The only democracy in the Middle East

Anyone who follows the news has no doubt come across the claim that ‘Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East’. Usually, this claim is followed by its logical inference: ‘As an island of freedom located in a region controlled by military dictators, feudal kings and religious leaders, Israel should receive unreserved support from western liberal states interested in strengthening democratic values around the globe’.

If you can get past the fact that Israel is a racist settler state, it is indeed a democracy, and a vigorous one, for Israeli Jews. And the license which is extended to the remaining Palestinians or ‘Israeli Arabs’, as the Zionists prefer to call them, within the country to participate in that political system on Zionism’s terms also gives them formal rights which are not enjoyed in most other states in the region.

Azmi Bishara, the militant and wittily perceptive Palestinian member of the Knesset, has described how whenever he is shown on al Jazeera speaking in the Knesset and denouncing the Israeli government in Arabic, he receives letters from puzzled viewers across the region asking how he can get away with saying such things openly from within the ‘Zionist entity’, while they could never get away with being similarly outspoken about their own governments.

He comments that when confronted with the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ line, he feels like responding ‘take your democracy and give us back Palestine’.

And that is the point. The conflict is not about the relative merits of different systems of government, it is about colonisation and disposession. Zionism did not come to the Middle East to bring Western standards of progress and democracy to the poor downtrodden Arabs. So formal comparisons of Israel’s political system with that of Arab regimes are simply irrelevant – just as it is irrelevant to the Suez aggression that Britain France and Israel were democracies, and Nasser a dictator.

It’s probably worth noting that a few years back Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were asked what country in the region they would like to take as a model for the political system of a Palestinian state. The winner by a landslide was Israel. Of course they did not mean by that, that they wished to be second-class citizens in a discriminatory state – just that they wanted for themselves what Israeli Jews already have.

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