Foreign Policiy Mag : Palestinian member of the Israeli Parliament says that Israel is not a Democracy, but a Fascist State, an Ethnocracy, Prominent Jewish Politicians talk of Apartheid and Segreation against Palestinians

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The Nazification of Israel :

Ahmad Tibi is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and is deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel's parliament.




‘Tahrirization' and the state of Israeli democracy
By Ahmad Tibi
Friday, February 18, 2011

‘Tahrirization' and the state of Israeli democracy

Some excerpts :

While U.S.-sponsored authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Tunisia slip out of America's geopolitical orbit and towards more open and democratic societies, Israel is moving in the opposite direction, as its politics veer to the extreme right and anti-Arab racism and intolerance for dissent increase steadily. Israel's foreign minister wants Palestinian citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state; rabbis on the government payroll call on Jews not to rent property to Palestinians; Israeli schoolteachers complain of rampant and virulent anti-Arab racism amongst their students; new laws to prevent Palestinians from living in so-called community villages are being approved. In short, rights in Israel are being reserved for Jews only.

Unsurprisingly, even for Israeli Jews, democratic freedoms are eroding at an alarming rate. Israeli human rights groups and left-leaning NGOs are under attack from right-wing activists and the most extreme, racist government in Israel's history. The Israeli Knesset will soon open an investigation into the funding of Israeli human rights groups, part of a wider campaign to suppress their work and prevent them from documenting Israeli human rights abuses. The political climate in Israel today resembles the Jim Crow South in the 1950s coupled with the McCarthyism of the time. Conscientious people are refusing to participate in these witch hunts.

Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories suffer many of the same injustices as the peoples of totalitarian regimes and more: torture and abuse at the hands of a repressive state security apparatus; bombardment, white phosphorus, and assassination; systemic inequality, both racial and economic; lack of political freedoms; poverty -- in our case the result of deliberate Israeli government policies. And the same tear gas canisters, made in the U.S., are fired at demonstrators in Cairo, Tunis and the West Bank. Palestinian demonstrators in Israel are shot in the streets.

As Arab popular movements strive to establish democracy and Israeli officials move to constrain civil liberties, it is increasingly clear that calling Israel a democracy is a misnomer. At best, it is an ethnocracy, where only Jews enjoy the full rights and privileges of citizenship. Today, there is a de facto, virtual caste system within the territories that Israel controls, with Israel's Jewish settlers at the top and Muslim and Christian Palestinians in the Occupied Territories at the bottom. Increasingly, people around the world are recognizing this situation for what it is: apartheid. Former Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak have both warned of an apartheid future if the status quo is maintained, and pro-Israel columnist Thomas Friedman recently did the same.

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