The Myth of the Only Democracy of the Middle East

Intro

In the eyes of many Israelis and their supporters worldwide ,even those who might criticize some of its policies ,Israel is, at the end of the day, a benign democratic state, seeking peace with its neighbors, and guaranteeing equality to all its citizens.

Those who do criticize Israel assume that if anything went wrong in this democracy then it was due to the 1967 war. In this view, the war corrupted an honest and hardworking society by offering easy money in the occupied territories, allowing messianic groups to enter Israeli politics, and above all else turning Israel into an occupying and oppressive entity in the new territories.

The myth that a democratic Israel ran into trouble in 1967 but still remained a democracy is propagated by Zionists and has no historical foundation.

The Israeli elections last years were seen in the Western press and among some Western politicians as confirmation that Israel is becoming less democratic, and more racist and chauvinistic.

This we are told is undermining Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state”. The New York Times reported: “To the left, Israeli democracy is on the defensive. To the ethnonationalist right, which succeeded last year in enshrining Israel’s self-definition as the nation-state of the Jews in a basic law, it is in need of an adjustment.”

The general celebratory line that Israel has been able to balance its two important ideals and core principles – namely, that it is “a Jewish and a democratic state” – has shifted recently with some now lamenting that this alleged balance has been offset by the country’s “recent” right-wing tilt.

• Commitment to ethnic cleansing: The major fact that such a depiction deliberately ignores is that “democracy” in Israel was established for Israeli Jews after the Zionists expelled 80-90 percent of the Palestinian population who owned most of the land when Israel was founded in 1948, making themselves a majority overnight in the ethnically cleansed country.

They opted for liberal democratic governance for the colonial Jewish majority, while instituting a legal apartheid system for the Palestinians they could not expel, including dozens of racist laws. This commitment to ethnic cleansing and Jewish supremacist rule has been an ideological cornerstone of the Zionist movement since its inception.

Evidence

Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, devised plans on what to do with the native Palestinians. In his 1896 foundational pamphlet The State of the Jews, he cautioned against any democratic commitments and advised that

“an infiltration [of Jews into Palestine] is bound to end in disaster. It continues till the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened, and forces the [existing] government to stop further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless based on an assured supremacy.” (The so-called formula of a ‘Jewish and democratic state’ … was always based on an arithmetic of Jewish supremacy and ethnic cleansing)

The Jewish colonists, Herzl wrote in his diary, should

“try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country …

“The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.”

As Jewish colonies multiplied, so did the expulsion of Palestinians. Polish agronomist and colonist Chaim Kalvarisky, a manager of the Jewish Colonization Association, reported in 1920 that as someone who had been dispossessing Palestinians since the 1890s,

“the question of the Arabs first appeared to me in all its seriousness immediately after the first purchase of land I made here. I had to dispossess the Arab residents of their land for the purpose of settling our brothers.”

Kalvarisky complained that the “doleful dirge” of those he was forcing out “did not stop ringing in my ears for a long time thereafter”.

• Categorical opposition: Zionists’ fear of universal democracy, and their commitment to ethnic cleansing, was so strong that after the First World War, when the British – concerned with overextending themselves – wanted to ask the US to assume part of the responsibility for Palestine, they opposed it categorically.

The World Zionist Organization (WZO) objected vehemently to US involvement:

“Democracy in America too commonly means majority rule without regards to diversity of types or stages of civilization or differences of quality … The numerical majority in Palestine today is Arab, not Jewish. Qualitatively, it is a simple fact that the Jews are now predominant in Palestine, and given proper conditions they will be predominant quantitatively also in a generation or two,”

the WZO stated:

“But if the crude arithmetical conception of democracy were to be applied now or at some early stage in the future to Palestinian conditions, the majority that would rule would be the Arab majority, and the task of establishing and developing a great Jewish Palestine would be infinitely more difficult.”

Note that the WZO ignored the fact that Native Americans and African Americans, among others, were not included in the US version of “democracy”.

In the same year, Julius Kahn, a Jewish US Congressman, delivered a statement endorsed by around 300 Jewish personalities – both rabbis and laymen – to then-president Woodrow Wilson, whose administration supported Zionists. The statement denounced Zionists for attempting to segregate Jews and reverse the historical trend towards emancipation, and objected to the creation of a distinctly Jewish state in Palestine as contrary “to the principles of democracy”.

-Compulsory transfer: Herzl’s foundational fear of democracy was adopted by his Zionist followers. On the right, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, argued in 1923 against the Zionist Labor “left” who wanted to expel the Palestinian population through trickery, explaining that there was **no escape from the violent formula that Jewish colonisation and expulsion of the Palestinians were one and the same process.

“Any native people … will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs,” Jabotinsky noted. “Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked … [and] who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs.”

In the 1920s and 1930s, Zionists strategised plans for the ethnic cleansing (what they termed “transfer”) of Palestinians. Concurring with Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, the Labor Zionist leader of the colonial settlers, declared in June 1938:

“I support compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it.”

https://wiki.handala.info/en/palestinians_left_myth

(The reader is encouraged to read from the linked article above, to understand how Zionist leaders called for and planned ethnic cleansing.)

His statement followed the policy adopted by the Jewish Agency, which set up its first “Population Transfer Committee” in November 1937 to strategise the forceful expulsion of the Palestinians. Two additional committees were established in 1941 and 1948.

