Republican and Democratic coddling hasn’t stopped Israel’s self-destructive settlements. And now, with little land remaining for Palestinians, the Two State Solution is dead. Both parties got it wrong on Saturday’s editorial page.
For Charles Krauthammer Obama’s attempt to preserve the Two State Solution by abstaining from the customary U.S. veto of a UN resolution condemning settlements, was more proof Obama is an antisemite and Israel-basher. Krauthammer griped that Obama is keeping Jews from worshiping on the Temple Mount. Actually, it’s the Israeli government that is blocking End Times wingnuts from damaging what is also the site of the Al Aqsa mosque. Krauthammer joins Trump’s ambassador nominee David Friedman in a new age of Republican advocacy for extremists even too extreme for Israel.
Then there is Eugene Robinson, who praised the veto, even while acknowledging “Two States” is a dead letter. Robinson failed to hold Democrats accountable for doing little to stop the settlements, and he ends by praising Israel’s “vibrant democracy,” worrying what kind of democracy it will now become.
Become?
For Middle East correspondents based in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, for American politicians on AIPAC junkets, or for those who have never seen the West Bank or the Galilee, the sanitized version of Israel may have some trappings of a democracy. But for the 1.7 million Arab and Bedouin citizens of Israel, it’s a place where the phrase “filthy Arab” is heard repeatedly, where racial epithets are common, and brawls occurs at soccer games between Maccabi Petah Tikva and Hapoel Haifa. Arab Israelis earn 30% less than Jewish citizens, and jobs, scholarships and loans are harder to obtain. Life expectancy is lower, and half live in poverty. Israeli Bedouins are nomads and also the domestic victims of Jewish settlement.
Vigilante groups in Petah Tikva, Pisgat Zeev and Kiryat Gat beat interracial couples. Schools in Kiryat Gat “educate” Israeli girls on the dangers of interracial dating. One of their videos is called “Sleeping with the Enemy” and was co-produced with local police. In 2004 Safed’s chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, called Arab and Jewish dating “an act of war.” Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman advocates the forced expulsion of the nation’s Arabs (“finishing the job”), a view supported by half the Jewish population.
A few years ago, the Israeli community of Moshav Yishi, whose motto was “The American Dream in Eretz Israel,” had a webpage that asked: “Looking for the American Dream in Eretz Yisrael? Two acre plots, farmland, reservoirs, and terrific views? Does an Arab-free environment sound appealing? Yishi is miles inside the Green Line and even further from the nearest Arab settlement.”
If Israel really is a democracy, says former Palestinian-Israeli Knesset member Azmi Bishara, “I would call it a trivial democracy.”
And then there is the required submission of news articles to military censors; a law forbidding Arab Israelis from observing Nakba Day (commemorating the expulsion of 80% of Palestinians from their homes in 1948); and a different law penalizing Jewish supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. ACRI, the “Association for Civil Rights in Israel,” reports widespread discrimination, civil liberties violations, abrogation of treaties, mistreatment of asylum seekers, crackdowns on whistleblowers and journalists, and ongoing abuses in the Occupied Territories. ACRI’s December 2016 report laments: “This year, we unfortunately moved backwards.”
And this was Israel proper.
Then there are the territories that Israel occupies (West Bank) or dominates militarily (Gaza), which include about 4.5 million people under military control. Imagine if the United States occupied all of Mexico and Central America – and you can begin to fathom the scale of the Israeli occupation. Detentions in the West Bank don’t require warrants, and forty percent of all Palestinian men have been in prison. Land is stolen and homes bulldozed. Future ambassador David Friedman has a building with his name on it built on stolen land in the West Bank settlement of Beit El. Palestinians must travel through checkpoints like the one in Qalandia that, when I passed through in 2009, reminded me of how cattle are moved in stockyards.
With Two States dead, Republicans are now embracing Israel’s homegrown religious extremists, while Democrats continue to embrace a fairy-tale “democracy” that never was. And now the “Alt-Right’s” antisemites and white supremacists have joined the circus. Astonishingly, many of them are full-throated Zionists. After all, what’s not to love about a militaristic nation of ethnic and religious privilege, where government is mixed with religion, and half the citizens want to throw the “filthy Arabs” out?
It may be too late for Republicans, but Democrats had better figure out what democracy really means. At home and elsewhere.
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