You can’t save democracy in a Jewish state
JVL Introduction
Peter Beinart’s guest article in the New York Times is one of the sharpest critiques he has yet penned of the Zionist regime for which he was once such a brilliant if critical advocate.
He has come to recognise it for what it is and, in quiet, measured tones, has become one of its severest critics.
So unlike those who have taken heart at the hundreds of thousands of Israelis on the streets protesting against Netanyahu’s planned evisceration of the Supreme Court in the interests of “saving Israeli democracy”, Beinart says simply but firmly “It’s not a movement for equal rights… It’s a movement to save liberal democracy for Jews.
It is only by including Palestinians as full partners, he believes, that Israel’s democracy movement can discover a vast reservoir of new allies and develop a far clearer moral voice.
This article was originally published by the New York Times on Sun 19 Feb 2023. Read the original here.
You can’t save democracy in a Jewish state
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It is remarkable how quickly Peter Beinart has developed into one of Zionism’s sharpest critics after having abandoned liberal Zionism.
What amazes me is how some allegedly Marxist organisations, and I single out the Socialist Equality Party in particular, go weak at the knees at the size of the Israeli demonstrations and are blind to the fact that Palestinian Israelis are conspicuous by their absence.
It’s a good piece for the intended audience. I’m not sure if Peter Beinart is aware of some significant inaccuracies. Or his piece may have been edited.
I refer to the section where he says that “Most of the land inside Israel proper was seized from Palestinians during Israel’s war of independence in the late 1940s, when more than half the Palestinian population was expelled or fled in fear.”.
Firstly, around 85% of Palestinians were ‘expelled or fled in fear’. True, that is more than half, but….
Secondly, while some of the Palestinian land was under Israeli forces’ control at the end of the Naqba (aka ‘war of independence’), the process of ‘legally’ appropriating it didn’t start till 1950, with the Absentees’ Property Law . This applied not only to land, but to factories, shops, homes, machinery, tractors, livestock… all property. It was a law designed to seize the maximum from Palestinians, even from those who had remained in the new state. It took the Nazis over 5 years to expropriate German Jews, with successively severe laws; Israel passed one draconian law.
It was supplemented with many other ‘legal’ means of stealing Palestinian property even when the owners were never ‘absent’, such as declaring closed military zones which were then handed over to Jewish settlers for ‘socialist’ enterprises like kibbutzim and moshavim. All “Israeli Arabs” lived from 1948-1966 under military law which was the framework for continued property theft, just as in the West Bank today. (My repeated use of quotation marks is to indicate where Zionist language bears no relation to the normal meaning of these words in a decent society).
Here’s one article describing The Absentees’ Property Law https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestinian-absentees-property-law-eviction-homes-explained