Why does the word "democracy" repel people and how can we change their minds?

Sometimes things like this happen at our booth:

🌷 “A woman around fifty, passed us and was happy to take a flower, but when I handed her the postcard, she blurted out, ‘Democracy? No, thank you,’ and returned the flower.”

🌷 “After my first conversation yesterday at the Beit Shemesh booth, he asked permission to take a photo with me. He admitted that the word ‘democracy’ on my shirt had put him off at first, but he was glad we had talked, and asked his wife to make sure that the word ‘democracy’ was clearly visible in the picture.”

In this post, we share stories that address the question: Why are people put off by the word ‘democracy,’ and how can a conversation with us change their minds?

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We meet quite a few people who find the word “democracy” off-putting and even angering. Some people, like the man from Or Akiva in last week’s story, dislike the word because they have lost faith in Israeli democracy. But most people are put off by the word because of its association with the protests.

This experience, shared by a volunteer at the Netanya booth, is familiar from all the booths:

🌷 “A woman walked by with her son, around 17–18 years old, wearing a black kippah and tzitzit. She initiated the conversation with me and described herself as Mizrahi, with academic degrees, and not a Likud supporter (as if she wanted to dispel the stereotypes one by one). She said that she thought the protests had caused division among the people, and that she was angry with us.”

The volunteer added:

🌷 “I haven’t heard a single person, including people on the right, who wants Netanyahu and his government to stay in power. But they can’t let go of how insulted they felt by the demonstrations, which they perceived as a provocation directed at large segments of the population, rather than as protests aimed at preventing specific destructive moves being made by the government.”

For those who did not take part in it, their perception of the protests is based primarily on what they saw in the news and on social media. It therefore does not include the anxiety, distress, and existential fear that motivated those who participated to take to the streets. It also does not include the attempts at “polite” warning and persuasion that took place through all the official channels before the mass protests began. It includes only the shouting, the water cannons, the road blockages, and the threats to stop volunteering for reserve duty. As a result, even people who are not enthusiastic supporters of the government or the judicial “reform” feel that the protests were violent, inflammatory, and divisive.

So what can we do about this? Our answer: stand in the street and deliberately put a different face on the protests.

What does that face look like? First and foremost, it is a more attentive and less hostile face than the one portrayed in the media. As a volunteer from Ramat Gan shared:

🌷 “I spoke with a group of women who support Netanyahu. They were happy to hear that I don’t hate them, even though I disagree with them.”

But most importantly, the face we present is a human face—one that replaces the conversation between two imagined camps with a conversation between two real people.

A volunteer from Rehovot illustrated this perfectly when she told us about:

🌷 “Shlomi, with whom I spent a large part of our long conversation asking him to stop saying ‘you people,’ because I’m not 'you people,' I'm Maya and he’s talking to me. He decided that I was actually okay, and said, ‘You people think that right-wingers don’t want peace, but I actually do. I wouldn’t even mind giving back territory for it; there’s just no one on the other side to make peace with.’”

And indeed, when I asked Tomer from the Beit Shemesh booth what he had talked about with the person who asked to take a photo with him, I discovered that they had barely talked about democracy at all. They talked about their lives, their families and children, and their shared hopes that their children would have a safe future.

In other words, what changed the man’s mind about the word “democracy” was his encounter with Tomer himself—and the way that encounter changed his view of the people who walk around with the word “democracy” on their shirts.

In the pictures: The "human face" of our volunteers in Petach Tikva and Netanya