It’s virtually impossible to be involved in Palestine activism without being barraged by the mantra that “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East“. This talking point is invoked whenever the need to justify Israeli behavior is needed, even if the topic under discussion is completely unrelated. Indeed, in the minds of those who utilize it, it confers an automatic moral superiority to Israel which further distinguishes it from its “backwards” neighbors, and ex post facto legitimizes its actions.
There are multiple issues with this talking point, and we could discuss it for hundreds of pages, but for the sake of expedience we will briefly focus on two major ones.
First, there is an erroneous assumption that being a democracy automatically confers an elevated moral position. The usual line of reasoning is that if a state is a democracy then it listens to the needs and wants of its citizens, who generally tend to want to steer clear of war, misery and repression. A further element of this is that democratic leaders are accountable to their people which makes them think twice before enacting any of these policies.
While this may sound good on paper, there is scant empirical evidence to support it. For example, when it comes to war and aggression against other countries, there is absolutely no evidence to support the claim that democratic countries differ from non-democratic countries, either in initiation or participation in wars.
But we needn’t go so far and talk about wars, let us think of the Jim Crow United States, which was classified as a democracy at the time. If a state practicing such untold injustice and repression against its own citizens -let alone people abroad- could maintain the moniker of democracy, then how could anyone seriously claim that being a democracy automatically makes a state good or just? Post WWII France waxed poetic about freedom and democracy domestically while it was committing genocide in its colonies. We see similar patterns in all the settler colonies which consider themselves democratic while dispossessing and brutally oppressing their native populations.
The simplistic and ideologically driven urge to divide the world into “good states” and “bad states” based on whether they are a democracy or not is based on a fictitious assumed morality of democratic states. When it comes to international politics, morality and altruism, while often invoked as pretexts for action, are mere window-dressing for political ambitions. This becomes exceedingly clear when we see the self-anointed “champions of democracy” sponsoring and supporting coups against democratic governments which posed a threat to the West’s regional interests, such as the 1953 coup against Mosaddeq in Iran. Meanwhile, these same “champions” would prop up and reinforce the most reactionary and tyrannical regimes imaginable if they were deemed beneficial to their interests in the region.
This bias has been inculcated by decades of propaganda, which paints warmongering from democratic states as noble, involuntary and for the greater good, while downplaying the frequency of said warmongering.
So now that we have established that being a democracy doesn’t inherently mean anything vis-à-vis morality, the second major issue with this talking point is perhaps the biggest flaw in it: Israel is not a democracy, at least not in the way people commonly understand it.
I can already hear you protest, but Israel has elections! There is separation of powers! How could you say such nonsense?
When discussing democracy many often fall into the trap of focusing on the formal trappings of democracy while ignoring its actual spirit. For instance, you can have regular elections, but if your system is designed so that it purposefully de facto excludes certain people then it is functionally no different than legally excluding them for whatever reason, be that race, gender or class.
One of the core aspects of democracy is equality. We cannot speak of a democratic system unless all of those participating in it are on equal legal and moral footing. There can be no second-class citizens in a democracy. In the case of Israel, however, it clearly distinguishes between citizenship and nationality.
What does this mean?
For example, you can be a citizen of Israel but be a Druze national, or a Jewish national. Your nationality is determined by your ethnicity and it cannot be changed or challenged. Many of the rights you are accorded in Israel stem from your nationality not your citizenship. Meaning an “Arab” Israeli citizen and a Jewish Israeli citizen, while both citizens, enjoy different rights and privileges determined by their “nationality” [You can read more about this here].
This is not merely discrimination in practice, but discrimination by law. Adalah have composed a database of discriminatory laws in Israel that disfavor non-Jewish Israelis. For example, the Law of Return and Absentees’ Property Law are but two examples of flagrant racism and discrimination in the Israeli legal system.
This is not some old, odd oversight, but a very deliberate part of the design of Israeli society. This is periodically reinforced whenever some Israelis petition the Supreme Court to recognize an Israeli nationality that does not discriminate based on ethnicity. A recent example of these petitions was in 2013, where the Supreme Court rejected such an idea on the grounds that it would “undermine Israel’s Jewishness“.
It says quite a lot about Israel that a unifying egalitarian identity not based around ethnicity would “pose a danger to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people” as the court ruled. The fact that such discrimination is seen as a cornerstone of Israeli society only reinforces its colonial ethnocratic nature, and undermines any claims to equality among citizens.
But this kind of discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg, as it only covers some aspects of de jure inequality among Israelis. Inspecting the de facto discrimination against non-Jewish Israelis shines an even brighter light on Israel’s ethnocratic hierarchy.
Almost half of all Palestinian citizens of Israel live under the poverty line, with a considerable percentage close to the poverty line. They also have a considerably lower life expectancy, a higher infant mortality rate, less access to education and resources as well as less municipality and government funding. Should you be interested in delving into some of the more detailed aspects of this discrimination, you can read Adalah’s The Inequality Report. It is an excellent overview of many issues. Another report shining the light on Israel’s discrimination is “Discrimination against Palestinian Citizens in the Budget of Jerusalem Municipality and Government Planning: Objectives, Forms, Consequences” by the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, which you can find at this.
