srael is a vibrant democracy By ALAN DERSHOWITZ 12/15/2011 22:23 "Nuance, subtly and balance are not characteristic of the domestic Israeli media conversation."

A visit to Israel is always an experience in cognitive dissonance. The Israel you personally see and hear is so completely different from the Israel you read and hear about in the media.

The Israel that I saw over the past several weeks was a vibrant democracy. I heard intense arguments about everything, ranging from the existential to the trivial, from the sublime to the truly ridiculous: What to do about the Iranian nuclear threat; how to bring the Palestinians to the negotiating table; whether to change the manner of appointing Supreme Court justices; whether to limit foreign government contributions to Israeli NGOs; what to do about a dilapidated and hazardous wooden bridge to the Temple Mount; how the army should treat Orthodox soldiers who refuse to listen to the singing of fellow women soldiers; whether buses that travel through certain haredi neighborhoods should be allowed to segregate passengers by gender.

Everyone in Israel seems to have an opinion on every issue, and they don’t hold back on expressing their views, often in rather extreme, even apocalyptic terms. Newspaper headlines scream, “The dictatorship cometh, Israeli democracy is at risk.”

Columnists promiscuously throw around the epitaph “fascist,” without any sensitivity to the deep traumatic memories invoked by that horrible word.

Israel is a nation of extremes and extremists, on both the right and the left. Harry Golden may have been describing Israeli Jews rather than American Jews when he famously said, “Jews are just like everyone else, only more so!”

Nuance, subtly and balance are not characteristic of the domestic Israeli media conversation, even concerning issues about which reasonable people do and should disagree.

Each of the issues mentioned above – Iran, negotiations, selection of judges, restrictions on foreign contributions, the bridge, singing women soldiers, even gender segregated buses – is complex. I have strong views on all of them but I acknowledge the plausibility of opposing views on most of them and welcome a good argument on the merits and demerits of alternative positions. Even were my strong views not to prevail in the marketplace of ideas, I do not believe Israel would become a fascist dictatorship and lose its democratic character.

Recently, a “human rights” group gave Israel the lowest ranking – along with Afghanistan and other repressive theocracies – on its religious freedom index. This is because the complaints by secular Jews about the excessive influence of Orthodox rabbis on Israeli politics has been so loud. In reality of course there is almost total freedom of religion in Israel, in the sense that no one is forced to be religious. Israel can do better but it is isn’t comparable to Afghanistan – or for that matter Iran. In some respects, it is freer than the United States: In Israel an atheist can be elected to high office; not in the US.

The Israeli character, contentious, confrontational, opinionated, argumentative, direct and uncompromising – is what makes Israel quintessentially democratic. As the great American judge Learned Hand once observed, liberty lives and dies in the hearts and souls of human beings more than in the parchment preaching of courts and legislatures.

Laws are important precisely because in a democracy they reflect the attitudes and aspirations of those they govern. The laws of Norway may afford more legal protection to freedom of speech than the laws of Israel, but there is far more actual dissent, criticism of government and diversity of viewpoints in Israel than in that boringly homogeneous nation to which fascism came so easily as soon as Vidkun Quisling was placed in power.

The fact that Israel will always remain a vibrant democracy doesn’t mean that Israelis should not take seriously the recent legislative efforts to change the manner by which Supreme Court justices are nominated, the degree to which Israeli NGOS are funded by foreign governments and the rules governing defamation lawsuits.

My civil libertarian views on these issues are well known, but they are serious and important concerns worthy of debate. The debate, however, should honestly reflect the actual stakes involved in various outcomes, rather than overblown claims that the democratic character of Israel is at risk.

Israelis need to continue debating but they need to cool the rhetoric and stop accusing each other of terrible things such as fascism, apartheid and lack of democracy. These terrible and false accusations become weapons in the hands of those who would delegitimize Israel. The sad reality is that there are no purely domestic issues in Israel.

Issues that would be dealt with by municipalities in other countries – such as how to deal with a dangerous bridge or how to resolve conflicts between religious and secular bus riders – become major international issues when they occur in Israel.

Consider for example Israel’s treatment of gay and lesbian citizens. Everybody acknowledges that Israel’s record on this issue is among the best in the world, but a really dumb op-ed in The New York Times recently claimed that the only reason Israel has a good policy toward its gay and lesbian citizens is to whitewash what it is doing to the Palestinians.


