Democracy and the Jewish State

Israel-Flag-Johnk85Never mind the Islamic State and its boxes of heads. The consensus among politicians and the media is that the real crisis in the region is that the Jewish State is declaring itself a Jewish State.

Again.

Israel’s flag carries the six-pointed star that was the seal of the House of David. Its anthem speaks of the “Jewish spirit.” Israel’s Declaration of Independence declared “the establishment of a Jewish State.”

It couldn’t be any less unambiguous if Mel Brooks were made the President of Israel (which would also be a manifest improvement over the even more clownish President Rivlin.) Despite that the media and its politicians treated the Jewish State bill as a major development and the end of the world.

And that’s not an exaggeration.

The understated title of a Haaretz article was “The road from Jewish nation-state to the Gates of Hell.” It was only to be expected that the radicals of the leftist paper would lose their minds over a bill that reaffirms reality. Reality has always been the enemy of the left. But the level of hysteria and incitement was a bit much even by the standards of a paper that had called Israeli soldiers and officers “filth.”

The New York Times called the bill “heartbreaking.” This is the first time that the Gray Lady showed anything resembling a heart when it came to Israel.

The State Department, whose boss just decided to ignore the results of a democratic election and press on with his undemocratic agenda, warned Israel to maintain its “commitment to democratic principles.” The European Union, which rejects a democratic referendum, warned Israel to “protect its democratic standards.”

Obama, the EU and the Israeli left like talking about democracy. They just don’t like practicing it.

PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas declared, “We will never recognize the Jewishness of the state of Israel.” A PFLP official, the terrorist organization which claimed responsibility for the recent massacre of Rabbis in a synagogue, called the bill racist.

And yet the Palestinian basic law states that “the Palestinian people are part of the Arab nation.” There is no provision made for non-Arab Palestinians, even though the term was originally used to refer to all residents of the British Mandate for Palestine. There is no mention of the ten thousand Africans living in Gaza.

When it comes to religion, the basic law is even clearer.

“Islam is the official religion in Palestine,” it states. “The principles of Islamic Sharia shall be a principal source of legislation.”

Finally it adds that “Arabic shall be the official language.”

If a Jewish State in Israel is racist and undemocratic, why is an Arab Muslim settler state in Israel that goes much further in explicitly limiting membership to Arabs and makes Islam into its official religion and law okay?

Are Islam and Arab Nationalism inherently more democratic than Judaism and Zionism? Certainly the radically different approaches to them by Israel’s critics are.

There has never been a United Nations resolution declaring Arab Nationalism to be racist despite the ethnic cleansing carried out by major figures such as Nasser and Saddam. Arab Nationalists have made war on Israel with the open aim of genocide. Islamic leaders continue to call for the mass murder of Jews. But only Zionism was deemed racist by the UN under pressure from Arab and Muslim countries.

The State Department and the European Union fund the Palestinian Authority. They have no objection to its explicitly Arab and Islamic identity. The media, which acts as the unofficial public relations bureau of the PLO, has never objected to it. Certainly not the way its members have to a Jewish State.

The critics of the Jewish State bill insist that Israel’s only hope is to make a deal with the PLO. Clearly they see nothing wrong with its Islamic and Arab status. Unless they can show that Judaism and Jews are worse than Islam or Arabs, they have to admit that there is nothing wrong with a Jewish State.

Peres, the Jimmy Carter of Israel who sank his career by giving away the store to the PLO, warned that being a Jewish State threatens “Israel’s democratic status at home and abroad.” But Peres doesn’t feel that there’s anything wrong with the PLO’s Palestinian Authority even though its own president has dispensed with election and the territory is being run by the PLO.

Can a Jewish State be less democratic than an Islamic terrorist state run by terrorists who no longer even bother holding elections?

The majority of Israelis support the Jewish State bill. The great democratic voice of the people has already spoken. The only thing standing in its way is the undemocratic obstructionism of career leftists, media hysteria and politicians who are more comfortable denouncing Jews than living among them.

Despite having a Jewish majority, Israel has protected the rights of everyone living there. But there is nothing extraordinary about that. There are plenty of European countries with state churches and monarchs who carry religious titles which nonetheless protect the rights of all without prejudice.

Just because a country has deep roots in the history of a single people and their faith does not mean that it is undemocratic or that it denies civil rights to anyone. The history of Israel is Jewish in the way that the history of England is English and Christian.

There is only one of the big three religions today that engages in widespread religious discrimination. There are no churches allowed in Saudi Arabia (to say nothing of synagogues) because over a thousand years ago Mohammed had commanded the ethnic cleansing of Jews and Christians.

When Muslims want religious freedom, they don’t go to a Muslim country. They go to a non-Muslim one such as America or Israel.

Minority religions descending from Islam such as the Ahmadis and the Baha’i live in peace in Israel. Indeed the Baha’i religion is based in Israel. Meanwhile Sunni and Shiite Muslims are killing each other all over the Middle East to settle an ancient tribal religious dispute.

