To hear Eric Weinstein's entire "shut it down, the goyim know" drunken rant, - in which he repudiates everything he's professed about the DISC as well as placing himself squarely in the Epstein psy-op camp - go to the 3 hour 30 minute mark on the spotify podcast with Rogan.
NYTimes | For
most of the Palestinians under Israeli control — those in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip—Israel is not a democracy. It’s not a democracy because
Palestinians in the Occupied Territories can’t vote for the government
that dominates their lives. When Mr. Gantz sends Israeli troops to shut
down their human rights groups, West Bank Palestinians can’t punish him
at the ballot box. They can complain to the Palestinian Authority. But
the P.A. is a subcontractor, not a state. Like other Palestinians, its
officials need Israeli permission
even to leave the West Bank. In Gaza, too, Israel determines, with help
from Egypt, which people and products enter and exit. And Gaza’s
residents, who live in what Human Rights Watch calls “an open-air prison,” can’t vote out the Israeli officials who hold the key.
This
lack of democratic rights helps explain why Palestinians are less
motivated than Israeli Jews to defend Israel’s Supreme Court. As the
Israeli law professors David Kretzmer and Yael Ronen note in their book,
“The Occupation of Justice,”
“in almost all of its judgments relating to the Occupied Territories,
especially those dealing with questions of principle, the Court has
decided in favor of the authorities.” Enfeebling the court would
undermine legal protections that Israeli Jews take for granted but most
Palestinians did not enjoy in the first place.
To
be fair, roughly 20 percent of the Palestinians under Israeli control
enjoy Israeli citizenship and the right to vote in Israeli elections.
Yet it is often these Palestinians who protest most vociferously against
Israel’s democratic credentials. In 2009 the Palestinian Knesset member
Ahmad Tibi quipped
that Israel was indeed “Jewish and democratic: Democratic toward Jews
and Jewish toward Arabs.” To many liberal Zionists, that might sound
churlish. After all, Mr. Tibi has now served in Israel’s Parliament for
almost 25 years. But he understands that the Jewish state contains a
deep structure that systematically denies Palestinians legal equality,
whether they are citizens or not.
Consider how Israel allocates land. Most of the land inside Israel proper was seized from Palestinians during Israel’s war of independence in the late 1940s, when more than half the Palestinian population was expelled or fled in fear. By the early 1950s, the Israeli government controlled more than 90 percent
of Israel’s land. It still does. The government distributes that land
for development and leases it to citizens through the Israel Land
Authority. Almost half the seats on its governing council are reserved for the Jewish National Fund, whose mission is “strengthening the bond between the Jewish people and its homeland.”
This
helps explain why Palestinians comprise more than 20 percent of
Israel’s citizens but Palestinian municipalities, according to a 2017 report
by a variety of Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups, encompass
less than 3 percent of Israel’s land. In 2003, an Israeli government
commission found
that “many Arab towns and villages were surrounded by land designated
for purposes such as security zones, Jewish regional councils, national
parks and nature reserves or highways, which prevent or impede the
possibility of their expansion.” Unable to gain permission, many
Palestinian citizens build homes illegally — which are therefore subject
to government demolition. Ninety-seven percent of the demolition orders
in Israel proper between 2012 and 2014, according to the 2017 report,
were against Palestinians.
This isn’t
an accident. It’s the logical outgrowth of Israel’s self-definition.
Israel is not a “state for all its citizens,” a concept Mr. Lapid said
in 2019 that he has opposed “my entire life.” In 2018, when several Palestinian lawmakers introduced
legislation “to anchor in constitutional law the principle of equal
citizenship,” the Knesset’s speaker ruled that it could not even be
discussed because it would “gnaw at the foundations of the state.” That
same year, the Knesset passed legislation reaffirming
Israel’s identity as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” which
means that the country belongs to Jews like me, who don’t live there,
but not to the Palestinians who live under its control, even the lucky
few who hold Israeli citizenship. All this happened before Mr.
Netanyahu’s new government took power. This is the vibrant liberal
democracy that liberal Zionists want to save.
Some
Jews may worry that by advocating genuine liberal democracy — and thus
exposing themselves to accusations of anti-Zionism — Mr. Netanyahu’s
critics will marginalize themselves. But if they widen their vision
they’ll see that the opposite is true. By including Palestinians as full
partners, Israel’s democracy movement will discover a vast reservoir of
new allies and develop a far clearer moral voice. Ultimately, a
movement premised on ethnocracy cannot successfully defend the rule of
law. Only a movement for equality can.
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