The virulently anti-Israel author of the article even came up with a term for this cover-up: “Pink washing.”

Everybody has something to say when it comes to Israel.

Now even Iceland, a country with fewer people than Boston, has put in its much deflated two cents. It has decided to become the first European country to recognize Palestine as a state on the 1967 “borders.”

Thus according to the wise men and women of Iceland, every Jew who prays at the Western Wall is trespassing on Palestinian territory. Every Israeli student who makes his or her way to the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus is an unlawful occupier. And every Israeli who lives in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem must be moved out of his home, despite the reality that Jews have lived in the Jewish Quarter for more than 2,000 years. There is no shortage of stupidity when it comes to international expression of opinion about Israel.

So let Israelis continue to debate vigorously every issue under the sun, but let them realize that every insult they hurl at each other is heard through a megaphone around the world and becomes part of the international effort to delegitimize the Jewish state. So cool it, please. Israel has much to be proud of, as anyone spending a few weeks there can see with his own eyes.

The writer is a Harvard law professor and political commentator.

YNET: Clinton concerned over Israeli democracy US secretary of state voices deep concern over wave of anti-democratic legislation, particularly bill targeting leftist organizations; criticizes exclusion of women from public life in Israel. Statements draw criticism by Israeli ministers

WASHINGTON – US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced deep concern on Saturday over a wave of anti-democratic legislation in Israel and in particular a bill proposing to limit donations to human rights organizations. Clinton also criticized the growing exclusion of women from Israel's public life.

In a closed session at the Saban Forum attended both by Israeli and American decision-makers Clinton addressed the issue of discrimination against Israeli women. She expressed concern for Israel's social climate in the wake of limitations on female public singing and gender segregation on public transport.

Among the Israeli representatives taking part in the forum were Minister Dan Meridor, Opposition Chairwoman Tzipi Livni, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.

Clinton, a longtime advocate for women's rights, noted she was shocked at the fact that some Jerusalem buses have assigned separate seating areas for women. "It's reminiscent of Rosa Parks," she said, referring to the black American woman who refused to give up her seat to white passengers in the 1950s.

Clinton in Myanmar (Photo: Reuters)

Referring to the decision of some IDF soldiers to leave an event where female soldiers were singing, she said it reminded her of the situation in Iran.

'Criticism exaggerated'

Clinton's comments drew extensive criticism in Israel. Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said in response, "these voices are totally exaggerated. Israel is a living, breathing liberal democracy." He added, "The issue of the exclusion of women and separation is unacceptable and must be stopped but to claim there is a threat on Israeli democracy is a big stretch."

Interior Minister Eli Yishai also rejected Clinton's statements. "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. I assume that whatever will be done here will be within the measure of the law."

Minister Gilad Erdan proposed that "elected officials around the world examine their domestic problems first." He nevertheless said he shared the concern over the exclusion of women noting that such measures cause people to hate the Jewish religion. "I hope that government steps will demonstrate our commitment to equality between men and women."

This year's Saban Forum has been focusing mainly on issues related to Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Some members of the forum said that Clinton's statements about Israel stemmed from genuine fear for the country's future.

Democratic State While protests rage across the Arab Middle East, Israel stands as a regional model of resiliency, relevance, and democratic adaptability. And the Arab states will have to be more like it to survive.

Last week I argued that Israel is finished, given the current state of the Middle East. The fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt is only the latest setback in a decade of extraordinary strategic debacles for Israel, I contended, including the failure of peace negotiations with the Palestinians, the 2006 war in Lebanon, the 2009 war in Gaza, the rise of Iran as a regional hegemon, the radicalization of Turkey, the ebbing of American military power and influence, and the accompanying de-legitimization of the Jewish State. Together, they have left this tiny Westernized nation adrift in a sea of enmity that it is unlikely to survive.

This week I’ll argue the other side—not just that Israel will be fine but rather that it is the rest of the Middle East that is in big trouble. Recent history and statistics show that in order to survive Arab and Muslim societies are going to have to forget about the notion of an Islamic alternative to modernity and will instead have to adopt what they have typically described as Western values but are in reality the universal values of political modernity. Learning to live like the West is not going to come through buying more Western goods—from cell-phones to tanks—or even earning more Western diplomas but by embracing those values as embodied by the one country in the region that lives them. The Arab model for success is not Iran, or Turkey, but Israel.

