Israeli Repression and the Language of Liars

By Tim Wise, AlterNet. Posted May 8, 2002.

Webster’s New World Dictionary defines democracy as, among other things, “the principle of equality of rights, opportunity and treatment, or the practice of this principle.” Keep this in mind, as we’ll be coming back to it shortly.

Now, imagine that the United States abolished our Constitution, or perhaps had never had one to begin with. No Bill of Rights. No guarantees of things like free speech, freedom of assembly and due process of law.

And imagine if Congress passed a law stating that the U.S. was from this point forward to be legally defined as a Christian nation. As such, Christians would be given special privileges for jobs, loans, and land ownership, and Christians from anywhere in the world would be given preference in immigration, extended automatic citizenship upon coming to America.

Furthermore, political candidates espousing certain beliefs -- especially those who might argue that we should be a nation with equal rights for all, and not a “Christian nation” -- were no longer allowed to hold office, or even run for election.

And imagine that next month, laws were passed that had the effect of restricting certain ethnic and religious groups from acquiring land in particular parts of the country, and made it virtually impossible for members of ethnic minorities to live in particular communities.

And imagine that in response to perceived threats to our nation’s internal security, new laws sailed through the House and Senate, providing for torture of those detained for suspected subversion. This, on top of still other laws providing for the detention of such suspects for long periods of time without trial or even a formal charge against them.

In such a scenario, would anyone with an appreciation of the English language, and with the above definition in mind, dare suggest that we would be justified in calling ourselves a democracy?

Of course not: and yet the term is repeatedly used to describe Israel -- as in “the only democracy in the Middle East.” This, despite the fact that Israel has no constitution; despite the fact that Israel is defined as the state of the Jewish people, providing special rights and privileges to anyone in the world who is Jewish and seeks to live there, over and above longtime Arab residents. This, despite the fact that Israel bars any candidate from holding office who thinks the country should be a secular, democratic state with equal rights for all. This, despite the fact that non-Jews are restricted in terms of how much land they can own, and in which places they can own land at all, thanks to laws granting preferential treatment to Jewish residents. This, despite that fact that even the Israeli Supreme Court has acknowledged the use of torture against suspected “terrorists” and other “enemies” of the Jewish state.

For some, it is apparently sufficient that Israel has an electoral system, and that Arabs have the right to vote in those elections (though just how equally this right is protected is of course a different matter). The fact that one can’t vote for a candidate who questions the special Jewish nature of the state, because such candidates can’t run for or hold office, strikes most as irrelevant: hardly enough to call into question their democratic credentials.

The Soviet Union also had elections, of a sort. And in those elections, most people could vote, though candidates who espoused an end to the communist system were barred from participation. Voters got to choose between communists. In Israel, voters get to choose between Zionists. In the former case, we recognize such truncated freedom as authoritarianism. In the latter case, we call it democracy.

If giving names like "Operation Enduring Freedom" or "Operation Just Cause" to deadly military offensives is not sufficient to indicate that the English language is dead, this should pretty well prove the point. If what we see in Israel is indeed democracy, then what does fascism look like?

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