https:\/\/www.vox.com\/policy-and-politics\/2020\/2\/27\/21075868\/israeli-democracy-war-netanyahu<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“The West Bank\u2019s Palestinian residents, who live under the grinding realities of occupation, are not Israeli citizens and don\u2019t have a voice in the policies that profoundly shape their lives. The Israeli settlers, many of whom moved to the West Bank with the explicit ideological purpose of seizing control of Palestinian land, do.<\/p>\n
Israel is a democratic country within its internationally recognized borders, but it maintains a military occupation of land on which millions of people live while denying those people the right to vote. Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this inherent instability has started to tip toward outright authoritarianism throughout the territory under Israeli control. In a 2019 poll conducted by the nonpartisan Israeli Democracy Institute, a majority of Israelis (54 percent) said their democracy was \u201cin grave danger.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since Netanyahu took office in 2009, the nationalist right has mounted an assault on liberal institutions and eroded democracy in Israel. The Israeli parliament has passed a bill formally defining Israel as a state for its Jewish citizens, implicitly slotting the sizable minority of Arab Muslim Israeli citizens into a form of second-class citizenship.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“Netanyahu allegedly struck a deal with a major newspaper to exchange political favors for favorable coverage.<\/p>\n
When this scandal was exposed, Netanyahu was indicted on bribery charges; his response has been to attack the media that reported on the scandal, demonize the prosecutors who brought the case, and attempt to pass a law immunizing himself from prosecution while in office.<\/p>\n
Israel is heading down a path already trod by countries like Turkey, Hungary, and Venezuela: former democracies whose elected leaders have, gradually and through mostly legal processes, twisted the state\u2019s institutions to the point where the public no longer has a meaningful choice in who rules them. The signs are subtle, but I found them striking during my trip last fall”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“Some of the causes of this anti-democratic drift are uniquely Israeli. No advanced democracy maintains anything like the occupation of the West Bank. The foundational Zionist vision, a state that\u2019s both meaningfully \u201cJewish\u201d and \u201cdemocratic,\u201d leads to a constant high-wire act in a country whose citizens are around 25 percent non-Jewish.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“\u201cbad civil society.\u201d These relatively new organizations \u2014 the big ones were founded in the 2000s \u2014 use the tools of a free society, like court filings and free speech, to attack and shut down people and groups that disagree with them. \u201cThese [NGOs] view differences in perceptions of society and the state as being sufficient justification for silencing or delegitimizing others,\u201d as Jamal puts it.<\/p>\n
Such \u201cbad civil society\u201d groups are well-funded allies of the right-wing parties in power; they sometimes even share personnel. One prominent far-right MK, Bezalel Smotrich, is a co-founder of the pro-settlement group Regavim. They perform tasks that official members of government can\u2019t or won\u2019t, helping to hollow out Israeli civil society while claiming to be part of it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[485,431,194,196,389,484],"class_list":["post-2266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-bibi","tag-democracy","tag-israel","tag-netanyahu","tag-palestine","tag-west-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2267,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2266\/revisions\/2267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}