At a time when the Muslim Middle East is becoming less religiously diverse than ever and when Christians are vanishing from territories under PLO control, Israel continues to be a place where Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists and a dizzying variety of beliefs and unbeliefs live side by side.

Israel, like any other country, has things that it can be criticized for, but it’s curious that the same outpouring of outrage doesn’t appear when it comes to the PLO arresting an atheist for criticizing Islam.

The media praises backward Muslim theocracies and their pet Imams who are dispatched to the West to preach hate. It calls the explicitly theocratic Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned numerous terrorist groups including Al Qaeda, “moderate.” It gives the benefit of the doubt to the Islamic terrorist theocracy in Tehran no matter how many times it calls for the destruction of America and Israel.

While Jews and Christians continue to show tolerance to the minorities living in their midst, they are accused of constantly plotting to create totalitarian theocracies. Meanwhile these defenders of religious freedom defend Muslim theocracies and theocrats which they claim are moderate and misunderstood.

Is the problem with the Jewish State that it’s Jewish or is the real problem that it isn’t Muslim?

If Israel were putting forward a bill to call itself a Muslim state, there would be no objections. Just as there were no objections to the constitutions of the Muslim world which declare that those countries are Islamic, just as there are no objections to the PLO which Israel is expected to turn over territory to.

Arguments can be made for objecting to the Jewish State bill. But anyone who objects to it, but doesn’t object to the Islamic political and legal identities of the Palestinian Authority and the Muslim countries of the region, isn’t defending a broad universal principle. He’s pandering to Muslims and attacking Jews.

*

Don’t miss Daniel Greenfield on this The Glazov Gang discussing Obama’s Fantasies about Un-Islamic Jihad:

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Subscribe to Frontpage’s TV show, The Glazov Gang, and LIKE it on Facebook.

  • Bamaguje

    Brilliant again Daniel!!
    I just don’t understand the vociferous objections to formally stating the obvious – that Israel is the national homeland of Jewish people. Nor do I see how such declaration is incompatible with democracy. It’s not as if Israel denies non-Jews citizenship rights.
    Despite denials from the pro-Palestinian loudmouths, only antisemitism explains making demands of Israel that are not applicable to other nations.

    People who have raised no objections to Saudi Arabia that bans other religions, oppresses Shiites and even discriminates other Arabs, particularly against non-Gulf Arabs… have a problem with Israel being a Jewish state.

    • cree

      It’s not that the PLO and other Muslim states don’t want to accept the Israeli state and its right to exist, it’s that the Israeli state exists, has a right to exist and no amount of Muslim denial will change reality. What the Muslims can’t handle is their denial not working; wanting Israel not to exist because it does.

    • Delores Moyer

      I totally agree with you. Those nations that allow immigration of those who hate you/despise you are now facing multiple problems with these immigrants actually just wanting to destroy your society from (then) within. Examples being many of the European Countries (i.e., England, & France being good examples plus, now America. We need to stop all immigration to America/US of all Muslims right now and stop any more mosques from being built (last I read there were 250 in the US) and get rid of ones that show any sign of terrorism connections/expel those in those Mosques as well. We need to get our society back together as an American Society and anyone who wants to behead us/torture us/even says so has to go……..We need our Country Back….

    • Sara

      It’s anti-Semitism, of course, coupled with appeasement which is also manifesting in the Church of Englands proposition to read from the Koran at Prince Charles’s coronation.

  • Larry Larkin

    I have a suggestion for the next deal Israel offers to the PLO and/or HAMAS.

    “How about you come and stand in between this wall and this firing squad and save us the trouble of hunting you down and killing you, and we won’t have to occasionally kill civilians in the process”.

  • camp7

    It’s an age-old problem of reason versus emotion. When savage emotion compromises the morality of reason then the choice is clear. The survival of civilization or the surrender to primitive ideas.

    David slew Goliath. Israel can win this battle. Their enemy are their own worst enemy.

  • StanleyT

    There you go again, Daniel, making sense. Will you never learn?

  • Gee

    I always thought that if we simply renamed the country ‘Palestine’ and kicked out the Jordanian and Egyptian colonists the world would say nothing and every single UN resolution would support us.

    • watsa46

      U are INSANE. Antisemitism exists in countries devoid of Jews. It is the irrational concept of the Jews presence or absence that define antisemitism. It is a psychotic state of the mind. The “irrational emotions” destroy the mind of these people who can’t accept the existence of Jews and therefore: the holocaust! Some rejoice at the idea that it will be easier next time to eliminate the Jews who are concentrating in a very small surface: Israel. Palestine has little to do with Jews: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/palname.html.

      The name is being used to deny the Jewish connection and heritage.

      • Gee

        Am an Israeli – guess that joke went over your head a bit.

