will Be a Key Battleground in Israel’s Fight Against the Illiberal State”, Haaretz

The news that Israel’s far-right Noam party has compiled blacklists of feminists and LGBTQ activists is a surprise only to those who have not followed developments in countries like Turkey, Hungary or Russia, where illiberal forces have taken over the state.

What lessons can the opposition in Israel now draw from this decades-long process of making gender the main political battleground in other illiberal countries?

In the illiberal vocabulary, “gender” as a concept exists only as a political tool. It glues together different political forces that otherwise agree on few issues, in order to pursue their common strategic goal: To build up an illiberal state as a viable and desirable alternative to the liberal state. Through gender, illiberal forces define the new normal, and what is – and is not – socially acceptable.

The full anti-gender script in use in Hungary, Russia and Turkey may not necessarily be fully implemented in Israel, i.e. defining progressive NGOs and activists as enemies of the state, rejecting the Istanbul Convention on gender-based violence (although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to a far-right partner’s request for Israel not to accede to the convention), banning gender studies and critical social science more broadly, restricting gay rights such as adoption (civil, let alone equal, marriage does not exist in Israel to be banned), banning sex education in schools and restricting reproductive rights.

Some of these, though are already in play in Israel, and others are forthcoming.

The new coalitional agreement, which includes amending anti-discrimination laws to allow businesses to refuse service on the basis of religious beliefs, is not yet a government program. But, like other elements of the anti-gender script, the real aim of discussing these matters as a viable legislative option is to normalize new political language and values through intensive public debate, and with this exhaust the opposition through endless and fruitless discussions. Progressive forces should be strategic about when and how to intervene in these debates.

This age, which sociologist Eric Fassin calls a period of “neo-liberal neo-fascism,” has seen illiberal knowledge transferred on an international level to disseminate alternative political strategies, while responses from progressive politics are narrowed down to the national level. This “Illiberal International” has brought only one new element into the field of politics: their modus operandi.

They not only use hate and fear in their ongoing legal counterrevolution to destroy existing institutions, but they also build up alternative and parallel institutions to the existing ones.

Pride parade in Budapest with banner depicting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has passed anti-LGBTQ legislationCredit: Anna Szilagyi /AP

The main parallel organization for illiberal knowledge transfer is the Matthias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest. This institution, which is wealthier than Oxford University, uses money channeled from the deliberately impoverished Hungarian higher education, and operates with the same ideological closeness and cruelty as did the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow during the Soviet Union.

Lacking any academic quality control, it provides a space for knowledge transfer, where Israeli intellectuals like Gadi Taub, are willing to say what is expected of them, normalizing the language of illiberalism. Its lecturers not only receive a tax-free stipend higher than those offered by Harvard, but they can be sure that their work will be translated, popularized on social media or on state media channels funded by, or simply occupied by, illiberal forces.

Israel already has a parallel system of religious and secular in education and in the army. So far, this system has guaranteed pluralism. But the new government raises the question of how some institutions channel taxpayers’ money away from one type of institution to another, weakening them when others are getting stronger.

What will now be at stake is whether the state institutional system can be emptied out and a parallel system made hegemonic. A polarized, fragmented society and institutions are the aim and the modus operandi of illiberal governance.

A demonstration announced by independent Hungarian lawmaker Akos Hadhazy in front of the public media headquarters (MTVA) in Budapest, Hungary, in November.Credit: Szilard Koszticsak /AP

The past decade sadly proved that the role of civil society organizations in fighting the illiberal state is extremely limited. By being constrained to comply with the legal framework set by the illiberal state itself, NGOs have become prisoners. The illiberal state uses the civic responses to it to strengthen itself – protests, demonstrations and criticism on the streets are used to show the international community that it is in fact a democracy. At the same time, the persistent resistance from NGOs has a cost: It is consuming movements and activists from within.

In public spaces, bodies have great power and impact, but in this situation, protesting without a strategy only makes the opposition visible in the closest sense of the word, as the cities are full of surveillance cameras. It also mentally exhausts the opposition themselves, as they perform their labor of love, day after day, with no tangible results.

Protesters in Turkey clash with police preventing them from marching against the government’s decision to withdraw from Istanbul Convention, which offers protection against gender-based violenceCredit: AP

A law being drafted in Israel, following legislation already in place in Russia and Hungary, will make it financially impossible for human rights-oriented NGOs to cooperate with international organizations, and they will be left on their own, their resources dwindling.

The watchdog function of NGOs, through which they exercise professional and democratic supervision over the government, is a legacy of the human rights movements of the 1960s, but now it is confronted with a fundamentally different state and politicians.

Not only do NGOs not have the resources and the legal framework to supervise, but governments and politics have become increasingly shameless. It used to be humiliating for a leader to have thousands of people protesting against them. Now it is irrelevant, because the use of power is above any previous moral control. In fact, it even strengthens the cohesion of one’s own illiberal group.

Aerial view of the anti-Netanyahu government protest at Habima Square in Tel Aviv last weekendCredit: ללא קרדיט

In Israel, there are still institutional autonomies in universities and municipalities and in the military, which is no longer the case in Hungary. There is still economic power outside the control of the illiberal state that can support political activists, which is no longer the case in Hungary or Russia.

The extremely diverse women’s movement in Israel needs to move beyond definitional debates and focus on the strategic issue of survival. It must focus on resistance from unexpected places, even inside institutions officially captured by illiberal forces or outside the preview of the illiberal state.

The only way to do this is to forge alliances with unlikely coalitional partners, such as Orthodox women, and on pressing issues, such as domestic violence and defending women’s rights to university education. Today’s fight is for basic rights that we used to take for granted.

The resistance movement in Israel must keep a close eye on the approaches and results of the fight against illiberalism elsewhere, and learn from each other’s best practices. We badly need to counterbalance the Illiberal International for the sake of all of our futures.

Andrea Pető is a historian and a Professor at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna, Austria, a Research Affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest, and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.