moon
Satire for Sanity
Israel’s farcical elections and fictional democracy
Marwan Bishara
Senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.
Israel’s powerful military and booming economy are undeniable facts, but its much-celebrated democracy is utter fiction.
Israel claims to be a Jewish and democratic state. In fact, it is neither. It boasts of being “the state of the Jewish people” everywhere, when less than half of the world’s Jews live in the country. Today, Israel rules over 15 million people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, half of whom are not Jews; most can’t vote in Israel.
Israel does not even recognise “Israeliness” as a nationality and rejects the liberal democratic concept of a “state of all its citizens”. Instead, the Jewish state recognises two strata of people: Jews who are entitled to full rights and Palestinians who must be content with fewer or no rights. These Palestinians are grudgingly tolerated as second-class citizens, occupied and repressed as colonial subjects, or are kept away as undesirable refugees, whose inalienable right to return would destroy the “Jewish state”.
And if that’s not enough to raise eyebrows, consider the fact that there is no consensus in the “Jewish state” as to “who is a Jew”. Orthodox, Reform and secular Jews have different – even conflicting – interpretations of Jewishness. It is a religious question that is dependent on power politics, as this old Israeli satirical sketch illustrates quite well.
Nevertheless, the legal and political rationale in apartheid colonial Israel privileges the Jews living on all territories between the River and the Sea in all important spheres of life, including citizenship, housing, land rights, language, culture, mobility, and so on.
In that way, Israel/Palestine is no different from apartheid South Africa, where privileged whites also enjoyed a degree of communitarian democracy. But Western hypocritical elites, who refer to “the one and only democracy in the Middle East”, never spoke of “the only democracy in Africa”. Tomato, tomahto.
To compensate for the lack of true democracy, Israel holds elections – spectacular elections. The more elections it holds, the crueller and more fragmented they become. As I wrote after the last election, “personal ambition trumps politics, and politicking outweighs ideology” in today’s Israel.
The fragmentation gives the country an allure of plurality and diversity, especially in contrast to the first three decades of the Israeli state, when Labour predictably won every election. But in recent years, the Right has become as dominant as Labour was, albeit with more screaming, slights and slurs.
Cruelty has become Israel’s national sport. Indeed, “Israel’s politics is crueller than most”, according to Benjamin Netanyahu. He should know; he’s the champ. Cruelty comes in two strands: political vitriol and racist violence. Both flare up like fireworks with each election season, which comes as often as spring or summer these days.
It is no surprise then, that as the November 1 election approached, the fifth in four years, the country’s political discourse turned poisonous. Where Israel’s racist leaders fall short on political disagreement, they make up for it in personal insults and character assassination. “Scum of the human race”, “pathological liar”, “assassin”, and “fascist” are some of the milder language animating Israel’s electoral spectacle.
MORE;
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/10/31/israels-farcical-elections-and-fictional-democracy
Yet the brazen lie of Israel being ' the only democracy in the Middle East ' continues and the West accepts this cuckoo and taxes Western populations in order to allow Jewish fascists- for that's what they are - to continue to trash international and humanitarian law , murder at will, employ apartheid as policy and occupy a sovereign state belonging to an indigenous people that it continually exploits and torments.
We've lately seen satire-worthy examples of American and British ' democracies ' in inaction but each has a vestige of respectability. Not so in fascist Israel.
Israel stinks.
You pay for the stench.
Do not support politicians that wallow in Neo-Zionist shit.