It’s not only that the Zionists deemed it necessary to practice ETHNIC CLEANSING to build their vision of “Jewish Democracy”, they have also opted to keep many Israelis in the dark by directly censoring what they read, hear, and see in the Israeli media. Martin Van Creveld (the renowned Israeli military strategist, and historian) eloquently described Israeli controlled censorship as follows:

“The [Israeli military] censor exercises draconian power over the content in the media, licenses newspapers, and fines and suspends newspapers if, in his view, they have violated secrecy. He does not have to explain the reasons for his decision; indeed one paragraph in the law obliges newspapers to publish free ads by military censor denying or correcting information that papers themselves published. . . . Thus one of the [Israeli military] censor’s main functions is to keep Israelis ignorant of what everybody else knows.” (The Sword And The Olive, p. 110)

“By this time [referring to the period prior to the October war in 1973] Israel’s system of media self-censorship had begun to backfire. …. the media, voluntarily refraining from publishing the news, helped the IDF in its own assessment [that Arabs are incapable of going to war] and put the public to sleep.” (The Sword And The Olive, p. 223)

• Enemies of Palestinians: Chaim Weizmann, head of the WZO, entertained in 1941 plans to expel one million Palestinians to Iraq and replace them with five million Polish and other European Jewish colonists. He told his plans to the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, in hopes of obtaining Soviet support.

When Maisky expressed surprise, Weizmann replied with a racist argument, not unlike that used by fascists against European Jews in the same period:

Palestinians’ “laziness and primitivism turn a flourishing garden into a desert. Give me the land occupied by a million Arabs, and I will easily settle five times that number of Jews on it.” (Other settler colonies were able, after centuries of ethnic cleansing, to institute white demographic supremacy)

The so-called formula of a “Jewish and democratic state”, which so many of Israel’s apologists fear may now be in peril, was always based on an arithmetic of Jewish supremacy and ethnic cleansing – not unlike the white supremacist liberal democracies established after ethnic cleansing in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

But while the other settler colonies were able, after centuries of ethnic cleansing, to institute white demographic supremacy – although the current anti non-white-immigration policies in the US show how delicate this balance has become – Israel’s colonial Jewish population went back to being a minority facing a Palestinian native majority.

That majority continues to resist ethnic cleansing and Jewish supremacist rule, which Israel’s supporters and the enemies of Palestinians celebrate as “a Jewish and democratic state”.

There is no denying of the fact that the Middle East is mostly ruled by autocratic, oppressive, and undemocratic regimes. On the other hand, the majority of these repressive regimes were mostly supported in their foundation and funded through Israeli and American wishes.

It’s worth noting that soon after the 1948 war, the undemocratic Arab regimes were the central factor in protecting the newly emerging “Jewish state”. And any forms of organized local resistance against Israel, similar to Hizbullah’s in southern Lebanon, was ruthlessly dealt with in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Actually, many of Israel’s “moderate” Arab neighbors transplanted most Palestinian refugee camps inland away from the Israeli borders, to curb the so called Palestinian “infiltration” [ or return] back to their homes in Israel. The so called “Infiltration Problem”, which faced Israel between 1949-1955, had become the most pressing and expensive challenge to face the newly emerging “Jewish state”. In other words, it’s not the presence, but the absence of democracy that greatly serves the Israeli interests in the region, and based on that the United States has systematically shored up these unpopular regimes against the wishes of the people (i.e. the Hashemite Kings in Jordan, the Saudi Kings in Arabia, Mubarak of Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq prior to the Gulf War, and the Emirates in the Gulf States), and undermined the popularly elected governments (i.e. toppling Musadiq in Iran in the early 1950s, invading Lebanon in the late 1950s, shoring up the Hashemites in Jordan in the late 1950s, and undermining Nasser in Egypt).

• Israel Before 1967 Was Not a Democracy: In addition to the Nakba, Before 1967, Israel definitely could not have been depicted as a democracy. The state subjected one-fifth of its citizenship to military rule based on draconian British Mandatory emergency regulations that denied the Palestinians any basic human or civil rights. Local military governors were the absolute rulers of the lives of these citizens: they could devise special laws for them, destroy their houses and livelihoods, and send them to jail whenever they felt like it.

For the Palestinians who lived in prewar Palestine ( Now Israel) and those who lived in the post-1967 West Bank and the Gaza Strip, this regime allowed even the lowest-ranking soldier in the IDF to rule, and ruin, their lives. They were helpless if such a soldier, or his unit or commander, decided to demolish their homes, or hold them for hours at a checkpoint, or incarcerate them without trial. There was nothing they could do. At every moment from 1948 until today, there had been many groups of Palestinians undergoing such an experience.

The first group to suffer under such a yoke was the Palestinian minority inside Israel. It began in the first two years of statehood when they were pushed into ghettos, such as the Haifa Palestinian community living on the Carmel mountain, or expelled from the towns they had inhabited for decades, such as Safad. In the case of Isdud, the whole population was expelled to the Gaza Strip.

In the countryside, the situation was even worse. The various Kibbutz movements coveted Palestinian villages on fertile land. This included the socialist Kibbutzim, Hashomer Ha-Zair, which was allegedly committed to binational solidarity.

