Bernard Spiegal

Israel is a country in denial. That is to say, it is a country which has obscured from itself its own nature; and until now, it has been adept at that.  But the protective carapace of self-delusion is now under considerable strain. Shattered. Perhaps beyond repair. But not admitted, faced-up to.

Purportedly liberal, primarily Ashkenazi, Jews march in their hundreds-of-thousands to protest against what they see as the dismantling of their democracy by the Netanyahu-led, extreme right-wing zealotry that is his administration.

‘Their’ democracy:  protesters have an essentially proprietorial understanding of democracy, seemingly not noticing the absence of significant numbers of Palestinian Israeli citizens – comprising some 20% of Israel’s population’ – not marching alongside the now-fervent, Jewish democrats. 

The democracy being sought, or protected, is a democracy for Jews. In other words, a contradiction in terms. Noticeable in this regard is the sharp contrast to be drawn between Israel’s alleged democrats now protesting, and the relative absence of Jewish Israelis that protested at the time the 2018 Jewish Nation State Basic Law was being promulgated. At that time, Israeli’s ardour for democracy was apparently not so pronounced.

Jewish Nation State Basic Law

The Basic Law constitutionally enshrines Jewish supremacy and the identity of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.  Of the law, The Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah says:

This law – which has distinct apartheid characteristics – guarantees the ethnic-religious character of Israel as exclusively Jewish and entrenches the privileges enjoyed by Jewish citizens, while simultaneously anchoring discrimination against Palestinian citizens and legitimizing exclusion, racism, and systemic inequality [The law, says Adalah] ‘…requires racist acts as a constitutional value.’

Also worth noting is Adalah’s submission (with others) to the Supreme Court opposing the 2018 Basic Law: ‘The Basic Law does not explicitly define the territory of the Constitution…does not specify the boundaries of the “State of Israel”… and opens the door to the application of Israeli law to the Occupied Territories, in an act of annexation that violates international humanitarian law’. This adds salience to the Basic Law’s affirmation that:

The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and will act to encourage it and to promote and to consolidate its establishment.

In effect, the Basic Law is a policy manifesto now being forcefully implemented by the Netanyahu-led coalition government.  A government comprising a number of particularly unsavoury elements. Minister for National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir leads a far-right party called Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power – the clue is in the title. Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, holds that ‘there is no such thing as the Palestinian people’.  

Basic Law’s implementation

The 2022 election, and the Netanyahu-led coalition that arose from it, effectively ripped the mask off the fantasy Israel so much admired by Western governments, and liberal-minded, yet Zionist, Jews. In plain sight, and in plain words, Israeli ministers affirm their intention to expand settlements. This can only be achieved by stealing, colonising, Palestinian land.

This intent is foreshadowed in the agreement between Likud and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s hard-line Religious Zionist Party: ‘The prime minister will work towards the formulation and promotion of a policy whereby sovereignty is applied to the Judea and Samaria.’ In other words, the annexation of significant areas of the West Bank.

Running alongside these legislative and administrative moves, is the escalating settler violence against Palestinians, effectively aided by Israel’s ‘security’ forces. Palestinians in the OPT live under perpetual threats. Threats that are violently realised – daily.

The Hawara pogrom – not an isolated event

Western media, not generally known for either its interest, or insight, into Palestinian/Israeli matters, found it had no choice but to cover in some detail the Hawara pogrom, such was the degree of shock engendered by it.

Enabled by what appears to have been the calculated indifference of Israeli security forces, the pogrom was perpetrated by Settlers on the Palestinian town of Hawara. A man was killed, houses and cars set ablaze. Settlers had previously announced their intentions.

But Hawara was not a one-off. It’s part of an entrenched pattern. As B’tselem reports, Al-Baq’ah joins the nearby communities of Ras a-Tin and ‘Ein Samia driven off their lands over the past year under the same circumstances’. 

As to the Occupation in general, apart from small numbers of dissenting Israelis, protest against it figures hardly at all within the flush of pro-democracy fervour.  This is particularly odd – worrying – for it goes to the diagnosis of Israel as a yet-to-be-referred patient in a state of delusion, in a state of denial.

What cannot be denied – but is

Each generation of Jewish Israeli youngsters are conscripted into the armed services. That is to say, grandparents, parents, and now their children, serve or have served in the Occupied Territories.

Their knowledge of the Occupation is direct, firsthand; or, if not that, it is inconceivable that across the armed forces, in this ‘people’s army’, what Israel does in the OPT, is unknown. Rather, schizophrenically, it is at once known, yet not acknowledged – across the generations.

This unacknowledged known comprises the almost daily murder of children, of their parents and grandparents; the destruction of homes and livelihoods; the stealing of land; the ‘precision targeting’ of ‘terrorists’ from the safe airborne cockpits of Israeli Air Force pilots, no matter the maiming and killing of those who innocently happen to be in too close proximity to the ‘precision target’.

All this, and more, are the fruits of Israeli democracy.

‘Strange fruit… Blood on the leaves and blood at the root’ the too apt lyric penned originally in response to the American South’s deep-rooted racism – and its consequences. Israel democracy, strange fruit indeed.