Marc Trius, May 14

I would like to start with a simple statement: a racially stratified, undemocratic, and warlike State isn’t good for anybody. It certainly isn’t good for those who get ground under the unsympathetic wheels of racial domination, or shot, blown, and burned by the fires of war. But neither is it good for those who benefit from enforced privilege or sit safe and secure in the bunker while the war is happening to someone else. Those who live by the sword will eventually die by the sword no matter how good their sword technology is, and those who live on the backs of others will end up consumed by their own cruelty and arrogance, no matter how long they themselves have previously been downtrodden.

Israel is a racially stratified, undemocratic, and warlike State. Israel is a State in which a fifth of the citizenry is denied a stake of ownership and required to forswear their own identity and history to avoid being branded enemies of the State. Even to call for equal rights is sufficient for an Israeli Arab to be hounded by the Security Services; to make alliances with Palestinians who are not citizens of Israel is even worse. When Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian Member of Knesset(MK)—the Israeli Congress—called for a ‘State of all its Citizens’ and refused to deny his cultural and political links with other Arabs, he was stripped of parliamentary immunity by special legislation, and eventually driven out of the country by harassment and threats of a trial for High Treason.

The so-called ‘Nakba Law’ is another attack on Palestinian identity, history, and self-expression. This law forbids public commemoration of the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from Israel in 1948; any public institution that commemorates the Day of the Nakba (May 15th) will be fined ten times the amount it spent on the event. This law passed the first reading in the Knesset last month, and has two more votes before it goes on the books.

There’s more: A series of ‘Loyalty Laws’ have been proposed that would strip anyone of citizenship for reasons such as refusing to swear fealty to Israel as a Jewish State; still pending is a law that would require Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that receive funds from sources outside of Israel to register on a special list; and a law, inspired by the Goldstone Report, that would shut down any organization which “provides information to foreign authorities and act to bring Israeli Military officers or Israeli leaders to trial on alleged war crimes” (from Ha’aretz Newspaper) has been proposed by MKs from Kadima, a centrist Israeli party, and from the National Union, a far-right party.

This onslaught of legislation is partly the result of the last elections, when far-right parties such as Israel Our Home and The National Union entered the governing coalition. The underlying reasons, however, include the rising civic consciousness among the Israeli Arab public and the increasing threat it poses to Jewish supremacy in Israel.

That is why Arab civil society is targeted with such verve. A recent example is the arrest of Ameer Makhoul on May 6th. Makhoul, the head of an Arab NGO called ‘Ittijah’, or The Union of Arab Community-Based Associations, and chairman of the Public Committee for the Defense of Political Freedom, was taken from his home at 3:10am by Israeli Security Services, and is being held for the allegation of ‘grave espionage.’ A gag order on news coverage of this event stood for a few days, until Israeli and international bloggers brought it to light. While the Security Services claim that Makhoul was giving secrets to a Hizbullah agent in Lebanon, it was eventually revealed that the accusation relies on a meeting between Makhoul and a Palestinian environmentalist from Jordan. This is what happens to Arab citizens of Israel who, like Makhoul and Bishara, speak to Arabs who are not also Israeli citizens.

For a State that sees the Palestinian Arab minority, which comprises a fifth of its population, as a “Strategic Threat,” as Avi Diskin, head of the Israeli General Security Services, proclaimed in 2007, acts of repression are inescapable. The grudging grant of citizenship to those Palestinians who failed to flee in 1948 (an event which, as we recall, it may soon be a crime to commemorate) does not change the fact that, as Bishara wrote in the Los Angeles Times, they have been transformed into “foreigners in [their] own country,” made to face discrimination in housing, education, and employment, turned into scapegoats for anything that goes wrong in the land, and denied political freedom.

It takes more than elections to make a Democracy: it takes a system where the rule of law, freedom of expression and conscience, and equality are paramount. As the new, draconian legislation and Makhoul’s and Bishara’s cases demonstrate so clearly along with many other cases here unmentioned, whatever can be said of Israel—whether it’s good or bad, necessary or counterproductive, Jewish or anti-Jewish—a Democracy is certainly isn’t.

Originally posted at:  http://open.salon.com/blog/mtrius/2010/05/14/israel_a_democracy_for_jews_only

Photo source: http://ruslantrad.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/some-facts-you-may-not-have-known-about-israel-the-only-democracy-in-the-middle-east/