Additionally, you could read this report from the Adva center which illustrates quite clearly how this discrimination touches almost every aspect of life.
Furthermore, most land inside the green line is off limits to Palestinian citizens of Israel. A large percentage of land in Israel is under the control of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which has a:
“specific mandate to develop land for and lease land only to Jews. Thus the 13 percent of land in Israel owned by the JNF is by definition off-limits to Palestinian Arab citizens, and when the ILA tenders leases for land owned by the JNF, it does so only to Jews—either Israeli citizens or Jews from the Diaspora. This arrangement makes the state directly complicit in overt discrimination against Arab citizens in land allocation and use..”.
The JNF is not the only entity blocking Palestinian citizens of Israel from purchasing, leasing or renting land and property, but also by so-called regional and local councils, which account for the vast majority of land. These councils have the authority to block anyone from settling in these areas that do not seem like a “good fit”, for example a religious community would not want to allow secular residents from moving in on the grounds that it would be against the spirit of their communities. In practice, this has translated into a virtual ban on non-Jewish Israelis moving into Jewish areas. In a Statement submitted by Habitat International Coalition and Adalah to the United Nations, it was estimated that almost 80% of the entire country is off limits to lease for Palestinian citizens of Israel. You can click here to read their full statement.
These features of Israeli “democracy” have not gone unnoticed. In its defense, Smooha suggests referring to Israel as an ethnic democracy, where he admits that the state institutions are built to privilege the majority group, but yet it maintains its democratic label.
Here we have entered the realm of qualified democracy: “Other than this one missing feature, the system would be a liberal democracy, therefore it’s just a different kind of democracy.” But what if this feature is a core aspect of democracy? How could one argue for the presence of democracy where the citizens are unequal in front of the law and the state?
This argument could also apply to other states, not just Israel, but while these states claim that the de facto inequality among citizens fostered by their systems are an unintended byproduct, doubtful as that is, Israel openly flaunts these features and doesn’t even attempt to hide them. It is an ethno-state, it will always privilege and support the dominance of one ethnicity.
Oren Yiftachel defines Israel as an ethnocracy rather than a democracy. According to Yiftachel ethnocratic regimes:
“…promote the expansion of the dominant group in contested territory and its domination of power structures while maintaining a democratic facade.”
Ethnocracies have several distinguishing characteristics:
- Despite declaring the regime as democratic, ethnicity (and not territorial citizenship) is the main determinant of the allocation of rights, powers, and resources, and politics is characterized by constant democratic-ethnocratic tension.
- State borders and political boundaries are fuzzy: there is no clear demos, mainly owing to the active role of ethnic diasporas and the bounded, unequal citizenship of ethnic minorities.
- A dominant, “charter” ethnoclass appropriates the state apparatus and determines the outcome of most public policies.
- Segregation and stratification occur on two main levels: ethnonations and ethnoclasses.
- The socioeconomic sphere is marked by long-term ethnoclass stratification.
- The logic of ethnic segregation is diffused into the social’ and political system, enhancing multidirectional processes of essentializing political ethnicization.
- Significant (though partied) civil and political rights are extended, to members of the minority ethnonation, distinguishing -ethnocracies from Herrenvolk (apartheid) or authoritarian regimes.
Hrmm, sounds familiar.
But unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. All of the above applies only to so called “Israel proper”, meaning we are completely neglecting the areas beyond the green line that Israel is expanding into and controlling. If we look at the entirety of the territory controlled by Israel, ethnocracy would be too toothless of a term to describe the complex system of IDs and tiered ethnicity-based rights employed by Israel. This system finally pushed B’Tselem, Israel’s largest human rights group to officially designate Israel as an Apartheid state [You can read more about this here].
Israel cannot be called a democracy without omitting major features that most think of when they hear the term. The hyper-focus on the formalistic aspects of democracy obfuscates the preconditions and modifications needed to sustain the appearance of this label while completely twisting its spirit. However, if you remain unconvinced and still believe Israel to be democratic, then by now you should know that it has no bearing on the behavior of any state. Indeed, throughout history democracies have been capable of monstrous cruelty, genocide and repression at home and abroad, something Israel is undoubtedly guilty of regardless of how democratic you think it is.
- Adalah, The Inequality Report The Palestinian Arab Minority in Israel, March 2011.
- Yiftachel, Oren. Ethnocracy: Land and identity politics in Israel/Palestine. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
- Huneidi, Sahar S. Israel and its Palestinian citizens: Ethnic privileges in the Jewish State. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
- White, Ben, and Haneen Zoabi. Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, discrimination and democracy. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
- Khamaisi, Rasim. Discrimination against Palestinian Citizens in the Budget of Jerusalem Municipality and Government Planning: Objectives, Forms, Consequences. Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, April 8th, 2020.