Long after the fighting of 1948 had subsided, villagers in Ghabsiyyeh, Iqrit, Birim, Qaidta, Zaytun, and many others, were tricked into leaving their homes for a period of two weeks, the Zionist army claiming it needed their lands for training, only to find out on their return that their villages had been wiped out or handed to someone else.

This state of military terror is exemplified by the Kafr Qasim massacre of October 1956, when, on the eve of the Sinai operation, In total 48 people died, of which 19 were men, 6 were women and 23 were children aged 8–17. Arab sources usually give the death toll as 49, as they include the unborn child of one of the women. The authorities alleged that they were late returning home from work in the fields when a curfew had been imposed on the village. This was not the real reason, however. Later proofs show that Israel had seriously considered the expulsion of Palestinians from the whole area called the Wadi Ara and the Triangle in which the village sat. These two areas — the first a valley connecting Afula in the east and Hadera on the Mediterranean coast; the second expanding the eastern hinterland of Jerusalem — were annexed to Israel under the terms of the 1949 armistice agreement with Jordan.

As we have seen, additional territory was always welcomed by Israel, but an increase in the Palestinian population was not. Thus, at every juncture, when the state of Israel expanded, it looked for ways to restrict the Palestinian population in the recently annexed areas.

Operation “Hafarfert” (“mole”) was the code name of a set of proposals for the expulsion of Palestinians when a new war broke out with the Arab world. Many scholars today now think that the 1956 massacre was a practice run to see if the people in the area could be intimidated to leave.

The perpetrators of the massacre were brought to trial thanks to the diligence and tenacity of two members of the Knesset: Tawaq Tubi from the Communist Party and Latif Dori of the Left Zionist party Mapam. However, the commanders responsible for the area, and the unit itself that committed the crime, were let off very lightly, receiving merely small fines. This was further proof that the army was allowed to get away with murder in the occupied territories.

Systematic cruelty does not only show its face in a major event like a massacre. The worst atrocities can also be found in the regime’s daily, mundane presence. Palestinians in Israel avoid talking much about that pre-1967 period in fear of persecution or discrimination , and the hidden documents of that time by the Zionist state do not reveal the full picture. Surprisingly, it is in poetry that we find an indication of what it was like to live under military rule.

Natan Alterman was one of the most famous and important Israeli poets of his generation. He had a weekly column, called

“The Seventh Column,” in which he commented on events he had read or heard about. Sometimes he would omit details about the date or even the location of the event, but would give the reader just enough information to understand what he was referring to. He often expressed his attacks in poetic form:

The news appeared briefly for two days, and disappeared. And no one seems to care,

and no one seems to know. In the far away village of Um al-Fahem,

Children — should I say citizens of the state — played in the mud And one of them

seemed suspicious to one of our brave soldiers who

shouted at him: Stop!

An order is an order

An order is an order, but the foolish boy did not stand, He ran away

So our brave soldier shot, no wonder And hit and killed the boy.

And no one talked about it.

On one occasion he wrote a poem about two Palestinian citizens who were shot in Wadi Ara. In another instance, he told the story of a very ill Palestinian woman who was expelled with her two children, aged three and six, with no explanation, and sent across the River Jordan. When she tried to return, she and her children were arrested and put into a Nazareth jail.

Alterman hoped that his poem about the mother would move hearts and minds, or at least elicit some official response. However, he wrote a week later:

And this writer assumed wrongly

That either the story would be denied or explained But nothing, not a word.

There is further evidence that Israel was not a democracy prior to 1967. The state pursued a shoot-to-kill policy towards refugees trying to retrieve their land, crops, and husbandry, and staged a colonial war to topple Nasser’s regime in Egypt. Its security forces were also trigger happy, killing more than fifty Palestinian citizens during the period from 1948–1967.

Subjugation of Minorities in Israel Is Not Democratic: The litmus test of any democracy is the level of tolerance it is willing to extend towards the minorities living in it. In this respect, Israel falls far short of being a true democracy.

For example, after the new territorial gains several laws were passed ensuring a superior position for the majority: the laws governing citizenship, the laws concerning land ownership, and most important of all, the law of return.

The latter grants automatic citizenship to every Jew in the world, wherever he or she was born. This law in particular is a flagrantly undemocratic one, for it was accompanied by a total rejection of the Palestinian right of return — recognized internationally by the UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948. This rejection refuses to allow the Palestinian citizens of Israel to unite with their immediate families or with those who were expelled in 1948.

Denying people the right of return to their homeland, and at the same time offering this right to others who have no connection to the land, is a model of undemocratic practice.

Added to this was a further layering of denial of the rights of the Palestinian people. Almost every discrimination against the Palestinian citizens of Israel is justified by the fact that they do not serve in the army. The association between democratic rights and military duties is better understood if we revisit the formative years in which Israeli policy makers were trying to make up their minds about how to treat one-fifth of the population.

Their assumption was that Palestinian citizens did not want to join the army anyway, and that assumed refusal, in turn, justified the discriminatory policy against them. This was put to the test in 1954 when the Israeli ministry of defense decided to call up those Palestinian citizens eligible for conscription to serve in the army. The secret service assured the government that there would be a widespread rejection of the call-up. To their great surprise, all those summoned went to the recruiting office, with the blessing of the Communist Party, the biggest and most important political force in the community at the time. The secret service later explained that the main reason was the teenagers’ boredom with life in the countryside and their desire for some action and adventure.

