Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit, on Wednesday, reconfirmed Israeli Supreme Court’s decision that Israeli authorities could expropriate privately owned Palestinian land for public use for Jewish settlements in the West Bank. According to the Supreme Court Justice Salim Joubran, Israeli settlers are part of the local civilian population of the West Bank, which affords them “the right to life, dignity, property and all the rights enjoyed by anyone in Israel.” This decision comes regarding the construction of an access path, which intersects privately owned Palestinian land, to Harsha, an illegal Jewish outpost.
Given that Israeli settlers enjoy the freedoms of a thoroughly institutionalized and functioning democracy, Palestinians living a few miles away exist under a different set of Israeli legal pretenses.
To many, Israel stands as the only true democracy in the Middle East. In a region marked by tyrants, dictators, and failing states, it is hard to argue otherwise. Nevertheless, Israel has received notorious attention in the past few years.
What does the latest judicial decision mean in context to Israeli democracy? To state simply: it reinforces a democracy that only serves Israeli Jews living in Israel proper and the West Bank, as opposed to non-Jews.
Israel’s prolonged occupation of the Palestinian Territories since 1967 has come under wide international scrutiny and critique for a number of reasons. Human rights organizations and agencies such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, International Court of Justice, and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) continuously report on Israel’s grave breaches of international human rights law regarding its enforcement of de facto segregation and unequal laws to Palestinians and Israelis.
Going beyond international human rights law, there are other domestic legal and political implications that should be considered in light of the latest judicial edict. For instance, in the West Bank Israeli settlers are governed by Israeli civil law, while Palestinians are governed by Israeli military law.[1] The Israeli government since 1967 has allowed “some 100 ‘outposts’ [to be] erected by Israeli civilians without formal authorization” [2] while demolishing 1,093 Palestinian homes in the West Bank including Jerusalem.[3] Besides home demolitions, in East Jerusalem, eviction proceedings affected 180 Palestinian households.[4]
While in Jerusalem, a city in which Israel completely annexed into Israel proper and currently administers, Jewish and Palestinian schools in Jerusalem receive largely unequal and disproportionate funding.[5] Jews have the right to return to Israel, meaning that any person of Jewish heritage has the right to become an Israeli citizen, while no Israeli law exists guaranteeing Palestinians the right to immigrate or become a citizen even if they were born in Israel or have official documentation of ancestral land or homes.[6] Since 1967, Israeli officials revoked the permanent resident status of 14,000 Palestinians who were unable to return to their homes in East Jerusalem.[7] Palestinians receive less water (and often dealing with water shortages) than Israeli settlers in the West Bank.[8]
Besides these few examples, Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, has compiled a database of these discriminatory laws in greater Israel.[9]
Mirroring the concerns of many Israeli Jewish scholars and government officials, the Israeli occupations negates and is incompatible with Israeli democracy.[10] As long as the occupation continues, Israel will never fully be a democracy it will be an ethnocracy. Ethnocracies are “states which maintain a relatively open government, yet facilitate a non-democratic seizure of the country and polity by one ethnic group.” They lack democratic framework, despite having democratic qualities and are not authoritarian. [11] The occupation corrupts the rule of law within the West Bank and Israel proper.
Either Israel annexes the rest of the West Bank and offers equal citizenship to the Palestinians, or it halts its settlement expansion enterprise and withdraws from the West Bank so that it can become the future site of a Palestinian state. The current Israeli policy jeopardizes the two-state solution but also avails Israel to the categories of being an ethno-territorial settler-colonial state, or worse, an apartheid state. [12]
********
[1] Kearney, M. G. (2017, March). On the situation in Palestine and the war crime of transfer of civilians into occupied territory. In Criminal Law Forum (Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 1-34). Springer Netherlands.
[2] See. Kearney, p. 5
[3] www.ochaopt.org/content/protection-civilians-weekly-report-10-23-january-2017
[4] www.ochaopt.org/sites/default/files/evictions_community_sum_ej_2016_final_1_11_2016.pdf.
[5] Nir Hasson, “Arab students in Jerusalem get less than half the funding of Jewish counterparts”, Haaretz, 23 August 2016.
[6] https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/537
[7] See https://www.ochaopt.org/location/east-jerusalem
[8] http://www.btselem.org/water/discrimination_in_water_supply
[9] https://www.adalah.org/en/law/index
[10] See Avigail Abrbanel (2014) http://mondoweiss.net/2014/02/oppression-consensus-israeli-democracy/; Gershom Gorenberg (2006) http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/opinion/israels-tragedy-foretold.html; Michael Ben-Yair (2002) https://www.haaretz.com/the-war-s-seventh-day-1.51513
[11] Oren Yiftachel, p. 364, (1999) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.00151/epdf; [12] Government Officials using the word ‘apartheid’: https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/stop-mccarthyite-campaign-against-use-of-apartheid-word-in-us/
You briefly touch on the relevance of Israeli democracy within the larger context of the Middle East, and the opinion of the international community as shaped by that context. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the role of the international community either providing support for antidemocratic action (settlement in the West Bank, for example). Personally, I would think that the US has been instrumental in enabling antidemocratic operations of the Israeli state. Perhaps examining this relationship can give us a better understanding of the negative impact geopolitical alliances can have on democracy. As one of the only stable and reliable US allies in the region, the US government can rarely afford to denigrate the actions of the Knesset or other Israeli governing bodies. While the Obama administration may have taken some steps, minor though they were, away from unquestioning support of Israel (certain US actions in the UN security council, to name one example), the Trump administration has reinvigorated US backing of Israel’s actions. The most recent announcement of recognition of Jerusalem demonstrates support of the Israeli state and removes available bargaining pieces for a two-state solution or other democratic reforms. Moreover, this signals that Israel will enjoy the backing of the US despite (or perhaps because of) its abuses of democracy. I would be curious to hear your thoughts of the role of the US in supporting current Israeli policy which you identify as running the risk of “an ethno-territorial colonial state” or even an “apartheid state”.
I do not believe Israel is a democracy whatsoever. I took a soft approach to appease the very apparent liberal-leaning Israeli apologetic tendencies in the field of political science by extremely white privileged prominent political scientists. The US is extremely instrumental in enabling Israel’s “anti-democratic” operations by allowing them to circumvent international humanitarian and human rights law. I recommend reading the research of Orna Ben-Naftali, John Reynold, John Dugard regarding Israel’s use of emergency modalities to circumvent international law to continue its control and settler-colonization of Israel proper and the West Bank. The US is not the only country which enables this. Yes, the US does provide $3.8b in military aid to Israel a year (accumulating to $134.7b since WWII) and vetos the majority of UNSC resolutions condemning Israel, but there are a variety of mechanisms and individuals in this equation that contribute to the problem including neighboring countries and a few European countries. To begin, Israel is not the only stable and reliable US ally in the region. It is argued that Saudi Arabia and Jordan are also considered reliable and stable allies given that they are less prone to regime change because they are dictatorships backed by the US and the West. Another ally, but less stable or reliable considering recent developments, would be Egypt as it has a history of secret negotiations with US and Israel since the Suez conflict and has continuously closed its border crossing into Gaza since Gaza’s blockade in 2007. Another factor to include is Hamas’s rival Fatah (notoriously corrupt and despised amongst Palestinians). In 2007 when the people of Gaza democratically elected the undemocratic and militant Hamas, the US, EU, Egypt, Fatah, and Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza. The government of the West Bank, Fatah, supported the Gaza blockade so to gain political power and economically deprive Hamas because they saw it as a threat to their legitimacy. The US and Israel want Fatah to be in power given that they collaborate and acquiesce with these “anti-democratic” operations.