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Israel Was Founded on Democracy? Let’s Dispense with This Nonsense.

by Aug 17, 2018Foreign Policy, Articles1 comment

Palestinian refugees fleeing Galilee in the fall of 1948 (Fred Csasznik)
Israel wasn't founded through any kind of democratic process, but through the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab population from their homes in Palestine.

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In the op-ed pages of the New York Times this week, the president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald S. Lauder, expressed his view that Israel’s new Jewish National State Law “correctly reaffirms that Israel is a Jewish state”.

“Israel is a miracle”, he opines.

“The Zionist movement,” he asserts, “has been unwaveringly democratic from its very start.”

“And when Israel was founded, it immediately became the first and only democracy in the Middle East.”

This is all a very nice sound legend. But that’s all it is: Zionist mythology.

The historical truth of the matter is that Israel was not founded upon democracy, but upon a profound rejection of democratic principles.

The Zionists, far from being “unwaveringly democratic”, rejected the right of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine to self-determination.

Israel was founded not through any kind of legitimate, democratic political process, but through violence and the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab population from their homes in Palestine.

Learn more by reading my article “The Jewish Nation State Law: If Israel Practiced Democracy, It’d Be Called Palestine”.

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  • Samy El Semman says:

    It’s easy for the Israeli regime to commit massive ethnic cleansing and expulsion of the indigenous population, and then attempt to coopt the token minority of the indigenous that remain with the promise of token equality. The reality remains however, that Israel is not a democracy, Western-type, or any other type. It is not a democracy because of the artificial—and indeed, criminal and brutal—manner in which a land where the overwhelming majority were NOT Jewish were killed, pushed out, hounded, and have been kept out, all in the name of creating an artificial Jewish majority were none could have ever resulted had the land been left in peace and allowed to evolve along its natural, organic demographic trends. Is it normal for “Western-type democracies” for a newly-arrived immigrant minority faction to wage campaigns of ethnic cleansing against the majority indigenous population if they don’t think they’ll like how the majority might vote? Is it democratic to impose a political regime over the majority (which hadn’t even been consulted about it), and then kill or expel them when they resist? Waging a war of ethnic cleansing against the population at large just so you can magically turn your minority community into the artificial majority, is DEFINITELY not “democratic”. It is in fact, the very antithesis of democracy. Such is the abominable yet undeniable reality of the Israeli state project, from its very conception, down to our present day.

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