Is Israel Moving Away from Democracy?

Last updated on: March 1, 2016 at 12:30 am by Kermit Zarley

Is Israel Moving Away from Democracy? 2016-03-01T00:30:40-07:00 Kermit Zarley

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Israel’s Knesset (Parliament) is considering a controversial bill that would empower it to suspend any of its own members for the rather vague “inappropriate” behavior. This certainly looks like a move away from democracy. It is happening because of what some Palestinian members of the Knesset are saying and doing. (Israel’s population consists of 21% Palestinians, though Israel refuses to call them that and thus calls them “Arabs.”)

The Knesset has 17 Palestinian members out of a total of 120 members. Many Jewish members are angry about a remark that Palestinian member Ms. Hanin Zoabi made recently in a media interview. She merely said what nearly all Palestinians say regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “The main criminal here is the occupation, the oppression of the Palestinian people.”

I fully agree with that as I make clear in my book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia (1990). Ms. Zoabi and two other Palestinian lawmakers in the Knesset also met with families of some Palestinians who had attacked Israeli citizens and soldiers and were killed by Israel’s security forces. The Knesset’s Ethics Committee then temporarily banned these three Palestinian lawmakers from the Knesset.

USA Today reported this story last Sunday and questioned if such measures were in opposition to Israel’s democracy. It also reported that Israeli President Reuven Rivlin believes this temporary ban is “blatantly undemocratic.”

Ms. Zoabi alleges that Israeli Jews try to “delete” Palestinians’ historical ties to the land. She adds, “They forget they immigrated to me, that I didn’t immigrate to them.” She is right about that last clause. Jews have been immigrating to this land since the 1880s, and many Palestinian families had lived there for many centuries.

But it is important to consider the whole picture. Ever since the Romans threw the Jews out of their land, resulting in the Diaspora, there has always been what what called “the Jewish Problem.” It really came into focus for the world’s non-Jewish population when the Holocaust occurred in WWII. And the resulting international consensus was that it was a just thing for Jews to return to their ancestral land and have a nation there based on the so-called “Balfour Declaration” that Great Britain adopted in 1917.

But the Balfour Declaration also states, “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Accordingly, if it was a just thing for the Jewish people to establish their own state there in that land that the world called “Palestine,” it was also just for the Arabs living there, who later took the name “Palestinians,” to establish their own state there. In fact, that was what the United Nations Resolution 7 of the Security Council in 1947 stated.

So, ever since the UN has tried to solve this most difficult Israeli-Palestinian problem by advocating a so-called “two-state solution.” Most parties involved now say the two-state solution is dead. If so, and the Knesset passes this bill, look for another Intifada. As the decades pass, this problem gets worse and worse, and it effects much of the world for various reasons. I don’t think the two-state solution is dead; but the traditional two-state solution–locating a State of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza Strip–is dead. Another two-state solution needs to be considered–the “revival of ancient Philistia.”

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Ms. Hanin Zoabi

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