Israel has a long history of awful treatment of the Palestinians, treating them in a way that has been compared to the apartheid system used by the white minority in South Africa to oppress the blacks. But Israel has got even worse in recent days. Ran Ha Cohen describes the rise of outright racism in Israel. Israeli police are even reported to be illegally arresting arrest five-year old Palestinian children.

The occupation of Palestinian is becoming so ugly that New Yorker editor David Remnick calls for it to end and has led even strong supporters of Israel like Jeffrey Goldberg (who has served in the Israel Defense Forces) to speculate that Israel could soon no longer claim the label of being democratic. Ilan Pappé, a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK and director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, goes further and says:

Israel is definitely not a democracy. A country that occupies another people for more than 40 years and disallow them the most elementary civic and human rights cannot be a democracy. A country that pursues a discriminatory policy against a fifth of its Palestinian citizens inside the 67 borders cannot be a democracy. In fact Israel is, what we use to call in political science a herrenvolk democracy, its democracy only for the masters. The fact that you allow people to participate in the formal side of democracy, namely to vote or to be elected, is useless and meaningless if you don’t give them any share in the common good or in the common resources of the State, or if you discriminate against them despite the fact that you allow them to participate in the elections. On almost every level from official legislation through governmental practices, and social and cultural attitudes, Israel is only a democracy for one group, one ethnic group, that given the space that Israel now controls, is not even a majority group anymore, so I think that you’ll find it very hard to use any known definition of democracy which will be applicable for the Israeli case.

The growth of outright racist views often voiced by rabbis, and its tolerance by the Israeli government and higher echelons of society, is causing some concern within that country amongst people who fear the emergence of a theocracy: “Hundreds of rabbis sign a manifesto prohibiting Jews from renting or selling apartments to non-Jews, yet no response is heard from the justice minister. The chief rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliahu, continuously incites and no criminal or disciplinary procedures were commenced against him.”

As Juan Cole points out, the racism in Israel is already quite overt as can be seen in the restrictions on interfaith marriage.

Israel, like Lebanon and some Muslim countries, for the most part makes no provision for civil marriage, requiring individuals to marry within the religious law of their sect. Israel’s rabbinate opposes civil marriage in part out of fear it would encourage inter-faith marriage. At the moment, couples of different faith heritages in Israel must go to Cyprus or elsewhere abroad to marry, and have the marriage recognized on their return. Such a marriage cannot be performed in Israel itself.

It is no secret that Israel, and its lobby in the US, have been urging a military attack on Iran. US leaders routinely threaten Iran with the possibility of a nuclear attack by saying that ‘the nuclear option is not off the table’. Israel makes sure everyone is aware that it can and will attack Iran at a moment’s notice if given the green light by the US, and both countries have repeatedly and recently invaded other countries in that region. And yet it is Iran, which has not attacked any neighbor for over a millennium, that is portrayed in the media here as the dangerous extremist nation, while the US and Israel are the ‘moderates’.

I have been puzzled by Israel’s preoccupation with Iran since the leaders of Iran are not stupid and are not likely to use any nuclear weapons it manufactures because of certain and overwhelming retaliation. It seems pretty obvious to me that if they seek nuclear weapons at all, it is as a deterrent to attacks on them by the US and Israel. I am more fearful of the Israeli or US governments using nuclear weapons because they refuse to deny that they are willing to use them (and the US has used them in the past) and there is no deterrence to their use.

Juan Cole provides a possible explanation for Israel’s preoccupation with Iran, based on cables released by WikiLeaks. Apparently Israel is concerned that the rate of immigration is slowing down and that its demographic edge over the native Arab population might soon disappear.

The Jewish Agency, which was created to promote the immigration to Israel of Jews all over the world, has conceded that the era of mass immigration by Jews is over. This peaked in the 1990s when hundreds of thousands of Jews — and many non-Jews — flooded into the country after the Soviet Union collapsed.
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This year, the Jewish Agency expects around 18,000 Jews to move to Israel from the United States and elsewhere and the number is likely to dwindle.

Israel’s demographic makeup has undergone dramatic change in recent years. Out of a population of around 7 million, one-fifth are Palestinian Arabs. Another large minority is made up of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are non-Jews as defined by Jewish religious law, or Halaka.

The rise in power of right-wing orthodox Jewish religious groups and their attempts to impose their absurdly restrictive lifestyle on the still significantly large secular population is causing tensions within the country. What is happening is that the new immigrants from Russia and the former Eastern bloc countries seem to be more anti-Arab, pro-settlement, and hard line nationalists. The Israeli government may be fearful that if Iran did manage to produce nuclear weapons, then its Jewish population that has been made so fearful of Iran would emigrate in even larger numbers, worsening the demographic problem. The government’s own polling says that one-third of Israelis would emigrate if Iran developed a nuclear weapon. The people who are most likely to leave are the more secular modernist elements, leaving the country even more firmly in the grip of its religious extremists. If this happens it will result in an Israel that looks like the Jewish equivalent of mullah-dominated Islamist states in which the religious nutters impose their crazy rules on everyone, whether they are believers or not. One Israeli Minister warns that Israel is already turning into Iran.

Whenever religion gains influence over a government, the results are bad. Religion is a menace and we would all be better off without it.