Is it democracy?
JONNYMYERS’S response to Nathan Geffen (“Off the Mark”, Letters, February 28) refers. Geffen’s argument is about why Israel is worthy of special focus. Whether Israel or Turkey is more democratic seems to occupy Myers’s mind but is peripheral to the argument. More central is the question of whether or not Israel can call itself a democracy?
Can a country that defines itself as a Jewish State be democratic for its Christian and Muslim Arabs, notwithstanding their right to vote? By this definition, Arabs are excluded from active citizenship. Furthermore, the Law of Return is discriminatory as it excludes Arabs from immigration to Israel, including those who were expelled over various periods.
Jews, notwithstanding their origins, are welcomed.
The Family Reunification Law prohibits Arab spouses from joining them in citizenship – another discriminatory law. Israel’s own studies have found systematic discrimination against Arabs in the Israeli legal system.
Property laws also discriminate against non-jews. Arabs face discrimination in housing, education, jobs and land ownership. Arab identity is curtailed whereby it is illegal to commemorate the Nakhba or catastrophe.
The point is that Israel either is not a democracy to all its citizens or alternatively actively discriminates against non-jews. So where it ranks in any index is immaterial in the face of such blatant exclusion of a significant part of its population. Furthermore, while decrying the success of religious political parties in Egypt, Myers ignores the religious nature of the Israeli state or the firm grip of right-wing religious politics on the state.
That Palestinians rejected partitioning of their country in 1948 is both logical and reasonable. Unlike Pakistan, which Myers uses as a spurious comparison, where a nation state was fragmented to accommodate various nationalisms within its own population, in Israel a settler population forced an unequal division of the land with the help of imperial powers through the instrument of the United Nations. That may have given it some semblance of legality, but not morality.
It is noteworthy that this Zionist project predated the odious Holocaust. This division was as disastrous as the formation of Pakistan. The division of Palestine is akin to the United Nations mandating the division of South Africa between white and black without the consent of the indigenous population – a situation which would reasonably be rejected by all.