NOW THAT Israel is going to the polls on March 17, the air is befouled with gutter invective, accusations of treachery and thinly veiled racial baiting. The ruling Likud Party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, has been consumed for a month with complaints of malpractice and legal wrangles, arising from the primaries that were supposed to determine the composition of its slate of candidates. Yisrael Beitenu, the party led by the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is imploding under a wide-ranging criminal investigation for corruption. The largest Orthodox Jewish religious party, Shas, is headed by the Moroccan-born former interior minister Aryeh Deri, who served a prison term for bribery; after a party rival released uncomplimentary tape recordings of a speech by a dead rabbi, denouncing Deri, he theatrically resigned—only to reemerge, unabashed, a few days later (his party, meanwhile, split). Former prime minister Ehud Olmert and former finance minister Avraham Hirschson have been sentenced to prison terms for financial crimes; former president Moshe Katsav is serving time for rape. And these are only the most prominent such cases in what some like to call “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

The first line of defense when such awkward facts are mentioned is invariably, as in the Kremlin of yore, the tu quoque: Israel, indeed, is far from alone in exhibiting grave defects in its governing elite. Is American political discourse these days, even in the once gentlemanly Senate, so civil? Is extremist populism unknown in Greece, Spain, France or Sweden? Is Italian public life a model of rectitude? Are politics untainted by religious fanaticism in Turkey or India or, for that matter, the United States? We look in vain in modern democracies for a latter-day Pericles or Demosthenes—and, if truth be told, even those paragons were accused in their own time of demagogy, warmongering, inconsistency, cowardice and peculation.

Nor is the disagreeable, often-hysterical tone of Israeli political debate altogether new. Politics here have always been a rough-and-tumble affair. Westminster-style courtesies have never been the rule. Even before the Jewish state was established, there were political murders in Palestine of Jews by Jews. As in America, the more closely we examine the characters and behavior of the founding fathers of Israel, the more blemishes we find.

Withal, there has been a perceptible decline in the standards of conduct of the Israeli political class. The other day I walked down a street in Tel Aviv past the former home, now a museum, of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion. This was where he lived while leading Israel to independence and then to victory in the wars of 1948–1949 and 1956 (after the 1967 Six-Day War, he urged Israel to withdraw from its new territorial conquests). It is a spartan two-level dwelling, drably furnished, with one striking feature: the library, which runs from floor to ceiling around all the walls of several rooms. It comprises about twenty thousand volumes. Although Ben Gurion formally studied law in Constantinople, he was really an autodidact rather than a conventionally educated man. On visits to England in the 1930s, he would alternate calls on the Colonial Office with trips to Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford, where he would stock up on classical texts. Anita Shapira’s new biography of Ben Gurion relates how his intimate friendship with a young Englishwoman was nurtured by a shared love of the ancients, especially Plato. She would write to him from London and send books from Blackwell’s. Apart from Shimon Peres, the last member of the founding generation, I cannot imagine any Israeli politician today who boasts a library half this size or quality.

And that was not even the whole of it. After his retirement, when he had retreated to the Negev desert kibbutz of Sde Boker, I met Ben Gurion. He was living in a small cabin that was crammed full of yet more books. A welcoming, gnome-like figure with white tufts of hair, he was a rumbustious, if one-sided, conversationalist, happy to reminisce about his relations with British, Arab and Jewish figures of the early twentieth century. He rambled on amiably far beyond the time allotted for our meeting.

Only at one point in the conversation did a cloud cross his brow. That was when I noticed, half-hidden among the massed tomes on an upper shelf, a television set. I was puzzled because, as prime minister, Ben Gurion had never permitted a television broadcasting service to be established in Israel. He thought it would lead to Americanization and a decline in Zionist cultural values. A little cheekily, I said to the old man that I was surprised to see the offending object perched there. Visibly cross, he tossed my remark aside, declaring that the set was a gift from an American friend and that he never watched it. I believed him: he much preferred browsing in Plato and Aristotle.