  • theoprinse

    Two archaeological finds, the Tel Dan Stele and the Mesha Stele, have direct bearing on the question of the existence of a historical David. The first of these is an Aramean victory stele (inscribed stone) discovered in 1993 at Tel Dan and dated c. 850–835 BC: it contains the phrase ביתדוד (bytdwd), which has been interpreted as “House of David”.[25] The Mesha Stele fromMoab, dating from approximately the same period, may also contain the name David in line 12, where the interpretation is uncertain, and in line 31, where one destroyed letter must be supplied, but apparently no other letter produces a word that makes sense in the context. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David

  • DontMessWithAmerica

    Thank you, Daniel Daniel Greenfield. Your pieces are good medicine in a world filled with germs.

  • watsa46

    CAN’T compare Israel with any Muslim country!!! Jews keep rising the bar while the rest of the world keeps pushing it down. That is why the Western world looks to Israel, constantly, for example to follow. They can’t believe what they see and need to lie about. See mass media systematically misrepresenting what IL does day in, day out. It is almost like every day miracles. Indeed it is hard to believe. U need to go to IL to believe it. Remember what colonel Kemp keeps saying about the IDF.

  • CDM

    It couldn’t be any less unambiguous if Mel Brooks were made the President of Israel…

    Which brings this to mind:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzbhbetwYFU

  • Texas Patriot

    Israel is sinking in a perfect storm of Islamic supremacism. So now it’s going to respond by emphasizing Jewish supremacism? I really don’t quite get it. From my perspective, the only hope for the State of Israel going forward is to emphasize the democratic rights of all but the supremacist rights of none. Under these circumstances, perhaps it would have been better to propose a bill clarifying that anyone who believes that their religion or political ideology gives them a right to violate the civil rights or human rights of anyone else has no place in the State of Israel and will be required to leave. Instead of giving the Jihadist propagandists even more ammunition to use against the State of Israel, why not give the State of Israel a tool it can use against Jihadists in its midst?

    • Texas Patriot

      There’s ancient Israel, and there’s modern Israel. The Jewish State needs to be the best of both!

  • William Slavin

    The six pointed “Star of David” first appeared on headstones in Jewish cemeteries during the Middle Ages, so it could not be the “seal of the House of David.” The ancient symbol of the Jews is the candelabrum as pictured on the Arch of Titus in Rome. Other than the above quibble, article is spot on as usual.

    • Daniel_Greenfield

      The Star of David represents the name David. It was the seal of the monarchy.

      The Menorah was associated with the priesthood which is why it was used by the Hasmonean kings and the Star of David fell into disuse during the period because it was a reminder that the Hasmonean kings were not legitimate.

      • William Slavin

        Do you have a reference for the star’s monarchical usage? My sources (infallible Wikipedia) say the star’s origin was kabbalistic.

        • Daniel_Greenfield

          The Kabbalistic origins are revisionist history created in part by confusing medieval magical obsessions with a Seal of Solomon, particularly among non-Jews.

          They had the origins somewhat correct since the seal of King Solomon would have been the symbol of the Davidic dynasty, but layered it over with assorted magical nonsense.

          But overall we’re dealing with a field where it was consistently denied that King David had even existed or that Jerusalem had been a major city until archaeological finds made those positions unsupportable.

          So the revisionist narrative on the Star of David won’t change unless First Temple era artifacts are recovered with it.

  • Daniel Rubio

    Antisemites of any flavor (muslims, arabs, anti-Zionists, anti-Israel, BDS-ers, 0bama) cannot stomach the fact that Jews have now a country of their own which not only can defend itself, but that even defeats its enemies and pushes them back to where they came from. A supersonic fighter proudly boasting a Start of David and blowing to smitherness an arab tank or a terrorist’s rocket launcher is more than what hard-core antisemites can tolerate. And that’s the quid of the issue. It’s not the Jewishness of the country, or whether Israel is a democracy, a pluralistic society or a bastion of freedom in a desert of oppression. It’s the fact that Jew haters cannot strike at the Jews with the ease they were accustomed to. It’s the fact that Jews are just not anymore the eternal punching-bags, the bullied, the bull’s eye for the Crusaders, the Germans, the Cossacks, the arabs, and so on.
    Career antisemites look back with nostalgia at those better times when they could easily bother, molest, persecute or kill Jews without remorse, without effort. They want back the old status-quo, and that’s all there is about this modern Israel bashing in any and all of its forms.

  • Daniel_Greenfield

    It’s one man, one vote. So yes.

    All citizens of the country, Jewish, Arab, Circassian, Druze, etc can vote for their party of choice. There are Arab parties, though mostly affiliated with the Communists, and they set in Israel’s parliament.

  • Texas Patriot

    Does this mean Israel is having an identity crisis? You bet.

  • Vinegar Hill

    Democracy, however, is not just based on voting rights, it is supposed to offer equality in all forms to all citizens that reside in the country and that is not the case with Israel.