In its essence, Israel is the West—a culmination of its successes and a symbol of its failures, a reminder of a millennia-old madness, anti-Semitism, and the failure of the Enlightenment. Criticism of Israel is very often a reflection of the bad faith of a Western intelligentsia and political class uncomfortable with its history and unsure of its moral bearings. That Europeans frequently hold negative attitudes toward Israel while the vast majority of Americans are favorable to it can be explained in part by how each society came out of World War II.

• Stateless

  Hosni Mubarak was a key U.S. ally who upheld the Arab world’s first peace treaty with Israel. By letting his regime fall, Barack Obama has threatened the survival of the Jewish state.

Europe’s war, and the mass slaughter of its Jews, revealed that the continent’s great cathedrals were built upon a bedrock of pagan barbarism celebrated in different ways by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. It was left to the United States to pick up the banner of Western civilization and lead the West to victory during the Cold War after the Europeans had trashed it.

Unlike their European cousins, contemporary Americans still read the Bible and understand that the Jewish nation is a historical reality connected to a living narrative that shapes the present in a constructive and desirable way. Americans abandoned replacement theology (or the notion that Jesus’ resurrection superseded God’s covenant with the Jews) after the Holocaust in order to embrace their elder brothers—as did Pope John Paul II, who lent his moral authority to President Ronald Reagan’s conviction that America’s victory in the Cold War was a historical necessity.

That is to say, pro-Israel Americans have also tended to misunderstand Israel’s place in the world. Yes, the point of Jewish self-determination is that the Jews can protect themselves. Yet the West needs Israel to succeed, because its success is a marker of our ability and determination to defend our values and our interests, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

And the truth is that Israel has been doing a remarkably good job of it, especially in the past 20 years. Israel is an IT powerhouse with more companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange than any other country except the United States, and its scientists have produced more tech patents than all of Asia. Last year Israel ranked17th out of 58 of the world’s most economically developed nations, while the country’s economy was rated the most durable in the face of crises and rated first in investments in research and development centers. The Bank of Israel was ranked first among central banks for its efficient functioning.

Contrasting Israel’s performance with that of its neighbors, most of whom still abide by the half-century-long Arab boycott of the Jewish state, throws Israel’s achievements into even sharper relief. Consider Egypt, with a literacy rate anywhere between 50 to 70 percent, and considerably lower among women. The country’s unemployment rate is believed to be twice the official level of 10 percent, and 40 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. While the Syrian regime proudly supports the resistance, thousands of its own people are suffering with a drought in the eastern part of the country that has ravaged crops and livestock. Iran’s nuclear program and full-throated opposition to the United States and the Zionist entity may make it the envy of some fans of resistance in the region, but the fact is that an Iranian bomb is the Hail Mary pass of a dying society where there’s been no economic development for 30 years.

If you follow these two trend lines, it is easy to project what the fate of these two different civilizations is likely to be. Israel will enjoy the ups and navigate the downs of the global economy and, if the last two years are any indication, will weather those setbacks better than most. For the Arabs things are only going to get worse.

The college graduates who took to the streets in Cairo to protest their lack of opportunity are going to have to keep coming back because the problem was not simply the corruption of the Mubarak regime. Rather, the issue is that the Egyptian people themselves are deluded if they think bogus business degrees are going to earn them a place in a globalized economy. By and large, the Arabs are simply not prepared to compete with the rest of the world. When the oil runs out, it will crush not only the energy-exporting nations but all of the Arab countries whose economies, like Egypt’s, depend heavily on guest-worker receipts from the Arab Gulf states. As such, every weapon purchased by an Arab regime is effectively a down payment on a forthcoming Mad Maxvision of the Middle East—including a series of civil wars like the one now under way in Libya.

The only way for the Arabs to avoid that scenario is for them to become more like Israel. Because Israel is the West, it is essential for Arab political, social, and economic development that the people of the region break with the past and embrace the Israelification of their societies. If not, the current popular demonstrations will end in yet another round of benighted dictatorships, as has repeatedly happened in the region, starting with the era of Arab independence in the 1940s.

