Upon its creation, “the first important mission to be undertaken by the new state was the removal, as best it could, of those who did not regard themselves as Jews.” In other words, Modern Israel inaugurated its creation with a process of ethnic cleansing.
Subsequently, Israel turned itself into what Israeli Historian Schlomo Sand, describes, using the terminology of the Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha, as an “ethnic-democracy” which makes it an “incomplete, low-grade democracy.”
Today’s Israel is not a democracy, but a “liberal ethnocracy” that presumes its “growing and strengthening” Arab minority “will always accept its exclusion from the political and cultural heart.” Ultimately, we may see “an uprising in the Arab Galilee, followed by iron-fisted repression,” which would constitute “a turning-point for the existence of Israel” in the region.
The case against the Jewish state cannot be based on an unseemly tussle for genetic primacy but a discourse of fundamental political and human rights. “If it is senseless to expect the Jewish Israelis to dismantle their state, the least that can be demanded of them is to stop reserving it for themselves as a polity that segregates, excludes, and discriminates against a large number of its citizens, whom it views as undesirable aliens.”
The country refuses to institutionalize the qualities of civil and political equality necessary to such a democracy. And, its Basic Law, forbidding any political party that denies the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, makes it impossible to “transform the Jewish state into an Israeli democracy by a democratic process” (Chapter 3: A Shared Identity; Sub-chapter: 3.11 An Exclusive and Discriminatory Biological-Religious Ethos; Page 81; Kindle Locations 1493-1508).
In ‘Trump’s America, Netanyahu’s Israel,’ Adam Shatz encapsulates in a short and to-the-point article how the leaders of the free world are denigrating biblical Zionism into Pagan Zionism; and, states: “more remarkable still, few Israelis – or their supporters abroad, among Jews and Evangelicals – fret over this ‘fate.'”
Says Adam Shatz:
“In 1948, Hannah Arendt … warned that after the Arab-Israeli war:
The ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by a hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, preoccupied with defense matters to the degree that would submerge all other interests and activities.
Political thought would center on military strategy; economic development would be determined exclusively by war needs.
And all this would be the fate of a nation that – no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries – would remain a tiny people vastly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.”
Arendt’s warning that an expansionist Israel would never realize Herzl and the founders’ dream and become a ‘normal’ state has lost its charge because “its abnormality is the new normal.“
Israel now looks more like a pioneer of illiberal, ethnocratic [ultra]nationalism …
Read more … ‘Trump’s America, Netanyahu’s Israel,’
With Every Good Wish to You, I am,
Sincerely,
Building the Bridge Foundation, The Hague
Abraham A. van Kempen
Senior Editor
*‘Christian Zionism … Enraptured Around a Golden Cal” (2nd Edition)
e-book version $ 3.33
Paperback $33.30
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