There is a new and exciting way to promote World Federalism and Regional Federalism – and the visions of subsidiarity, democracy and solidarity beyond borders. A series of new initiatives based on electronic communication now allow people to ‘give their votes’ to people outside the borders of their nation-state, to protest the deficit of democracy at the regional and global levels. As a citizen of Israel, during the last Israeli elections I participated in such an initiative together with Palestinian partners and in this article I would like to share my thoughts and experiences with you.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, likes to tell his listeners that “Israel is the only real democracy in the Middle East”. In order to better understand this statement, which is frequently repeated by Israel’s supporters around the world, it is good to recall another claim that Netanyahu made last year. In a much-reported interview that focused on the socio economic situation in Israel he concluded that “if you deduct the Arabs and ultra- Orthodox from inequality indexes, we’re in great shape”. The Arab citizens of Israel and the Jewish ultra-Orthodox, are indeed the poorest sectors among Israel’s society, and account for almost a third of its citizens, 20% and 8% respectively. It is this very talent of deducting large chunks of the population from the equation that enables one to claim also how great and real is the democracy of Israel. There is of course another population that regularly gets deducted from the equation – the 4 million or so Palestinians that live in the West Bank and Gaza, whose lives are affected by Israel’s policies to varying degrees, and yet who are not represented in the Israeli democracy and have no say about these policies.

Israel is certainly not the first or the only democracy to make such distinctions. The citizens of ancient Athens practiced a form of democracy that excluded women and slaves. Even modern democracies such as France or Switzerland only let women vote astonishingly late in the 20th century (1944 and 1971 respectively). On a wider, global perspective, it can be said that democracy has actually not changed substantially since the days of ancient Athens. Then in the polis, the minority (free men) were privileged with democracy, while the majority (slaves and women) toiled to serve them, without having any representation in the decision making process. Today in the ‘global village’ democracy is still the privilege of the few, while the majority (often named “the global South”) toil to care and serve for them, without having a say or representation in the decision making process.

This exclusion of populations from the political game is not only unjust and immoral, but it also means that democracy still has a long way to go until anyone will be able to say that they live in ‘real democracy’. In an effort to push democracy beyond the political status quo towards real inclusiveness, a few weeks before the last Israeli elections a group of Israeli and Palestinian activists launched a campaign called Real Democracy. The major platform of the campaign was a Facebook page through which Israeli citizens effectively transferred some of their political power to their Palestinian counterparts. The Israelis published on the group’s page that they were willing to vote in the coming elections according to the requests of fellow Palestinians, who would publish their requests on the same page or in private messages to the Israelis.

The inspiration for the Real Democracy campaign was drawn from a similar campaign called “Give Your Vote” that started before the UK elections in 2010. In that campaign British citizens gave their right to vote to citizens of Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Ghana, who are directly affected by UK foreign policy. In a much more direct manner, the state of Israel today governs the life of millions of Palestinians but does not give them any representation in its parliament. In an interview on national radio about the goals of the Real Democracy campaign, my friend, the world federalist Shimri Zameret, said that Israel has three choices: it should either grant the Palestinians citizenship and legal representation in the Knesset; end the occupation and allow the establishment of a Palestinian state; or that we should stop referring to Israel as democracy.

Despite the fact that the campaign was launched just a few weeks before the Israeli elections, it succeeded to draw the support of thousands of Israeli and Palestinian participants. Most of the Palestinians requested that their Israeli counterparts vote for Left wing or Arab-sector parties. Some also asked their counterparts not to vote at all in the elections, to protest against their undemocratic nature. Although the number of participants is unlikely to have had a significant impact on the ballot results, the campaign received impressive national and international coverage in mainstream media and raised awareness about the limits of Israel’s democracy.

For many of us it was also a chance to call for real democratisation of the UN and other international institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. These bodies today have serious limitations in their democracy – representing only governments and not people, and giving disproportional power of veto to only a few governments. Furthermore, many of the governments that supposedly ‘represent’ their nations in these bodies are simply non democratic. We believe that the causes and the ramifications of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stretch beyond the local to the regional and the global levels, and it is only through democratic mechanisms at all these levels that real solutions can come about. We believe that the responsibility to protect us all, regardless of ethnicity, gender, class or religion, should be – and can be – guaranteed by democratic federal institutions at the global level.

The most important lesson to be learned from the experience of Britain’s elections in 2010 and Israel’s elections of early 2013 is that this form of “electoral rebellion” gives activists an effective platform to protest the deficits of local democracy in the global era. Using simple social media tools we managed to create a small breach in the borders of national democracy, and engage mainstream media in the debate about it. The latest news of the campaign is that the model is about to be used and maybe even expanded in the coming German elections of September 2013. Activists from the group “Egality Berlin” and from the former campaigns plan to invite German voters to give their votes to citizens of other states that are affected by German foreign policy. The initial and most obvious ‘recipient’ country would be Greece, but at the time of writing we prefer the option of opening up participation to the global electorate. Interested readers are welcome to join the campaign and help the organizing team via the “Egality Berlin” page on Facebook. We strongly recommend activists to participate and also initiate similar campaigns in up-coming elections in every ‘democratic’ state in the world.