Democracy dying: Context for the Israel-Palestine horror

From the sadness, violence and injustice files: The NYT writes (not paywalled) a very long article about normalized extremism and lawlessness in Israel:

The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel

After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law

By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared.

Who bulldozed the village after that is a matter of dispute. The Israeli Army says it was the settlers; a senior Israeli police officer says it was the army. Either way, soon after the villagers left, little remained of Khirbet Zanuta besides the ruins of a clinic and an elementary school. One wall of the clinic, leaning sideways, bore a sign saying that it had been funded by an agency of the European Union providing “humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank.” Near the school, someone had planted the flag of Israel as another kind of announcement: This is Jewish land now.

Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.

Many of the people we interviewed, some speaking anonymously, some speaking publicly for the first time, offered an account not only of Jewish violence against Palestinians dating back decades but also of an Israeli state that has systematically and increasingly ignored that violence. It is an account of a sometimes criminal nationalistic movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society. It is an account of how voices within the government that objected to the condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of their country’s democracy.  

A sample of three dozen cases in the months since Oct. 7 shows the startling degree to which the legal system has decayed. In all the cases, involving misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an internal Israeli military memo. During our review of the cases, we listened to recordings of Israeli human rights activists calling the police to report various crimes against Palestinians. In some of the recordings, the police refused to come to the scene, claiming they didn’t know where the villages were; in one case, they mocked the activists as “anarchists.” A spokesman for the Israeli National Police declined to respond to repeated queries about our findings.

.... our reporting reveals the degree to which decades of history are stacked against [West Bank Palestinians]: After 50 years of crime without punishment, in many ways the violent settlers and the state have become one. .... it is in the West Bank where the corrosive long-term effects of the occupation under Israeli law and democracy are most apparent. (emphasis added)  

American officials bristle when confronted with the question of whether the government’s actions are just token measures taken by an embattled American president hemorrhaging support at home for his Israel policy. They won’t end the violence, they say, but they are a signal to the Netanyahu government about the position of the United States: that the West Bank could boil over, and it could soon be the latest front of an expanding regional Middle East war since Oct. 7.

But war might just be the goal. Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, said he believes that many members of the ultraright in Israel “want war.” They “want intifada,” he says, “because it is the ultimate proof that there is no way of making peace with the Palestinians and there is only one way forward — to destroy them.”

That reporting conveys a major part of why talk of a two-state peace solution makes no sense today. Israel has radicalized and quietly transformed into a harsh Jewish theocracy with a thin veneer of democracy to cover the underlying bigoted authoritarianism. The vestiges of democracy that are left help to hide Jewish authoritarianism. There is literally no place left for a meaningful Palestinian state. 

That final outcome is what I assumed starting on November 4, 1995. That was the day Yitzak Rabin was murdered by a Zionist zealot. Maybe in 1995 I was premature to think that peace and a two-state solution was no longer possible. But that it is how the end game is playing out right now. Maybe I was probably right for the wrong reasons, but this NYT reporting reinforces my thinking that I was probably right for the right reasons.

The article goes on to point out that the moral rot in the double standard rule of law in Israel, one for Palestinians, one for Jews, mirrored the moral rot that was killing Israeli democracy. In a parallel with what Trump is doing to opposition in his morally rotted, authoritarian Republican Party, extremists in power slowly pushed more pro-democracy, pro-peace politicians out of power. The authoritarian game plan in Israel is strikingly similar to the authoritarian game plan unfolding in America right now.

According to one source, Rabin's last words were: “I have always believed that the majority of the people want peace, are prepared to take risks for peace . . . Peace is what the Jewish People aspire to.” Well, peace is coming alright. It will just not look anything like the kind of peace that Rabin envisioned. There will be no Palestinian state.

Three take-aways:

• Theocracy is absolutely not compatible with democracy. That is true for bigoted, intolerant Jewish theocrats in Israel, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Mullahs in Iran. It is also true for America's bigoted, intolerant Christian nationalist theocrats, e.g., House speaker Mike Johnson. 

• The propaganda tactics that theocrats employ to rise to power and to kill democracy are roughly the same as what other kinds of authoritarians routinely employ. Dictators, plutocrats and kleptocrats, routinely rely on lies, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation, crackpot reasoning, unwarranted opacity and the like to deceive, deflect, distract, confuse, polarize and eventually conquer societies. The big difference is that theocrats claim God as their source of authority, while the others have to rely on secular arguments which carry less persuasive weight for many religious people. Secular and religious authoritarians can combine forces, as has happened in America.

• Authoritarians do not necessarily need majority support to win power and kill democracy. They can get by with minority support, e.g. as is the case in America today. Successful authoritarians are stealthy and expert at propaganda. A great example of the superb propaganda and stealth is the decades long effort of Jewish Israeli extremists to slowly, incrementally engulf Palestinian lands until there is essentially nothing significant left. I suspected it was happening ever since the Rabin murder, but most of the American public was and still is unaware of what has happened.