Notwithstanding this episode, the ministry of defense continued to peddle a narrative that depicted the Palestinian community as unwilling to serve in the military.

Inevitably, in time, the Palestinians did indeed turn against the Israeli army, who had become their perpetual oppressors, but the government’s exploitation of this as a pretext for discrimination casts huge doubt on the state’s pretense to being a democracy.

If you are a Palestinian citizen and you did not serve in the army, your rights to government assistance as a worker, student, parent, or as part of a couple, are severely restricted. This affects housing in particular, as well as employment — where 70 percent of all Israeli industry is considered to be security-sensitive and therefore closed to these citizens as a place to find work.

The underlying assumption of the ministry of defense was not only that Palestinians do not wish to serve but that they are potentially an enemy within who cannot be trusted. The problem with this argument is that in all the major wars between Israel and the Arab world the Palestinian minority did not behave as expected. They did not form a fifth column or rise up against the regime.

This, however, did not help them: to this day they are seen as a “demographic” problem that has to be solved. The only consolation is that still today most Israeli politicians do not believe that the way to solve “the problem” is by the transfer or expulsion of the Palestinians (at least not in peacetime). The audacity of such ludicrous claim against those who’s lands were stolen and are occupied, to serve in their oppressors army against their families and people by the colonial Zionist regime is outrageously ridiculous.

Israeli Land Policy Is Not Democratic: The claim to being a democracy is also questionable when one examines the budgetary policy surrounding the land question. Since 1948, Palestinian local councils and municipalities have received far less funding than their Jewish counterparts. The shortage of land, coupled with the scarcity of employment opportunities, creates an abnormal socioeconomic reality.

For example, the most affluent Palestinian community, the village of Me’ilya in the upper Galilee, is still worse off than the poorest Jewish development town in the Negev. In 2011, the Jerusalem Post reported that

“average Jewish income was 40 percent to 60 percent higher than average Arab income between the years 1997 to 2009.”

Today more than 90 percent of the land is owned by the Jewish National Fund (JNF). Landowners are not allowed to engage in transactions with non-Jewish citizens, and public land is prioritized for the use of national projects, which means that new Jewish settlements are being built while there are hardly any new Palestinian settlements. Thus, the biggest Palestinian city, Nazareth, despite the tripling of its population since 1948, has not expanded one square kilometer, whereas the development town built above it, Upper Nazareth, has tripled in size, on land expropriated from Palestinian landowners.

Further examples of this policy can be found in Palestinian villages throughout Galilee, revealing the same story: how they have been downsized by 40 percent, sometimes even 60 percent, since 1948, and how new Jewish settlements have been built on expropriated land.

Elsewhere this has initiated full-blown attempts at “Judaization.” After 1967, the Israeli government became concerned about the lack of Jews living in the north and south of the state and so planned to increase the population in those areas. Such a demographic change necessitated the confiscation of Palestinian land for the building of Jewish settlements.

Worse was the exclusion of Palestinian citizens from these settlements. This blunt violation of a citizen’s right to live wherever he or she wishes continues today, and all efforts by human rights NGOs in Israel to challenge this apartheid have so far ended in total failure.

The Supreme Court in Israel has only been able to question the legality of this policy in a few individual cases, but not in principle. Imagine if in the United Kingdom or the United States, Jewish citizens, or Catholics for that matter, were barred by law from living in certain villages, neighborhoods, or maybe whole towns? How can such a situation be reconciled with the notion of democracy?

Quiz yourself on “Israeli democracy” Is it Israeli Democracy or “Jewish Democracy”, you be the judge. Are you aware that:

1. Prior to the 1948 war, Palestinian Christians and Muslims were a two-third majority of the population of Palestine, who owned and operated 93% of Palestine’s lands?
2. Prior to the 1948 war, most Israeli Jews were persecuted and dispossessed European Jews who made a one-third minority of the population?
3. Prior to the 1948 war, only one third of the Jews in Palestine were legal citizens of the country?
4. For Israel to become a “Jewish majority” it opted to expel and dispossess the two-third Palestinian majority?
5. 80-90% of the Palestinian people were dispossessed from their homes, farms, and businesses and have been kept out for the past 73 years?
6. 95% of Israel’s lands (which is mostly owned by Palestinian refugees) is open for development to Jews only?
7. The Palestinian minority living in Israel(who are close to a quarter of Israel’s citizens) are restricted to less than 3% of the land in Israel? The implementation of these apartheid policies resulted in disenfranchising a quarter of the Israeli population, who mostly continue to live in segregate, gated, and over crowded ghettos that are plagued with high unemployment rate and suffers from lack of basic services. In fact, there are over forty plus unrecognized Palestinian-Israeli villages (within the “Green Line”) that receives no public services whatsoever , such as roads, sanitation, electricity, schools, …etc.
8. Only one of the 45 Zionist Jews who signed the Israeli “declaration of independence” on May 14th, 1948 was born in Palestine? The other 44 were mostly Jewish refugees who escaped their anti-Semitic Europe countries, such as Tsarist Russia, Germany, and Poland.
9. Israeli-Palestinian citizens live almost in segregated communities (or ghettos) because development is strictly limited outside their villages? Ironically, the word “ghetto” was used to describe the living conditions of Eastern European Jews in Tsarist Russia!
10. For just being “Jewish” you gain an automatic citizenship in Israel? Plus tens of thousands of dollars in subsidies too.
11. Palestinian Muslims or Christians refugees, who were born in the country and later expelled, cannot gain Israeli citizenship? Maybe,unless they convert to Judaism first!
12. Pretending to be Jewish in Israel is punishable by law with up to one year’s imprisonment?On the other hand, if you pretend to be a Muslim or Christian the law does you no harm!
13. When the Palestine problem was created by Britain in 1917, more than 92% of the population of Palestine were Arabs and there were at that time no more than 56,000 Jews in Palestine? That Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians at that time lived in peace with each other?
14. Palestinians in the early 20th century owned 97.5% of the land, while Jews (native Palestinians and recent immigrants together) owned only 2.5% of the land?
15. Close to 4 million Palestinian Muslims and Christians are being subjected to Israeli laws that are different than the laws governing the 4.5 million Israeli Jews? Is this a “democratically” elected apartheid, or not, that is the question?
16. In the occupied West Bank there are “Jewish Roads” and “Non-Jewish Roads”?
17. Israel issues national identify cards where the religion of the card holder is clearly shown in bold type?
18. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza drive vehicles with license plates that have different coloring than the cars driven by Israeli settlers?
19. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza hold ID cards that are of different colors than the cards held by Israeli settlers?
20. The only form of Judaism recognized by the “Jewish state” is Orthodox Judaism, so most US Jews could not get married in Israel? Furthermore, the only conversion to Judaism recognized is Orthodox, so most US converts aren’t Jewish enough.
21. Just prior to the 1948 war, Jews owned under 7% of Palestine’s land, and to increase their share after the war, they passed the “Absentees’ Law” which dispossessed the Palestinian majority land owners who later became “absent”. What is even more tragic was the passage of an oxymoron law, called “Present Absentees’ Law,” which dispossessed the Palestinian-Israeli citizens who became internal refugees in Israel? It is worth noting that the internal Jewish refugees were not dispossessed as a result of this racist law.
22. The U.S. funneled into the Israeli economy over 140 billion dollars, which is almost twice the amount devoted to rebuilding Western Europe after WW II!?
23. Israeli democracy is a facade for “Jewish Democracy?”
24. Israel has nuclear weapons, and it was close to dropping one on Cairo in 1973?
25. Israeli soldiers use Palestinian civilians including children as human shields in battle to minimize their casualties?
26. Israel killed over 20,000 Lebanese and Muslims (90% of whom are civilians) with American made and paid for weapons?
27. Israel killed over 100 thousand Palestinian, most are civilians including women and children?
28. Since Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory in 1967, at least 750,000 Palestinians have been detained under Israeli military orders in the occupied State of Palestine. Since 2000, more than 10,000 Palestinian children have been detained by Israeli forces from the occupied West Bank and held in Israeli military detention system?
29. Palestinians on a daily basis have to travel through illegal checkpoints between their own cities and villages , on their own lands , sometimes waiting for hours to pass and are humiliated by Israeli soldier in many instances?

Based on our correspondence with many Zionists and their sympathizers in the West, we find the majority of them WISH to continue to live in the illusion that Palestine was empty and it was waiting for its “people to redeem it.” But deep inside, they all suspect the Zionist narrative to be a farce. However, their memories of the Holocaust abstract them from reality and that makes them heartless. The Palestinian people has been underwriting their “Never Again” slogan with their homes, blood, and future since the establishment of the “Zionist colonial project”. For the average person this slogan may not sound harsh; after all European Jews suffered European anti-Semitism for centuries. On the other hand, to us, the Palestinian people, this slogan implies Never Again regardless of the price; Never Again ,period. Similarly, Holocaust memories (and the guilt associated with it) are the primary reasons why Western countries (who continue to parade the “Jewish state as the only democracy in the Middle East”) turn a blind eye to Israeli war crimes and apartheid. In a nutshell, the Palestinian people are the messiah to whoever caused the Holocaust, turned a blind eye to it, or feel guilty for its victims.

The Occupation Is Not Democratic: Thus, given its attitude towards two Palestinian groups — the refugees and the community in Israel — the Jewish state cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be assumed to be a democracy.

But the most obvious challenge to that assumption is the ruthless Israeli attitude towards a third Palestinian group: those who have lived under its direct and indirect rule since 1967, in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.From the legal infrastructure put in place at the outset of the war, through the unquestioned absolute power of the military inside the West Bank and outside the Gaza Strip, to the humiliation of millions of Palestinians as a daily routine, the “only democracy” in the Middle East behaves as a dictatorship of the worst kind.

The main Israeli response, diplomatic and academic, to the latter accusation is that all these measures are temporary — they will change if the Palestinians, wherever they are, behave “better.” But if one researches, not to mention lives in, the occupied territories, one will understand how ridiculous these arguments are.

Israeli policy makers, as we have seen, are determined to keep the occupation alive for as long as the Jewish state remains intact. It is part of what the Israeli political system regards as the status quo, which is always better than any change. Israel will control most of Palestine and, since it will always include a substantial Palestinian population, this can only be done by nondemocratic means.

In addition, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Israeli state claims that the occupation is an enlightened one. The myth here is that Israel came with good intentions to conduct a benevolent occupation but was forced to take a tougher attitude because of the Palestinian violence.