The other choice—the typical choice—is to fight Israel, which is in the end little but a token of Arab despair. As the Arab uprisings have shown, the problems of Middle Eastern societies have little to do with Israel. So even if the dreams of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the other guardians of the resistance were fully realized and they were able to destroy Israel tomorrow, corruption, repression, and obscurantism would still be rotting away Middle Eastern societies.

The West and its values—what Israel stands for—will survive, no matter how many suicide bombers the Islamic resistance throws at it. That tactic, even if tied to religious concepts like jihad, has a built-in limit to its effectiveness in the face of people who are determined to defend themselves. Hassan Nasrallah mocks those who love life and boasts that the resistance loves death. But in the end, it will make little difference if Egypt eventually joins its army to the forces of the resistance bloc, adding tanks and planes to Hezbollah and Hamas’ rockets, Syria’s missiles, and Iran’s forthcoming bomb. The reality is that the party of life will fight to preserve it, while the party that cherishes death will reap what it desires in abundance.

Nonetheless, I do believe that, as I argued last week, events over the last few years have presented serious threats to the Jewish state—not least of which is a delegitimization campaign waged not in the region itself but from the capitals of Europe. It is a peculiar moment in history, to see Europe tottering on the precipice of resentment and obscurantism while the uprisings in the Middle East over the last two months have shown that the Arabs are perhaps on the verge of something new. Maybe the protests reveal not a revolution as such but a recognition.

Up until now, one of the more bizarre and widespread beliefs in the region is that Israel wants to be the only democracy in the Middle East—as if democracy were a limited resource it needed to hoard, like oil. The uprisings suggest that the Arabs may have come to recognize that, to paraphrase the late Egyptian writer Taha Hussein, liberty is free to everyone, like air and water.

I certainly hope so, for Israel is doing fine and the conclusion of my brief dialectic is that it will continue to thrive. The real concern is for the fate of the Arabs. The longer they continue to make Israel the focus of rejectionism and hatred, the more impossible it will become for them to join the West and arrest the death-spiral of their societies and economies. The inability of Western observers who claim to care about the fate of these societies and their people to make this point clearly and repeatedly has only damaged the cause of Arab social and political development. Now, in the midst of all the excitement following the Arab uprisings, is a moment that calls for such clarity.

Since the beginning of the Zionist enterprise, supporters like Winston Churchill have argued that the Jews of Israel would have a positive influence on their neighbors—that their industry and their values would rub off on the Arabs. Outside of Israel’s own Arab community, that hasn’t yet been the case. Either that will change now or it won’t. But whether the Arabs embrace Israel and the West, or decline into total economic, cultural, and military irrelevance within the next generation, Israel will survive and prosper.

Israel Apartheid VS South Africa Apartheid

Facts VS Fiction

Apartheid in South Africa was based on color separation. It was the whites (the "Europeans") versus the "non-Europeans" (Blacks, Coloreds [mixed race], Indians Malays and Chinese). All suffered from the legalized deprivation decreed by a South African government determined to impose white domination on the
rest.

It is manifestly clear that Israel has no color problem of any kind.

Israel including Jews, Circassian, Druze, Kurds, Armenians, Beduin and other non-Jewish citizens of the Jewish State, enjoy equal rights. Many Druze and Beduin serve in Israel's army.

The apartheid lie attached to Israel is one of several concocted by Palestinians to publicize their cause. Readers and viewers are led by the nose because lies are so effective in promoting their policies -- the bigger the better. Nevertheless the apartheid concept is totally inapplicable to Israel as the following refutations abundantly make clear:

Saudi writer: Israel deserves respect

A Saudi writer on Tuesday said that "Israel is a country that deserves respect," adding that it is "better than all the Arab and Muslim countries" in relation to democracy. The author, Fahd Amer Ahmadi, wrote in his column on the Saudi Al –Riyadh newspaper, an article under the title "Unfortunately, Israel is a country that deserves respect." And he added: "This is the painful truth, gentlemen ... You can dispute me how much you like ..But this truth is established by comparing the the figures in an objective way." 