Ben Gurion’s successors Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir lived no less modestly. The same was true of the right-wing prime ministers after 1977, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. Of course, even in those days, there were occasional scandals: in 1977, at the height of an election campaign, Yitzhak Rabin had to withdraw as prime minister (he could not formally resign since the law did not permit that after an election had been called) when his wife was discovered to have held an undeclared bank account in the United States. The offense was technical and the sum involved paltry, a couple of thousand dollars, dating from the time, not long before, when Rabin had served as ambassador in Washington. By comparison with the amounts in some current cases, it seems the most trifling of peccadilloes. Just the other day, the police announced that they were recommending the indictment of former defense minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer on charges of bribery, fraud, breach of trust and money laundering, involving millions of shekels. Only a few months ago, he was a Labor Party candidate for president of Israel. Now he has retired from politics, citing “health issues.”

When and why did the rot set in? Part of the answer lies in the Americanization that Ben Gurion feared. In its early years the Israeli political system was heavily influenced (not always for the better) by European models: by the legacy of the British mandate over Palestine between 1920 and 1948, which imparted a respect for the rule of law, a robust administrative structure and a more or less incorruptible civil service; and by the Central and Eastern European political frameworks out of which most Israeli politicians of that period emerged. From revolutionary Russia the Zionists acquired a belief in the supreme importance of political ideology and devotion to a movement that encompassed every sphere of social life. Many learned their tactics and earned their spurs in the viciously illiberal political culture of interwar Poland. When it came to constructing a parliament, they copied the electoral systems of the Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917 and of Weimar Germany. These provided for the purest possible form of proportional representation: party lists elected by a single national constituency. The effect was to make it almost impossible for any party to win an overall majority in the Knesset, Israel’s single-chamber parliament. All governments have been coalitions, and small minorities, notably the Orthodox Jewish religious parties, have wielded disproportionate power in almost every government.

IN RECENT decades, however, Israeli politics have moved in a different direction. Put bluntly, the country’s political life has become heavily Americanized. Television and social media have replaced public meetings. Ideological mentors have given way to image consultants. Polling is incessant. Meretricious, often-mendacious advertising is ubiquitous. Above all, as in the United States, money has assumed an ever more central role in the political process. Figures like Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire Republican casino mogul, throw around both cash and antidemocratic rhetoric. Adelson owns Israel’s largest-circulation daily newspaper, Yisrael Hayom, which is given away for free and invariably supports Netanyahu and the settler movement in Israeli-occupied territories. In response to suggestions that, as a result, democratic values are under threat in Israel, Adelson recently scoffed, “So Israel won’t be a democratic state, so what?”

To some extent, the decline is a matter of personalities. Menachem Begin, notwithstanding his fiery speeches, behaved with a gentlemanly courtesy that often infuriated his enemies all the more. Shimon Peres, in spite of a persistent reputation for deviousness, hewed to a civilized level of public discourse and maintained friendships across political boundaries—for example, with the late Ariel Sharon.

With Netanyahu we encounter a different kind of personality. He used to be photographed at his desk in front of a shelf of books (the blue bindings of the Encyclopaedia Judaica) but I got into hot water once for speculating about whether he had ever actually cracked any of them open. The son of a professor (albeit an unsuccessful and embittered one), he seems to have recoiled from any suspicion of intellectual avocations. On one occasion I visited him in New York when he was serving as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. Upon arriving, his secretary instructed me to go straight in to his room. The ambassador was lolling on his chair with his legs on the desk, talking on the phone. He saw me enter but did not greet me or interrupt his conversation, nor invite me to be seated. He carried on like this for about ten minutes, uttering an unbroken series of crude obscenities to his unseen interlocutor. His manners barely improved when he turned his attention to his guest.

Of course, one only has to listen to the Nixon tapes to be reminded that most politicians talk less circumspectly in private than in public. Still, I could not imagine Chaim Weizmann (Israel’s first president) or David Ben Gurion receiving a visitor with such sovereign indifference. Anyone possessing a cursory knowledge of the Israeli political scene and the current prime minister’s ménage will know that this episode was par for the course. One cannot blame Netanyahu alone for the undoubted coarsening of Israeli political culture in recent years, but as the country’s longest-serving prime minister other than Ben Gurion, he bears his due share of responsibility. The founders of Israel may have been puritans, but they were not boors, not philistines and not on the take.

