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Politics : Israel to U.S. : Now Deal with Syria and Iran -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (6428)	12/15/2004 4:45:21 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 22250

Israel --a Judeofascist Utopia: December 2004 The New Israel by Michel Warschawski This essay has been adapted from chapter 8 of Michel Warschawski’s Toward an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society (Monthly Review Press, 2004), which presents an important dissident Israeli perspective that is rarely given a hearing in the United States. Warschawski is cofounder and director of the Alternative Information Center (AIC) in Jerusalem and a well-known anti-Zionist activist. He is also the author of Israel-Palestine: le défi binational (Textuel, 2001) and an award-winning memoir, On the Border (forthcoming from South End Press). With the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin on November 4, 1995, a long interval of relative openness, liberalization, and attempts at peace and normal relations with the Arab world came to an end. By assassinating Rabin the Israeli right not only seized political power —including inside the Labor Party—but also drove the last nail in the coffin of a certain kind of Israel. That Israel gave way to a new kind of country, with its own particular values and, in the end, a new constitutional framework and set of institutions. How was the transformation to this new Israel accomplished? The Central Electoral Commission had to disqualify a party list and two Arab Members of Knesset (MKs) before certain Israeli intellectuals, journalists, and legal experts began asking themselves whether Israel is still even the limited democracy it had been since its founding. The fact that Haim Baran or Uri Avnery ask the question and answer no is particularly significant. Both of them have seen themselves for years as Zionists and Israeli patriots. Baran is what Israelis call a “prince”: a son of the country’s first pioneers and leaders; Avnery is a hero of the 1948 war, a former MK and celebrated journalist. We are therefore hearing the feeling expressed at the heart of the old Israeli elite that what they thought they had created during Israel’s first decades is disappearing, perhaps for good. As Avnery writes: Liberman, Orthodox leader Effi Eitam and other Likud leaders are in the vanguard of a fifth column that is laying siege to Israeli democracy. They have begun by inciting their followers to violence against Arab citizens and excluding Arabs from the political system. Now they are speaking of eliminating the “extreme left.” Can anyone doubt that their next demand will be to eliminate the whole left, however “moderate” or “patriotic”? Then, in keeping with other historical examples, it will be the turn of the Likud “liberals.” Am I being alarmist? Not really. High Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak has just compared Israel’s current situation, in the presence of Israel’s president, to Nazi Germany. A Holocaust survivor himself, Barak said, “If it could happen in the country of Kant and Beethoven, it can happen everywhere. If we don’t defend democracy, democracy will not defend us!” The Libermans are out to destroy the democracy we have built and create a Fascistan. (http://www.gush-shalom.org/ ) A Fake Democracy During the last three years we have seen many signs that the most basic democratic norms are disappearing. Arabs suspected of links with terrorism have had their Israeli citizenship taken away. Arab MKs have been stripped of their parliamentary immunity. Openly racist opinions, political programs and bills—particularly projects for ethnic cleansing of the occupied territories and of Israel itself—have gained legitimacy. This development could take place quickly, without leading to a major crisis, because Israel has always had an idiosyncratic conception of democracy. Democracy for Israelis has always been restricted to two things: predominance of the majority over the minority by means of elections and the acts of the executive branch being based on laws adopted by a parliamentary majority (AIC Special Reports, winter 1986). This is obviously a rather meager conception of democracy, which completely neglects the concept of rights. Contrary to what has often been claimed, the fact that Israel has never had a constitution is not the sole responsibility of the religious parties. The real reason is that Zionist politicians have never been capable of writing a real democratic constitution, guaranteeing equality of all citizens and fundamental rights independent of the will of the majority. Israel has always been defined not only as a Jewish state (and democratic state, according to the hallowed formula) but also as a country in a state of emergency due to several decades of war. The state of emergency is so deeply rooted in Israeli political culture that neither peace with Egypt nor peace with Jordan nor the joint Declaration of Principles with the Palestinians has been able to put it in question. We can go deeper into this problem of democracy in Israel. The abrupt passage in 1948 without any transition from Jewish settlement organizations to a state structure made it very hard for Israel to adopt “norms of governance.” Norms of governance are by definition different from the norms that political-military organizations use, which are not bound by any clearly defined code of laws. (Palestinians know something about this from their own experience today. They find it terribly difficult to move on from the way the PLO functioned to the way the Palestinian Authority should function, as an elected semi-state that is supposed to adopt democratic norms.) Fifty years after independence, the behavior of the State of Israel and its political class still reveals a certain slippage between the state, the ruling parties and the politicians, and between a binding legal framework and interests that cannot be contained in that framework. Corruption is one example, of course. But there are also political and military practices that violate the law but the executive branch considers necessary, such as the use of torture and extrajudicial executions. [...] monthlyreview.org