Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Tel Aviv is
drafting legislation that ought to resolve in
observers’ minds the question of whether Israel
is the democracy it proudly claims to be. The
bill empowers a three-quarters majority of the
Israeli parliament to oust a sitting MP.
It
breathes new life into the phrase “tyranny of
the majority”. But in this case, the majority
will be Jewish MPs oppressing their Palestinian
colleagues.
Mr Netanyahu has presented the bill as a
necessary response to the recent actions of
three MPs from the Balad faction of the Joint
List, a coalition of parties representing the
often-overlooked fifth of Israel’s citizens who
are Palestinian.
He claims the MPs “sided with terror” this
month when they visited Palestinian families in
occupied East Jerusalem who have been waiting
many months for Israel to return their
relatives’ bodies.
The 11 dead are among those alleged to have
carried out what are termed “lone-wolf” attacks,
part of a recent wave of Palestinian unrest.
Fearful of more protests, Israel has demanded
that the families bury the bodies in secret,
without autopsies, and in plots outside
Jerusalem.
There is an urgent moral and political issue
about Israel using bodies as bargaining chips to
encourage Palestinian obedience towards its
illegal occupation. The three Palestinian MPs
also believe they are under an obligation to
help the families by adding to the pressure on
Mr Netanyahu to return the bodies.
Israel’s Palestinian minority has a severely
degraded form of citizenship, but it enjoys more
rights than Palestinians living under
occupation.
When a video of the meeting was posted
online, however, the Israeli right seized the
chance to attack and disenfranchise the MPs. A
parliamentary “ethics” committee comprising the
main Jewish parties suspended the three MPs for
several months. Now they face losing their
seats.
This is part of a clear trend. Late last
year, the government outlawed the northern
Islamic Movement, a popular extra-parliamentary
political, religious and welfare organisation.
Despite Mr Netanyahu’s statements that the
movement was linked to “terror”, leaks to the
Israeli media showed his intelligence chiefs had
advised him weeks before the ban that there was
no evidence to support such accusations.
At the time many Palestinians in Israel
suspected Mr Netanyahu would soon turn his
sights on the Palestinian parties in the
parliament. And so he has.
Balad, which decries Israel’s status as a
Jewish state and noisily campaigns for
democratic reform, was always likely to be top
of his list. In every recent general election,
an election committee dominated by the Jewish
parties has banned Balad or its leaders from
standing, only to see the Israeli courts reverse
the decision.
Now Mr Netanyahu is legislating the expulsion
of Balad and throwing down the gauntlet to the
courts.
It won’t end there. If Balad is unseated, the
participation of the other Joint List factions
will be untenable. In effect, the Israeli right
is seeking to ethnically cleanse the parliament.
For those who doubt such intentions, consider
that two years ago the government raised the
electoral threshold for entry to the parliament
specifically to exclude the Palestinian
factions.
The intention was to empty the parliament of
its Palestinian representatives. But these
factions put aside their historic differences to
create the Joint List.
Mr Netanyahu, who had hoped to see the back
of the Palestinian parties at last year’s
general election, inadvertently transformed them
into the third biggest party. That was the
context for his now-infamous campaign warning
that “the Arabs are coming out in droves to
vote”.
The crackdown on Palestinian parties may
finally burst the simplistic assumption that
Israel is a democracy because its Palestinian
minority has the vote.
This argument was always deeply misguided.
After Israel’s creation in 1948, officials gave
citizenship and the vote to the few Palestinians
remaining inside the new borders precisely
because they were a small and weak minority.
In exiling more than 80 per cent of
Palestinians from their homeland, Israel
effectively rigged its national electoral
constituency to ensure there would be a huge
Jewish majority in perpetuity.
A Palestinian MP, Ahmed Tibi, summed it up
neatly. Israel, he said, was a democratic state
for Jews and a Jewish state for its Palestinian
citizens.
In truth, the vote of Palestinian citizens
was only ever meant as window-dressing. David
Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister,
assumed that the rump Palestinian population
would be swamped by Jewish immigrants flooding
into the new state.
He miscalculated. The Palestinian minority
had a far higher birth rate and maintained a
level of 20 per cent of the population. None of
that would matter had the Palestinian
representatives quietly accepted their position
as shop-window mannequins.
But in recent years, as Mahmoud Abbas’s
Palestinian Authority has grown ever weaker,
confined to small enclaves of the West Bank, the
Palestinian MPs in Israel have taken up some of
the slack. That was why the Balad MPs met the
Jerusalem families. The PA, barred by Israel
from East Jerusalem, can only look on helplessly
on this issue.
This month Mr Netanyahu said he would
surround Israel with walls to keep out the
neighbourhood’s “wild beasts”. In his view,
there are also wild beasts to be found in
Israel’s parliament – and he is ready to erect
walls to keep them out too.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-02-23/israel-is-on-the-brink-of-a-tyranny-of-the-majority/#sthash.0WCRwj8w.dpuf
