* It's not even a democracy for Jews.
Uri Avnery: Unlike modern Christianity, but very much like Islam, the Jewish religion is not just a matter between Man and God, but also a matter between Man and Man. It does not live in a quiet corner of public life. Religious law encompasses all aspects of public and private life. Therefore, for a pious Jew – or Muslim – the European idea of separation between state and religion is anathema. The Jewish Halakha, like the Islamic Shari’a, regulates every single aspect of life. Whenever Jewish law clashes with Israeli law, which one should prevail? Religious fanatics in Israel insist that religious law stands above the secular law (as in several Arab counties), and that the state courts have no jurisdiction over the clerics in matters that concern religion (as in Iran). When the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, a most respected Orthodox rabbi easily mobilized a hundred thousand protesters in Jerusalem. The entire religious community, with all its diverse factions, now belongs to the rightist, ultra-nationalist camp. Transforming Israel into a Halakha state means castrating the democratic system and turning Israel into a second Iran governed by Jewish ayatollahs. - Uri Avnery, The Jewish Ayatollahs
Hence the world wide alarm re the election of extreme Zionists and religious orthodox Jews in the new Netanyahu govt.
Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman ... wants Torah law, or in other words, he wants Israel to be a country governed by Jewish religious law, halakha. In any event, Israel is already a semi-theocracy. The Israelis who were frightened by the minister's remarks and who love viewing their country as liberal, Western and secular are forgetting that our life here is more religious, traditional and halakhic than we are prepared to admit... Let's admit that we live in a country with many religious and halakhic attributes. Let's remove the concocted secularist guise with which we have wrapped ourselves. Shocked by Neeman's remarks? They are not so far removed from the reality of our lives. Israel is not what you thought. It's definitely not what we try to present to ourselves and the rest of the world.
https://www.haaretz.com/2009-12-10/ty-article/gideon-levy-lets-face-the-facts-is...Israel is slowly but inexorably turning into a conservative theocracy ... Israel is no democracy... it has become less and less democratic with regard to the rights of its Jewish population.... Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman attacked groups that seek to uphold civil liberties in Israel, for Jews as well as for Arabs, as “collaborators in terror.”
https://forward.com/opinion/147521/israel-turning-into-theocracy/One of the major successes of Israeli theopolitics has been the institutionalization of the Orthodox rabbinate within the state. The Orthodox rabbinate in Israel has been established as a monopoly—neither Reform nor Conservative rabbinic ordinations are recognized—and it is, in part, supported by the state. This monopoly and state support, in conjunction with the coercive tactics of the religious parties in the Knesset, has given the Orthodox rabbinate a good deal of power. It uses this power to further the observance of Orthodox norms, often violating the civil rights of the nonobservant Israeli.
- Norman L. Zucker,
The Establishment of the Orthodox Rabbinate Quote:What exactly do you think they are being deprived of?
Already told you, see above re the Bedouin and the many discriminatory laws.
And:
The Archbishop of New York announces that any Catholic who rents out an apartment to a Jew commits a mortal sin and runs the risk of excommunication.
A protestant priest in Berlin decrees that a Christian who employs a Jew will be banished from his parish.
Impossible? Indeed. Except in Israel – in reverse, of course.
The rabbi of Safed, a government employee, has decreed that it is strictly forbidden to let apartments to Arabs, including the Arab students at the local medical school. Twenty other town rabbis, whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers, mostly secular, including Arab citizens, have publicly supported this edict.
The same goes for another group of rabbis, who prohibited employing Goyim.
(In ancient Hebrew, “Goy” just meant a people, any people. In the Bible, the Israelites were called a “holy Goy”. But in the last centuries, the term has come to mean non-Jews, with a decidedly derogatory undertone.)
- Uri Avnery,
The Jewish Ayatollahs
....The ugly side of the Jewish "democracy" aka Israel.
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