Democracy & Israel

Submitted by John Reisner (Australia), Jul 21, 2004 at 22:00

The interviewer's and respondent's queries and comments regarding democracy are indicative of its common and incorrect basis for the investiture of legitimacy. Democracy is neither a guarantee of moral rectitude nor the sine qua non for existential rights, which is the tenor and false, aggressive premise of the interviewer.

Both approach the question of Israeli democracy from an unexamined viewpoint, one from a desire to use democracy as a weapon and the other absurdly uses the US as the sole democratic template. The collossus of America is not a benchmark for the application of democracy to other states, especially beseiged states 10,000 times smaller that the US itself. The effectiveness of US cold-war propaganda is demonstrated by Pipes blind adherence to its unexamined dictums regarding democracy.

Israel's rights are not predicated on her adherence to the idle ideals of pure democracy and the provision of democratic rights to those internal social elements which seek her destruction; merely because not to do so would attract the usual, droll accusations. Israel was not established nor perpetuated to supply rights, democratic or otherwise to Arabs, especially but not specifically when this element acts to abuse its position. Arabs are typically unmoved by the non-sequitor of demanding rights from an entity whose existence they do not recognise. How this works no-one has yet been able to satisfactorily explain to me. Israel must provide rights to Arabs who promptly deny those same rights to Jews, again how does this work?

No country has to provide fealty to political ideals to the point of its own extinction. Arabs think that democracy must provide and accommodate for it own demise, especially Israeli democracy. This is because they understand no principle any deeper past the point that it can be put to the service of their own agenda, interests or desires.

Jews have associated themselves into a polity so as to derive the preferential benefits of doing so exclusively for themselves, just like anyone else. Whether or not they extend that franchise, THEIR franchise, to 3rd parties is their business and totally up to them.

Excluding that franchise to "Israeli" arabs may make Israel undemocratic is some people's eyes, but it will never de-legitimise its absolute right to do so and certainly not its existential rights.

These idle political theory games are merely poor stealth methods of subverting Jewish self-determination in a barrage of politically correct terminology. As if, because Jewish numbers are relatively small, there right to self-determination is not the equal of anyone else's.

If democracy is going to be used as a benchmark of existential legitimacy, no Arab state can be considered so legitimate. As is usual within the anti-Semitic enterprise, Jews are subject to this type of inspection. The willingness of Jews to respond to this scrutiny is the problem. The interviewer has no right to question Israel's democractic credentials as a means of illegitimately questioning Jewish existential or political rights to self-determination. The respondent has no right to offer or subtly imply, Israeli democracy as being any sort of existential or political justification. The premise of the discussion is totally illegitimate ab initio.

The rights of Israel are not subject to the approval, especially external approval, of the political methods Jews use to govern themselves. Whether Israel grants rights or not to any inhabitant within its jurisdiction is not a relevant matter within an otherwise improper discourse whose hidden subtext is an arbitration over Israeli/Jewish existential or political rights to self-determination.

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