Ana

The future tense in this Haaretz editorial is the essence of the cowardly and denialist liberal zionism: "Israel will cease to be democratic"? Did you not hear about the HRW and Amnesty apartheid reports in 2021 and 2022? Did you not hear Netanyahu and others saying repeatedly over the years that Israel is not "a state for all its citizens"? Did you, Haaretz, not publish that Bennet/ Lapid government established more Jewish settlements and demolished more Palestinian houses than Netanyahu's governments per year? Did you not hear about the 2018 Nation State Basic Law that was celebrated by a white supremacist in the US as a role model, which constitutionalised Jewish Supremacy? Did you not hear about the the 2011 gated communities law, approved by Supreme Court in 2014 & expanded by Knesset in 2023, that effectively institutes racial segregation in housing and settlement within Israel "proper"? Did you not hear about the lack of the principle of equality for all in the Israeli "bill of rights" since 1990s? Did you not hear about the confiscation of the vast majority of the privately owned land of the Palestinian citizens in Israel? Did you not hear about the Israeli police killing Palestinian citizens protesters when their protested land confiscation and apartheid in 1976 and 2000? Did you not hear about the Lydda military court (1967-2000) that sent Palestinian citizens who violated security law to a military court while Israeli citizens who commit similar offences were tried before civilian criminal courts? Did you not hear about the military government (1948-1966) imposed on all Palestinian citizens and only on them, limiting their basic rights like the right to movement and work, and confiscating their lands? When was Israel democratic? Did you not know that activists against apartheid in South Africa like Ronnie Kasrils said, before the current genocide: "This is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses." Did you not know that South Africa had a competitive multi-party system, albeit in segregated and unequal political bodies; that the regime distinguished between blacks who resided in the Bantustans and those who were allowed to reside outside the Bantustans; that "Coloreds" and "Indians" were allowed to reside in white areas, and after the constitutional reforms in 1983 they had voting rights and property rights. Would you call that a democracy, Haaretz? Did you not know that according to the Group Areas Act (1955) and the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act (1970), blacks in South Africa were given "self-government"/ "independence" in "Homelands"? Did this make South Africa a "democracy", Haaretz? Palestinian intellectuals, like Fayez Sayegh, made the case that Zionism and Israel have established an apartheid, prior to the 1967 occupation. The same political ideology that has subjugated Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and took their lands have also the done the same against the Palestinian citizens inside Israel instituting a separate and unequal status. Israel was never a democracy. Pretending that it has been a democracy is a clear example of the refusal to call a spade a spade, of a rhetoric that conceals reality and prolongs injustice and suffering.