In 1967, the government treated the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a natural part of “Eretz Israel,” the land of Israel, and this attitude has continued ever since. When you look at the debate between the right- and left-wing parties in Israel on this issue, their disagreements have been about how to achieve this goal, not about its validity.

Among the wider public, however, there was a genuine debate between what one might call the “redeemers” and the “custodians.” The “redeemers” believed Israel had recovered the ancient heart of its homeland and could not survive in the future without it. In contrast, the “custodians” argued that the territories should be exchanged for peace with Jordan, in the case of the West Bank, and Egypt in the case of the Gaza Strip. However, this public debate had little impact on the way the principal policy makers were figuring out how to rule the occupied territories.

The worst part of this supposed “enlightened occupation” has been the government’s methods for managing the territories. At first the area was divided into “Arab” and potential “Jewish” spaces. Those areas densely populated with Palestinians became autonomous, run by local collaborators under a military rule. This regime was only replaced with a civil administration in 1981.

The other areas, the “Jewish” spaces, were colonized with Jewish settlements and military bases. This policy was intended to leave the population both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in disconnected enclaves with neither green spaces nor any possibility for urban expansion.

Things only got worse when, very soon after the occupation, Gush Emunim started settling in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, claiming to be following a biblical map of colonization rather than the governmental one. As they penetrated the densely populated Palestinian areas, the space left for the locals was shrunk even further.

What every colonization project primarily needs is land — in the occupied territories this was achieved only through the massive expropriation of land, deporting people from where they had lived for generations, and confining them in enclaves with difficult habitats.

When you fly over the West Bank, you can see clearly the cartographic results of this policy: belts of settlements that divide the land and carve the Palestinian communities into small, isolated, and disconnected communities. The Judaization belts separate villages from villages, villages from towns, and sometime bisect a single village.

This is what scholars call a geography of disaster, not least since these policies turned out to be an ecological disaster as well: drying up water sources and ruining some of the most beautiful parts of the Palestinian landscape.

Moreover, the settlements became hotbeds in which Jewish extremism grew uncontrollably — the principal victims of which were the Palestinians. Thus, the settlement at Efrat has ruined the world heritage site of the Wallajah Valley near Bethlehem, and the village of Jafneh near Ramallah, which was famous for its freshwater canals, lost its identity as a tourist attraction. These are just two small examples out of hundreds of similar cases.

Destroying Palestinians’ Houses Is Not Democratic: House demolition is not a new phenomenon in Palestine. As with many of the more barbaric methods of collective punishment used by Israel since 1948, it was first conceived and exercised by the British Mandatory government during the Great Arab Revolt of 1936–39.

This was the first Palestinian uprising against the pro-Zionist policy of the British Mandate,and it took the British army three years to quell it. In the process, they demolished around two thousand houses during the various collective punishments meted out to the local population.

Israel demolished houses from almost the first day of its military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The army blew up hundreds of homes every year in response to various acts undertaken by individual family members in retaliation to land theft and oppression.

From minor violations of military rule to participation in violent acts against the occupation, the Israelis were quick to send in their bulldozers to wipe out not only a physical building but also a focus of life and existence. In the greater Jerusalem area (as inside Israel) demolition was also a punishment for the unlicensed extension of an existing house or the failure to pay bills or building of Palestinian houses without permits on their lands (Permits issued by the Israeli government, permits almost impossible to get)

Another form of collective punishment that has recently returned to the Israeli repertoire is that of blocking up houses. Imagine that all the doors and windows in your house are blocked by cement, mortar, and stones, so you can’t get back in or retrieve anything you failed to take out in time. There is nothing like this in history books, there’s no evidence of such a callous measure being practiced elsewhere.

Crushing Palestinian Resistance Is Not Democratic: Finally, under the “enlightened occupation,” settlers have been allowed to form vigilante gangs to harass people and destroy their property.

During the 1980s, they used actual terror — from wounding Palestinian leaders (one of them lost his legs in such an attack), to contemplating blowing up the mosques on Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem.

In this century, they have engaged in the daily harassment of Palestinians: uprooting their trees, destroying their yields, and shooting randomly at their homes and vehicles. Since 2000, there have been at least one hundred such attacks reported per month in some areas such as Hebron, where the five hundred settlers, with the silent collaboration of the Israeli army, harassed the locals living nearby in an even more brutal way.

From the very beginning of the occupation then, the Palestinians were given two options: accept the reality of permanent incarceration in a mega-prison for a very long time, or risk the might of the strongest army in the Middle East. When the Palestinians did resist — as they did in 1987, 2000, 2006, 2012, 2014, and 2016 — they were targeted as soldiers and units of a conventional army. Thus, villages and towns were bombed as if they were military bases and the unarmed civilian population was shot at as if it was an army on the battlefield.

Today we know too much about life under occupation, before and after Oslo, to take seriously the claim that nonresistance will ensure less oppression. The arrests without trial, as experienced by so many over the years; the demolition of thousands of houses; the killing and wounding of the innocent; the drainage of water wells — these are all testimony to one of the harshest contemporary regimes of our times. Amnesty International annually documents in a very comprehensive way the nature of the occupation. The following is from their 2015 report:

In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israeli forces committed unlawful killings of Palestinian civilians, including children, and detained thousands of Palestinians who protested against or otherwise opposed Israel’s continuing military occupation, holding hundreds in administrative detention. Torture and other ill-treatment remained rife and were committed with impunity.

