Andrei.Hicks wrote on May 17
th, 2016 at 12:07am:
My two cousins on national service taken last year.
I could not be more proud of them.
Israel discovers that democracy is not an Israeli value
For obvious strategic reasons, Israel and its uncritical supporters in the United States have long focused on presenting Israel as the sole bastion of democracy in the Middle East in order to attract continued political, military, and economic support from Western democracies by evoking a “people like us” sense of common identity and values.
Testifying before the House Appropriations Foreign Operations Subcommittee on 2 April 2003, the Executive Director of pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, Howard Kohr, stated:
“In these increasingly dangerous times, the United States and Israel have forged a unique and remarkable partnership, made even more evident after September 11.
This relationship is based on a common set of values, a shared commitment to democracy and freedom, and comparable histories of providing safe haven to oppressed peoples.”
Similarly, in a leaked pro-Israeli media strategy published by EI last month, prepared for pro-Israel activists by The Luntz Research Companies and The Israel Project, the authors stated:
“So far, one of Israel’s most effective messages has been that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East… As a democracy, Israel has the right and the responsibility to defend its borders and protect its people.”When arguing that Israel is a democratic country, Israel and its supporters typically point out that the Palestinians living in Israel (commonly and misleadingly termed “Israeli Arabs”) have the right to vote and that there are Palestinians in the Knesset (Israeli parliament).
The reality, of course, is that Israel’s Palestinian citizens do not enjoy equal rights to the same degree or extent as Israel’s Jewish population. In a background document entitled, “History of the Palestinians in Israel”, published by Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the authors state:
Israel never sought to assimilate or integrate the Palestinian population, treating them as second-class citizens and excluding them from public life and the public sphere. The state practiced systematic and institutionalized discrimination in all areas, such as land dispossession and allocation, education, language, economics, culture, and political participation. Successive Israeli governments maintained tight control over the community, attempting to suppress Palestinian/Arab identity and to divide the community within itself. To that end, Palestinians are not defined by the state as a national minority despite UN Resolution 181 calling for such; rather they are referred to as “Israeli Arabs,” “non-Jews,” or by religious affiliation.
All of this without even considering the blatantly undemocractic nature of Israel’s military occupation of the over 3 million Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and West Bank (including Jerusalem), which will enter its 37th year next month.
“Alarming findings”Yet, even as the Israeli government and its supporters in America and elsewhere invest millions of dollars in public relations strategies emphasizing how democratic Israel’s system of government is, it emerges that there is a deep confusion among Israel’s Jewish citizens about what “democracy” actually means in practice.
For over a decade, the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), a non-partisan Israeli research institute founded in 1991 and based in Jerusalem, has been studying the quality of Israeli democracy and how well it functions. The result is “The Democracy Index”, a long-term, comparative study of some thirty-one indicators measuring Israeli democracy against that of thirty-five other democracies. The index includes a public opinion survey component reflecting how Israelis view their democracy.
Today, on 22 May 2003, the IDI will present its 2003 Democracy Index findings at a special conference under the joint auspices of Israel’s President, Moshe Katzav, and the Institute itself.
Describing the 2003 Index’s findings as “alarming,” the IDI asserts that Israel’s political system “has not yet acquired the characteristics of a substantive democracy”. The Index notes that Israel does not rate high on political participation, “as opposed to what has commonly been thought: there has been a downward trend since 1996, and the country now ranks 22nd [of 31].”
For nearly every indicator in the “Rights” measurement, the Index placed Israel in the lower half of the list:
“Israel’s ranking in this aspect is worrisome. For nearly every indicator, Israel places in the lower half of the list. Protection of human rights in Israel is poor; there is serious political and economic discrimination against the Arab minority; there is much less freedom of religion than in other democracies; and the socioeconomic inequality indicator is among the highest in the sample.”On the “Stability and Social Cohesion” indicator:[b]“Here Israel ranks at the bottom of the list in all indicators. The turnover in governments is more frequent than in other democracies, and only India ranks lower in social tensions and rifts between the various segments of society.
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