#Check out : #Israel is a #democracy, perhaps in the way that all our so-called democracies evolve, more #authoritarian, more #oppressive, more #oligarchic, more #differential and #unequal - anyway #Israel is an #occidental #invention
« The next morning I left the festival and made my way from Ramallah to Jerusalem. I had to wait an extra hour or so for a taxi with the right color license plate, yellow, and so be allowed to cross through a checkpoint in Israel’s wall and onto the road to Jerusalem on the other side. I made small talk with my driver, then retreated back into my thoughts of the journey so far. It was my sixth day in Palestine, but I felt like I had been here for months. The days were filled with tours, the nights with talks—even the meals felt like seminars. Some of this is just being abroad somewhere far from home. But most of it was the specificity of this place—how much it seemed to embody the West and its contradictions, its claims of democracy, its foundations in exploitation. Of all the worlds I have ever explored, I don’t think any shone so bright, so intense, so immediately as Palestine.
But when the light cleared I had new eyes, and I could see my own words in new ways—and the words from which they were derived—the stories, columns, speeches, and talks presented by “willing intellectuals.” So much seemed obvious. I now noted a symmetry in the bromides—that those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state. Riding in that taxi toward Jerusalem, the truth of this struck me as undeniable. I’d spent most of my time in the Occupied Territories, a world of minority rule. But even in the state proper, caste reigned. Palestinians living in Israel have shorter lives, are poorer, and live in more violent neighborhoods. Certain neighborhoods in Israel are allowed to discriminate legally against Palestinian citizens by setting “admission committees.” The committees, operating in 41 percent of all Israeli localities, are free to bar anyone lacking “social suitability” or “compatibility with the social and cultural fabric.” Openly racist appeals are the norm, as when Benjamin Netanyahu warned in 2015 that “the right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” For all my talk of being fooled by the language of “Jewish democracy,” it had been right there the whole time. The phrase means what it says—a democracy for the Jewish people and the Jewish people alone. »
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message
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