The authorities continued to promote illegal settlements in the West Bank, and severely restricted Palestinians’ freedom of movement, further tightening restrictions amid an escalation of violence from October, which included attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinians and apparent extrajudicial executions by Israeli forces. Israeli settlers in the West Bank attacked Palestinians and their property with virtual impunity. The Gaza Strip remained under an Israeli military blockade that imposed collective punishment on its inhabitants. The authorities continued to demolish Palestinian homes in the West Bank and inside Israel, particularly in Bedouin villages in the Negev/Naqab region, forcibly evicting their residents.

Let’s take this in stages. Firstly, assassinations — what Amnesty’s report calls “unlawful killings”: about fifteen thousand Palestinians have been killed “unlawfully” by Israel since 1967. Among them were two thousand children.

Palestinian resistance in all of its forms whether violent or non-violent , including their right of freedom of speech against the Israeli occupation on social media or their conduction of peaceful protests against it , were met with live bullets , life sentences, and home demolitions.

(Israeli Soldier’s Explosive Tell-All: “Palestinians are Right to Resist” by Abby Martin :

In a rare, candid conversation, Abby Martin interviews a former Israeli Army combat soldier who served as an occupier in Palestine’s Hebron City. Eran Efrati spent years as a sergeant and combat soldier in the Israeli military, but has since become an outspoken critic of the occupation of Palestine and Israeli apartheid)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FkxJd88xkBU&t=1319s

Part of Israeli and western media’s propaganda campaign against the Palestinian people and their legitimate cause is that Israel and the western media absolutely refuses to differentiate between terrorism and Palestinian legitimate armed resistance.

The Palestinians have the right under international law to resist occupation, ethnic cleansing, annexation, aggression, and colonization. And Israel as an occupying power cannot justify military force as self defense in territory for which it is responsible for as the occupant. By definition, an aggressor cannot act in defense. Israel is asserting rights that may be consistent with colonial domination but simply do not exist under International Law.

General Assembly Resolution A/RES/3246 (XXIX) of 29 November 1974: Reaffirms the legitimacy of the peoples’ struggle for liberation form colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation by all available means, including armed struggle; and strongly condemns all Governments which do not recognize the right to self-determination and independence of peoples under colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation, notably the peoples of Africa and the Palestinian people.

United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/33/24 of 29 November 1978: Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle.”

The mainstream US media outlets are actively concealing the alarming displays of genocidal racism emanating from Israeli Jewish society. Violence against Palestinians is nothing new. Israel’s ongoing colonial project requires enormous levels of brutality against Palestinians. But this daily reality is only newsworthy when it blows back against Israeli Jews.

Imprisoning Palestinians Without Trial Is Not Democratic: Another feature of the “enlightened occupation” is imprisonment without trial. Every fifth Palestinian in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has undergone such an experience.

It is interesting to compare this Israeli practice with similar American policies in the past and the present, as critics of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement claim that US practices are far worse. In fact, the worst American example was the imprisonment without trial of one hundred thousand Japanese citizens during World War II, with thirty thousand later detained under the so-called “war on terror.” Neither of these numbers comes even close to the number of Palestinians who have experienced such a process: including the very young, the old, as well as the long-term incarcerated.

Arrest without trial is a traumatic experience. Not knowing the charges against you, having no contact with a lawyer and hardly any contact with your family are only some of the concerns that will affect you as a prisoner. More brutally, many of these arrests are used as means to pressure people into collaboration. Spreading rumors or shaming people for their alleged or real sexual orientation are also frequently used as methods for leveraging complicity.

As for torture, the website Middle East Monitor published a harrowing article describing the two hundred methods used by the Israelis to torture Palestinians. The list is based on a UN report and a report from the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. Among other methods it includes beatings, chaining prisoners to doors or chairs for hours, pouring cold and hot water on them, pulling fingers apart, and twisting testicles.

What we must challenge here, therefore, is not only Israel’s claim to be maintaining an enlightened occupation but also its pretense to being a democracy. Such behavior towards millions of people under its rule gives the lie to such political chicanery. However, although large sections of civil societies throughout the world deny Israel its pretense to democracy, their political elites, for a variety of reasons, still treat it as a member of the exclusive club of democratic states. In many ways, the popularity of the BDS movement reflects the frustrations of those societies with their governments’ policies towards Israel.

For most Israelis these counterarguments are irrelevant at best and malicious at worst. The Israeli state clings to the view that it is a benevolent occupier. The argument for “enlightened occupation” proposes that, according to the average Jewish citizen in Israel, the Palestinians are much better off under occupation and they have no reason in the world to resist it, let alone by force. If you are a noncritical supporter of Israel abroad, it’s probable you will accept these assumptions as well.

There are, however, sections of Israeli society that do recognize the validity of some of the claims made here. In the 1990s, with various degrees of conviction, a significant number of Jewish academics, journalists, and artists voiced their doubts about the definition of Israel as a democracy.

It takes some courage to challenge the foundational myths of one’s own society and state. This is why quite a few of them later retreated from this brave position and returned to toeing the general line.