Perhaps most perilous is the lack of any sense of proportion on the part of several prominent figures in the political and security establishment. Ben Gurion, for all his hawkishness, understood the limits to what can be achieved purely by the application of military might. Now Netanyahu and others toy with the idea that Israel, unaided, could eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat with a conventional military onslaught. Nor is this all. That the U.S. Congress should voluntarily submit to a hellfire sermon on the subject by this swaggering braggart, leader of a pint-sized country smaller than Vermont, beggars belief. Fortunately, in both houses of Congress a few members whose pro-Israeli credentials are not in doubt have expressed their distaste for Netanyahu’s breach of protocol and of manners.

AT LUNCHTIME one day, someone says to me, better corrupt, vulgar self-seekers than messianists. Perhaps—if that were really the Hobson’s choice before Israel. But the country’s outgoing government might most accurately be described as a coalition that incorporates both those camps. The problem runs much deeper than the personal deficiencies of the country’s rulers. Israeli society has changed dramatically in recent years. A semisocialist welfare state has been transformed into an acquisitive society with one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in any advanced economy. Along the way, many of the values that sustained, or were supposed to sustain, Zionism in its early days have been completely jettisoned. The kibbutzim have morphed into private holding companies. Once the advance guard of a militant young generation, they have dwindled into little more than garden suburbs for those retreating from the urban jungle.

Israelis are still almost obsessively concerned with what other people think of them. But in the place of the U.S. (and Israeli) founders’ “decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” the country seems to be possessed by a gnawing dread that “the whole world’s against us.” As Menachem Lorberbaum, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Tel Aviv University, points out, no Israeli leader has exploited the idea of victimhood as shamelessly as Netanyahu. Much argumentative energy is expended denying any equation of Israel’s occupation regime with apartheid-era South Africa—as if disposing of that alleged libel would, in and of itself, solve Israel’s problem of how to come to terms with the Palestinians.

One evening in January I attended a public meeting at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, convened by the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, donated by the British-born hair designer. (It’s just down the corridor from the Emanuel Streisand Building for Jewish Studies, donated by his daughter Barbra, and across the way from the Frank Sinatra International Student Center.) The Sassoon Center, which has existed since 1982, documents anti-Semitism worldwide. The meeting took place a few days after the terrorist attacks in Paris against Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. The audience, consisting mainly of elderly people, many wearing yarmulkes, heard three speakers.

The first, Irwin Cotler, is a Canadian Liberal member of Parliament and former federal justice minister who likes to present himself as a spokesman for humanitarian causes, having served as counsel to Nelson Mandela, Natan Sharansky and others. When it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, he focuses mainly on what he calls “state-sponsored incitement” and “hate speech” (meaning attacks on Israel by Palestinians and their supporters). He devoted his remarks mainly to denouncing the United Nations and its agencies for what he sees as their “systematic bias” against Israel. He views all this as part of a “global anti-Semitism” that is working to promote the “delegitimization and demonization of Israel.” This was not the first time that I had heard Cotler speak. Nor was it the first time that I had heard him deliver a nearly identical speech. On this occasion, as in the past, he came across as not much more than a blowhard for Israeli hasbara (which literally means “explanation” but has turned into a euphemism for the country’s propaganda machine).

Then there was the historian Robert S. Wistrich, a professor at the Hebrew University and head of the Sassoon Center. He was the author, early in his career, of some well-received works on European Jewish history. In recent years he has become concerned, or, to use his own term, obsessed, with what he sees as the universal danger of anti-Semitism. In 2010, he published A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad. The title tells you all you need to know, without the exquisite pain of having to wade through the 1,184 pages of the book. In his speech Wistrich traced a similar trajectory, suggesting that what lies behind anti-Israel attitudes today, especially in Europe, is an inexpugnable “exterminationist” anti-Semitism. Indeed, in anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism “we are talking about a distinction without a difference.” He thus interprets the Arab-Jewish struggle less as a rational conflict over territorial and other interests than as a product of inveterate “toxic fantasies” of Jew-hatred that have infected the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Wistrich particularly objected to statements by German chancellor Angela Merkel and British prime minister David Cameron in the wake of the Paris attacks. Both these leaders drew a distinction between radical Islamists, who claim falsely to act in the name of their religion, and what Cameron called “true Islam.” Wistrich depicted such remarks as a “preemptive cringe.” As for the danger, in the wake of the attacks, of a backlash of Islamophobia, he considered that term “a very questionable concept.” He urges Jews in Europe to heed his “wake-up call” and mobilize against the hydra-like monster that threatens them. Otherwise they will succumb to a “suicidal charge into the abyss.”

