The question of Israel’s regime—whether it is a democracy or not—is pertinent not only to the country or the Middle East region but also taps into some of the most-pressing challenges democracies around the world are facing: public distrust, institutional erosion, and regime backsliding. In addition, elected populist leaders in established democracies champion the majoritarian principles of democracy while undermining human rights, minority groups, and democratic institutions. Admittedly, democracy in Israel and beyond is no longer a question of yes or no, but of dimensions, shades, and types.

Gal Ariely’s book dives into these questions with a meticulous analysis, putting forward a novel multidimensional approach to democratic regime classification, and applying it to Israel. The book starts off with a review of the debate surrounding the classification of Israel’s regime as a democracy. Departing from this debate, the book highlights that the controversy stems from disagreement regarding the unit of analysis (i.e., Israel proper or the entire area under Israeli control) and from the ambiguity embedded in the concept of democracy. These limitations lead Ariely to propose a multidimensional framework of “democraticness” and a revised spatial analysis of Israel’s Zones of Control. Thus, instead of asking whether Israel is a democracy or not, Ariely examines Israel’s democracy along three dimensions (political contestation, protection, and coverage) and across different zones of control—Israel proper (within the 1967 borders) and the Occupied Territories. The last two sections of the book take a rather different turn, examining the effect of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on the Israeli regime and analyzing the key factors for stability and change of the democratic and nondemocratic aspects of the regime in Israel. This disaggregated approach allows for democratic and nondemocratic elements to cohabit within the same regime. It thus provides insights not only on the status of democracy but also on democracy as a process—either of consolidation or backsliding.

In analyzing Israel’s democraticness, Ariely takes in this book a macro-level approach that focuses on historical developments, the political system and its structure, and enacted policies. While far less attention is given in the book to public opinion, juxtaposition of the multidimensional approach and public support for democracy yields notable insights. First, political actors and institutions—at the heart of the stronger dimension of political contestation—receive little support from citizens in many democracies, including Israel. Longitudinal data from the Israel National Election Study and the Israel Democracy Institute show that Israelis’ support for political institutions—parties, the Knesset, and the government—has been consistently low over the past two decades. Conversely, support for democratic principles of free speech and equality before the law—associated with the protection and coverage dimensions in Ariely’s schema—ranges between 70–90 percent since the 1980s. These trends highlight a discrepancy between public opinion and macro-level indicators of democraticness, which further complicates the state of democraticness in Israel—the aspect of democracy that works best in Israel proper receives only little public support while the dimensions that enjoy high levels of support are much weaker.

Second, Ariely’s approach holds another key insight into better understanding the strains of public support for democracy—the relationship between erosions in the different dimensions of democracy. Ariely posits that democracy’s dimensions are independent of one another, as levels of democraticness in one dimension do not affect the levels in other dimensions. Conversely, his approach suggests that an erosion in one dimension is independent of an erosion in the other dimensions. Applying his perspective to public support for democracy and its crisis leads to a radical change in the mechanism of this crisis. The said crisis is perceived as a spillover of eroding support from the most specific level of support for political actors and institutions to the most diffuse levels of support for the regime’s principles. If we are to accept Ariely’s argument that the dimensions are independent, then each of them may exhibit decline in support and even a crisis, irrespective of the trends in other dimensions. Thus, the crisis does not lie in a spillover effect from specific to diffuse levels, but within each and every level. And so, not only democracy becomes a plural but also its crisis.

Ariely’s perspective sheds new light on the well-established data on public support for democracy. These data show low levels of public support for political authorities and institutions (specific support) since the 1970s alongside high and stable support for democratic values and principles (diffuse support) (e.g., van Ham et al., Myth and Reality of the Legitimacy Crisis: Explaining Trends and Cross-National Differences in Established Democracies, 2017). With support at the diffuse levels remaining high, most scholars conclude that the crisis of democracy, if it exists, is not severe. Yet other scholars have recently argued that the crisis has reached the levels of diffuse support, especially among young cohorts (Foa and Mounk, “The Signs of Deconsolidation,” Journal of Democracy 28[1]: 5–15, 2017). Both conclusions rely on the assumption that the levels are interconnected, and a spread of eroding support from specific to diffuse levels is the key indicator for democracy in crisis.

The approach in Israel’s Regime Untangled leads to a different conclusion, namely, that democracy is in crisis at the specific levels of support but not at the diffuse levels. This conclusion squares with the negative effect of populist leaders on representative institutions in established democracies. These leaders have attacked, eroded, and undermined the already wounded political institutions (the January 6 Capitol attack in the United States is a case in point, as well as Benjamin Netanyahu’s attacks on Israel’s Supreme Court and legal system). How are we to understand the adverse impact of these attacks, given that political institutions suffered low public trust long before these leaders came to power and the fact that these trends did not amount to a crisis of legitimacy? Following Ariely, we can say that populist leaders’ attacks on political institutions exacerbated the crisis at the specific level of legitimacy, that is, the political contestation dimension, even though they may not tap into the diffuse level of legitimacy (the coverage and protection dimensions). For example, figure 4.6 in the book shows that the three dimensions in Israel proper trend independently of one another (notwithstanding the overall stability of the trends), with signs of decline in political contestation since Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in Israel for the first time in the mid-1990s.

To sum, under the multifaceted approach of Israel’s Regime Untangled, different accounts of both democracy and Israel coexist such that tensions and contradictions are acknowledged but not resolved, binarism is rejected, and complexities are embraced. Israel is both democratic and not democratic at the same time along various dimensions and across its different zones of control. While the book focuses on Israel, the insights drawn from it exceed this specific case and suggest broader implications for democracy and the crises it faces.