Ahmadi went on to say: "Israel is better than all the Arab and Muslim countries with regard to democracy and political integrity (evidenced by the annual studies issued by various global organizations). Ahmadi also gave some examples to back his claims, mentioning the deduction of car installments from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's monthly salary, or the trial of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert over US$150,000 he received as "donations", while he served as the mayor of Jerusalem.  

The Saudi writer continued: "Today Israel is in the third place globally in terms of arms exports and in the 1st place in the world in the production of drones. "It is also the smallest country in the worls that can produce tanks and fighter planes, and the fifth state in terms of possessing nuclear bombs."

Israel Matzav: What if Israel ceases to be a 'democracy'?

Jeffrey Goldberg worries that Israel will one day cease to be a democracy.

I will admit here that my assumption has usually been that Israelis, when they finally realize the choice before them (many have already, of course, but many more haven't, it seems), will choose democracy, and somehow extract themselves from the management of the lives of West Bank Palestinians. But I've had a couple of conversations this week with people, in Jerusalem and out of Jerusalem, that suggest to me that democracy is something less than a religious value for wide swaths of Israeli Jewish society. I'm speaking here of four groups, each ascendant to varying degrees:The haredim, the ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose community continues to grow at a rapid clip; the working-class religious Sephardim -- Jews from Arab countries, mainly -- whose interests are represented in the Knesset by the obscurantist rabbis of the Shas Party; the settler movement, which still seems to get whatever it needs in order to grow; and the million or so recent immigrants from Russia, who support, in distressing numbers, the Putin-like Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister and leader of the "Israel is Our Home" party.

Let's just say, as a hypothetical, that one day in the near future, Prime Minister Lieberman's government (don't laugh, it's not funny) proposes a bill that echoes the recent call by some rabbis to discourage Jews from selling their homes to Arabs. Or let's say that Lieberman's government annexes swaths of the West Bank in order to take in Jewish settlements, but announces summarily that the Arabs in the annexed territory are in fact citizens of Jordan, and can vote there if they want to, but they won't be voting in Israel. What happens then? Do the courts come to the rescue? I hope so. Do the Israeli people come to the rescue? I'm not entirely sure. There are many Israelis who value democracy, but they might not possess the strength to fight. Does American Jewry come to the rescue? Well, most of American Jewry would be so disgusted by Israel's abandonment of democratic principles that I think the majority would simply write off Israel as a tragic, failed experiment.

Am I being apocalyptic? Yes. Am I exaggerating the depth of the problem? I certainly hope so. Israel is still a remarkably vibrant democracy, with a free press and an independent judiciary. But on the other hand, the Israel that I see today is not the Israel I was introduced to more than twenty years ago. The rise to power of the four groups I mentioned above has changed, in some very serious ways (which I will write about later) the nature and character of the Jewish state.

Rabbi Meir Kahane HY"D (may God avenge his blood) predicted all along that the day would come when Israel would have to choose between being a Jewish state and being a democracy. And indeed it could happen.

But a couple of points need to be kept in mind. First, Israel can be a democracy without being identical to either the United States or Western Europe. We can be a democracy in our own style - indeed, we must be our own style of democracy in order to preserve our Jewish character. Neither the United States nor the Europeans (with the nominal exception of the Church of England) has an established religion. Most other democracies have nothing like the Law of Return, which clearly discriminates in favor of Jews. Does that make us not a democracy? Not at all. It just means that in some less-than-absolute sense, we have already chosen to put the State's Jewish character ahead of Western notions of democracy.

Second, Goldberg assumes that we can push a button and be rid of 'the territories.' We can't even if we wanted to. We can't because it would make us militarily vulnerable. We can't because it wouldn't bring peace and it would encourage war. We can't because it's not what the Arabs are after. What Goldberg and those who 'worry' about Israel's democracy don't or won't understand is that Israel's war isn't a war about territory. It's existential. Once you accept that, you can more easily accept necessary limitations on democracy to cope with that reality.

WSJ: Can Israel Be Jewish and Democratic? Many nations have laws and practices that recognize their majority group's history, language or religion while also protecting the rights of minorities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently asked Palestinian peace negotiators to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. Some critics have called this move cynical, because Palestinian leaders are unlikely to offer such an acknowledgment. But others oppose it for a more basic reason: They claim it is antidemocratic.