Nevertheless, for a while during the last decade of the last century, they produced works that challenged the assumption of a democratic Israel. They portrayed Israel as belonging to a different community: that of the nondemocratic nations. One of them, the Israeli geographer Oren Yiftachel from Ben-Gurion University, depicted Israel as an ethnocracy, a regime governing a mixed ethnic state with a legal and formal preference for one ethnic group over all the others. Others went further, labeling Israel an apartheid state or a settler-colonial state.

In short, whatever description these critical scholars offered, “democracy”was not among them.

Finally, In our view, it’s worth emphasizing that “Israeli democracy” is an incarnation of Apartheid South Africa’s democracy ,if not worse .It also could be argued that Apartheid South Africa was for a very long time the only democracy in Africa, however, it was a democracy for the White race only. Similarly, Zionist democracy in Israel was and still is designed to empower Jews only based on their religion/ethnicity.At one point, Israel has to choose between being a “Democratic Jewish State” or a “Democratic State” to all of its citizens, Jews and non-Jews alike. Eventually, such a facade to democracy will self-destruct, and until it changes, the talk about “Israeli democracy” is nothing but a propaganda that makes good sound bites in the Western and Israeli medias.

“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.“ -Nelson Mandela

-OverDose

Lists and References

1- Israel Is Not a Democracy by Michael Sfard. (A democracy doesn’t deny millions their civil rights, plunder their land and resources and deprive them of independence and of a say in their future) https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.haaretz.com/amp/israel-news/.premium-israel-is-not-a-democracy-1.5478982

2- Israel’s democracy myth by Mark Perry https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2013/2/13/israels-democracy-myth%20%20%20%20

3- Israel: is it really a democratic state? by Motasem A Dalloul https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20191107-israel-is-it-really-a-democratic-state/amp/

4- Israel is a non-democratic apartheid regime, says rights group by Oliver Holmes https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/12/israel-is-a-non-democratic-apartheid-regime-says-rights-group

5- Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East? Netanyahu’s comments have shattered that illusion by Ben white https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/voices/netanyahu-israel-elections-palestine-middle-east-otzma-yehudit-a8817701.html%3famp?client=safari

6- Forget About Jewish or Democratic. Is Israel Even an Actual Country? By Yuli Tamir https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT-forget-about-jewish-or-democratic-is-israel-even-an-actual-country-1.9224997

7- Why calling Israel an apartheid state is not enough by Lana Tatour https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/why-calling-israel-apartheid-state-not-enough

8- Is Israel an Apartheid State? By Quraysha Ismail Sooliman, AUG 28 2018

Is Israel an Apartheid State?

9- Israel: The making of a colonial state in a postcolonial world by Murat Sofuoglu https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/israel-the-making-of-a-colonial-state-in-a-postcolonial-world-13599/amp

10- Israel is not a democracy by Josef Avesar https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israel-is-not-a-democracy/

11- Israel no longer protected by its false democracy by Ramzy Baroud https://www.arabnews.com/node/1649946/amp

12- Israel’s right to be racist by Joseph Massad (As for those among us who insist that no resolution will ever be possible before Israel revokes all its racist laws and does away with all its racist symbols, thus opening the way for a non-racist future for Palestinians and Jews in a decolonised bi-national state, Israel and its apologists have a ready-made response that has redefined the meaning of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is no longer the hatred of and discrimination against Jews as a religious or ethnic group; in the age of Zionism, we are told, anti-Semitism has metamorphosed into something that is more insidious. Today, Israel and its Western defenders insist, genocidal anti-Semitism consists mainly of any attempt to take away and to refuse to uphold the absolute right of Israel to be a racist Jewish state.) https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-right-be-racist/6813

13- Israel is a settler colony, annexing native land is what it does by Mark Muhannad Ayyash https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2020/7/7/israel-is-a-settler-colony-annexing-native-land-is-what-it-does

14- United Nations: Israel attempts to silence growing condemnation of its apartheid regime https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/17431.html#_ftn5

15- https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2019/7/9/israels-separation-wall-endures-15-years-after-icj-ruling Israel’s separation wall endures, 15 years after ICJ ruling by Linah Alsaafin(Fifteen years on, the wall has continued to cut through Palestinian communities, taken over natural resources in the occupied West Bank, and has annexed Palestinian land, including areas where Israeli settlements are built on.)

16- Palestinians in Gaza reflect on 10 years of siege by Hosam Salem https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/6/24/palestinians-in-gaza-reflect-on-10-years-of-siege

17- Rights group: Record number of home demolitions in East Jerusalem https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/24/rights-group-record-number-of-home-demolitions-in-east-jerusalem

18- Five ways Israeli law discriminates against Palestinians(More than 65 Israeli laws already exist that discriminate against Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories.) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/7/19/five-ways-israeli-law-discriminates-against-palestinians

19- Israel’s Apartheid Is Worse Than South Africa’s by Yitzhak laor https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.haaretz.com/amp/1.5286425

20- https://www.dci-palestine.org/issues_military_detention Palestinian children in the West Bank, like adults, face arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment under an Israeli military detention system that denies them basic rights.

21- Each year approximately 500-700 Palestinian children, some as young as 12 years old, are detained and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system. https://www.dci-palestine.org/children_in_israeli_detention

22- Israeli Apartheid Week: South Africa Rejoins Palestine by Nolwalzi Lembede https://studies.aljazeera.net/ar/node/1249