As if Wistrich had not terrified us enough, we were then subjected to a tirade from Gerald Steinberg, a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, an Orthodox Jewish institution “based on the belief in the centrality of Israel to the Jewish world as its national homeland.” Steinberg addressed what he insists are the systematic anti-Israeli attitudes of NGOs such as Amnesty International and Oxfam. He seemed particularly exercised about a small anti-Israeli Dutch organization that he sees as embodying this pan-European vice. Steinberg has vociferously denounced European funding for human-rights organizations active in Israel.

What all three speakers had in common, and what evidently appealed to the majority of their audience, was a deep sense of grievance against those they regard as misguided international do-gooders at best, and, more fundamentally, against a broad international climate of anti-Israelism fueled (so the three think) by pervasive anti-Semitism. They view the world in a Manichaean framework that leads into the politics of fear peddled by the Israeli Right in general and Netanyahu in particular. Seizing, for example, on a momentary blip in the number of Jews emigrating to Israel from France, such people imagine that the greater part of the remaining Jewish community there, and indeed in Europe as a whole, is busily packing its bags to depart for the Jewish state.

Unfortunately, such fanciful notions are shared by a sizable segment of American public opinion. These are the sort who view “old Europe” as overrun by Muslim immigrants, sliding toward a new kind of fascism, incorrigibly anti-Semitic and a dangerous place for Jews. As a resident of Amsterdam (an infinitely safer city, by any reckoning, than my previous abode, Chicago), I sometimes wonder whether these folks are talking about the same continent I now live in or somewhere on another planet. Richard Hofstadter once wrote a brilliant essay about American populism called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” That evening, I felt I had come face to face with the paranoid style in Israeli politics.

THE NEXT day, a refreshing corrective: I attended a meeting of the Rainbow Circle, a Christian-Jewish discussion group in Jerusalem. This is a semiprivate society, founded in 1965, with admission by invitation, though it seems admirably open in its outlook. Participants included a number of Catholic and Protestant clergymen and theologians, Orthodox and Reform rabbis, as well as lay intellectuals. I also encountered the American-born Jerusalem representative of the Baha’i International Community. (There were not, so far as I could gather, any Arab Christians, nor any Muslims present.)

An old and valued friend, the late Geoffrey Wigoder, editor in chief of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, was a moving spirit in the group, which works quietly to foster interfaith relations in this most contentious of religious environments. Wigoder used to claim, with endearing optimism, that the circle’s “still, small voice” could have an outsize impact. The theme of this evening’s discussion was “Last Supper/First Passover” and the participants ruminated learnedly and fascinatingly on the chronology, nature and degree of the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity. Later I had an illuminating conversation with Raymond Cohen, another Hebrew University professor, who is writing a book on Christian-Jewish relations. He concedes that Christian anti-Semitism remains. But he maintains that since the Second Vatican Council and Pope Paul VI’s watershed declaration in 1965 on the relations of the church with non-Christian religions, Nostra Aetate, there has been a fundamental change. Yes, there are still anti-Semites in the church. But now there are authoritative documents condemning anti-Semitism that their opponents can appeal to. But where anti-Semites are non-Christian (I think he means secular or pagan, rather than Muslim)—as many in Europe now are—there is nothing to appeal to. Cohen also said that since Nostra Aetate and Pope John Paul II’s millennial prayer to God for forgiveness for anti-Semitism, “it is our [the Jews’] problem now.” The church feels that it has done what it had to, but Jews who can’t forgive remain weighed down with a burden of bitterness.

