The Lost Treasure of Israeli Democracy

Against the backdrop of Hannah Arendt's consistent axis of criticism of the collapse of the public sphere, the rise of management, bureaucracy, the passivization of citizens, and the conversion of political freedom into a technical government of needs, in which she saw a symptom of the loss of meaning of politics in modernity, the solution of which is the decentralization of power and the implementation of the federal principle, Mihaely attempts here to rethink the specific contemporary crisis of Israeli democracy, through two models of decentralized political action that run through Arendt's writings: the American tradition of self-government, and the kibbutz. In an interpretive move that connects the revolutionary councils, American democracy, and the kibbutz, in Arendt's writings, Mihaely gives the idea of the kibbutz a new relevance. Inspired by Arendt's non-nostalgic approach, he peels away the failed excess socialist element from the democratic element--two central ideals of the kibbutz in its beginnings--and finds a place for the kibbutz idea that restores it to its natural status as a guide at the head of the camp, by virtue of being the only source in the history of Zionism of participatory democracy.