While Israelis are at the polls choosing the new Knesset that will hand up a new prime minister, let us reflect on how startling this is. It is taking place in a region where any other country would have handled this decision by a despotic family choosing among the relatives of a king. Or a clerical camarilla, meeting in secret, choosing from among a meeting of mullahs. Or a junta of generals tapping a tyrant. Or an aspiring tyrant assassinating the man he seeks to replace, and then closing the newspapers and radio stations.

Instead, a young country, whose land was promised them by God and whose secular claim was ratified by the United Nations, has forsaken all of these local customs and opted instead for democracy. Its democracy is informed by free political parties, lively clergymen, and privately owed newspapers, radio stations, Web sites, television stations, and magazines. These range from left to right, religious to secular, Jewish and Arab, communist, anti-communist, socialist, capitalist. All sexes are welcome in this fray.

What this means is that no matter who ends up as prime minister of Israel, he or she will have more standing, more credibility, more legitimacy to speak for his or her country than any leader in the region. There is no Palestinian Arab leader, no Hashemite king, no Egyptian general, no Syrian strongman, no mullah who can boast of this kind of democratic legitimacy. We say this not out of any sense of chauvinism. It’s a sad fact; it would be simpler for everyone if the people in Israel’s neighboring countries had leaders who can speak for them.