This insight extends beyond the theological realm, for such bitterness is the mental condition or constriction that afflicts too many Israeli Jews today. Their ressentiment extends in every direction: toward the Palestinians for “inciting hatred”; toward the Arab world, whose 2002 peace initiative they dismiss out of hand; toward the Christian churches, whose anti-Semitic recidivism they regard as ineradicable; toward Islam, which they see as inherently hostile to Judaism (never mind a millennium of generally peaceful coexistence in Muslim lands); toward the European Union, supposedly in thrall to “multiculturalism” and terror; toward President Obama, notwithstanding his pro-Israeli protestations; and toward a world that they feel will never fully recognize or accept them. I find it strange that such people, who think of themselves as Zionists, thus implicitly deny one of the fundamental tenets of Zionist ideology—namely, the claim that Zionism can secure the Jews’ place among the nations and has cemented their legitimacy as a nation. If it were really true that, after sixty-seven years of sovereign existence, Israel had failed to achieve this central objective, what conclusions would we be obliged to draw about the realism or practicality of Zionism as a political doctrine?

HAPPILY, SUCH ideas are not universal in Israel. There remain plenty of people in the country who are not nursing such pseudohistorical aches and pains. Many of them are located in the universities, for the most part beacons of liberal values—and consequently under attack for that very reason. (Wistrich lamented that politically he felt rather a fish out of water among most of his colleagues.) The judicial system, for all its limitations, remains relatively uncontaminated, though inflammatory attacks on the judiciary, especially directed against the Supreme Court, are common in nationalist rhetoric. The newspaper Haaretz continues to be outspoken in its criticism of the evils of hypernationalism, religious coercion, and repression of Israel’s second-class citizens (Israeli Arabs), quasi-colonial subjects (Palestinians in the occupied territories), and virtually rightless noncitizens (asylum seekers and others who endure peculiarly degrading treatment—more than two thousand of them, mainly from Darfur and Eritrea, in a wretched “detention facility” at Holot in the Negev desert).

Many opponents of the current government despair of the possibility of change. Opinion among Israeli Jews has undoubtedly shifted to the right in recent years, particularly since the Gaza war of last summer. The election prospects of the center-left “Zionist Camp” (Netanyahu, in a typical McCarthy-style slur, calls them the “anti-Zionist Camp”) are generally minimized. Even if they (the Labor Party, led by Isaac Herzog, and his centrist ally, Tzipi Livni, with her supporters) emerge as the largest group in the next Knesset, they would face a considerable uphill struggle to form a viable coalition government.

I leave Israel at the end of January amid a heightened cacophony of shameless grandstanding and renewed allegations of financial malversation. Six major generals in the national police force alone have resigned in disgrace after they were accused of sexual misconduct or photographed consorting with organized crime bosses. Tensions are rising on the northern border. Simmering resentment in the occupied territories threatens to boil over at any moment into a third intifada. In some ways the political atmosphere now reminds me of that around the time of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

So what’s new? Some observers are curiously content to see Israel as a perpetually turbulent place in what they call (in a phrase with disturbingly racist undertones) “a troubled neighborhood.” There is no prospect, they maintain, of genuine peace with the Arabs; the best that can be hoped for is “conflict management.” But the status quo is not a viable option for Israel. The occupation that poisons every aspect of Israeli politics and society, pollutes its value system and gradually undermines its democracy is not sustainable—not politically, not diplomatically, not militarily, not in the longue durée, not in the medium term, not even in the short run. It confronts Israel with a dilemma that its leaders and its electorate have avoided for far too long but that will have to be faced by the incoming government of whatever hue. This is where there is a genuine and politically inescapable point of comparison with late-apartheid South Africa.

Israel does not await its Mandela; it awaits its de Klerk.

Most ordinary Israelis yearn, more than anything, for a normal society, one where they can go about their daily lives in freedom: from interference by primitive clerics who restrict their rights to eat, travel, enjoy themselves or marry as they wish; from the burden of extra taxes to support crazed settlers in Hebron and elsewhere in the West Bank; and above all, from the permanent cloud of anxiety that hangs over the country so long as the conflict with the Palestinians remains unresolved. I do not know who will win the election. But I do know that whoever can steer Israel toward that culture of normality—the prize that historical Zionism promised to the Jewish people—will have taken the first step on the road to restoring this country’s self-respect, sense of proportion and human decency.

Bernard Wasserstein is an emeritus professor of modern European Jewish history at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews (Harvard University Press, 2014).