The necessary elimination of Israeli democracy

Thank you for publishing this.

Furthermore, Israel's measures against some Arab populations are all national security based, not racially based as in S.Africa, making the any such "apartheid" narrative against Israel nothing but a calumny that targets the Jewish nation-state as illegitimate.

Schocken insults the memory of those you suffered under Apartheid. His arguments are pure propaganda and wildly inaccurate.

I live in SLC, UT, the most right wing place in the US, and I have come to detest Israeli policies. Stop stealing others land.

and now is the opportunity to do so as the relations between Jews and Arabs have deteriorated over time needlessly, and the delay in establishing a peace agreement with the Palestinians has contributed to the problematic internal issues which Amos Schocken reminds us.

There is a difference between the human rights practised by the arabs and the one practised by the west. The west established liberia freetown and libre ville for the emancipated slaves. Bishop desmond tutu and the church of england played a great role in removing apartheid in south africa. But the mufti of mecca accepts slavery still today.so the slave traders inflict heavy pain on black slaves in sinai. So the negev desert is giving hope to the blacks and the west bank and the gaza are a hell to the canaanites. So again the west must give southern israel to the canaanites and the rest of the land to the jews , the arabs should be sent to mecca to practise slavery there.

The US press is starting to report more and more on this. The Republicans supported S Africa too, and look what happened there

What will happen (I hope) the Palestinians will get so unhappy they will leave for Jordon or Lebanon or whatever and Israel will go back to Democracy for Jews not for Palestinians. Lets be honest Mr. Owner of Haaretz you are very short sited and have a natural tendency to bash Israel. Listen to what the Palestinians truly want, no more Israel.

Why so much mud-slinging at Israel ?

"There are two population groups in one region, one of which possesses all the rights and protections, while the other is deprived of rights and is ruled by the first group. This is a flagrantly undemocratic situation. " By this definition, Jews have been victims of apartheid in all of Europe and every Muslim country. In what Muslim country today do Jews have equal rights? Are Copts victims of apartheid in Egypt? Are Bahai victims of apartheid in Iran? Are Shia victims of apartheid in Bahrein? How about the Kurds in Turkey? By Shocken's definition the Muslims in France are victims of apartheid. Then why does Shocken's publication, Haaretz, reserve it as a derogatory against Israel?

The US experienced a Civil War to block the cessation of the South, which wanted to use its system of slavery to become a major manufacturer. The North, of course, fought the cessation because slavery in a Southern manufacturing entity would have destroyed the northern economy. The Civil War realy had little to do with freeing the slaves except as a reason for emasculating the South and its plans to industrialize. Lincoln was not to be believed. He was less credible than Netanyahu. Once the slaves were freed it took over 100 years for their civil rights to mature and the election of Obama as president was a signal we are almost there. It hardly happened overnight; indeed 200 years from our founding. In any case the civil rights of the Palestinians has a long way to go and the mr. Schocken is totally unfair. It is also true that the slaves were not militaristic and not looking to overthrow the US. Moreover blacks in Africa were not rooting for or supporting them. So Mr. Schocken give it some time, maybe another 100 years, for the 'civil rights' of the Palestinians to mature. The Arabs blew it in 1948 and it will take a long time for that insult and assault to disappear. I personally think Israel has a far tougher time with its Palestinian malcontents than the US had with its slaves.

that owned the Schocken Book and Publishing Company during days of the Weimar Republic? If this is indeed the case, the focus could be a story that parallels Job. The Schocken family advocated then, as does the above piece: Moral superiority in the face of dangerous adversity and affinity to the ideology of the proletariat left. Just as then their fellow citizens who do not agree with the left were engaged in "apartheid" (or fascism, etc.). In Weimar this attitude of we know what is best for the masses - which included, if not in fact was led by Schocken, had the opposite effect. They helped Hitler get elected. Now almost a century later, a Schoken tars his fellow citizens with the "apartheid " label in spite of the dangerous threats of nuclear terrorism and assimilation. But just as then you offer no other choices than what was offered a century ago. The lesson should be to accept your own contribution to this tragedy instead of pointing the finger of moral superiority at those with whom you disagree.

among all the top papers in the nation. Haaretz is totally transparent.

Scoken should increase his phenothiazide tablets - the doctor said the delusions will only go away with a higher dose.

I am beginning to understand the irrational support of the settlers which is obviously blocking any hope for long lasting peace in the region. And of course I am losing sympathy for Israel.

And the comparisons between Hamas and Gush Emunim are ridiculous nonsense. No wonder the left in Israel has lost all credibility.

Gush Emunim is to Israel what Islamists are to Arabs and cancer is to men. An evil that does not cure easily

Looks like Amos only sees one side of the coin. Not mention of terror attacks, continuous rockets falling from Gaza, continuous sabotage of peace initiatives by the P.A. (Remember Camp David 2 in 2000). How about u change your kippa for a kafia?

What is sad is that Jews of all people, after suffering so many injustices, have now become the ones carrying out the injustices. Shame on the Zionist supremacist. They have destroyed the moral high ground Jews had left.

Thankfully Israel is a thriving multi-racial society, and the Arab minority actively participates in the democratic process. There are Arab parliamentarians, Arab Supreme Court judges, Arab cabinet ministers, Arab heads of hospital departments, Arab university professors, Arab diplomats in the Foreign Service, and senior Arab police and army officers. Any comparison with South Africa under white supremacist rule is utterly false and used by those who wish to delegitimize the State of Israel for their own ends.

All this tsuris comes from the firmly held belief, 'There is no God, but God and, you pick, Moshe, Joshua/Jesus, Mohammed is His prophet. Oh, please, can we have no relief from the chains of Bronze Age mythology? Can't we just have Democritus as our first and only prophet? 'Apparently there is color, form, truth and beauty. Actually there are only atoms and the void.'

"WE DECLARE that.. until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People's Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State" - From Israel's Declaration of Independence// The lack of an Israeli Constitution is at the heart of the successful assault by the Right on normal democratic rights. Indeed, drafting a Constitution was what the Constituent Assembly, elected in January 1949, was supposed to do. Unfortunately, 2 parties of the Left refused to join the coalition because they believed the "quality" of their ideology and work entitled them to more seats than their numerical strength indicated. Instead, the Coalition had to rely on support from the religious parties that opposed a Constitution in principle (believing Torah Law should be the constitution). As we know today, that was a tragic historical mistake. And when a million former Soviets showed up on our shores, people who were not educated on fair play and human rights, all dams broke.

Hypocritical and lake of deep perspective knoweledge and sense on the subject, manipulation of the circumstaces from hystorical context equal charlatanism, you deserve a liebel indictement.

a state for a certain people.

... unfortunately, with money. As any other leftist hack piece, it Is very one-sided and does not mention actions of Arabs.

In case you do not read the headlines, Egypt is now going to have a government that includes the Muslim Brotherhood as a minority or majority, Iran is getting nukes and wants to destroy Israel, Syria keeps trying to get nukes and hates Israel, Turkey hates Israel, you have a terrorist government governing the Palestians (Hamas), and a anti Israeli racist world and UN as well as a weak US president. When Israel is not on the verge of being destroyed by its enemys, then you can whine and debate about democracy and its current state in Israel.

For years I have asked myself what could possibly be the patent encouragement of blatantly anti-Semitic posters at talkbacks, (and the daily, selective censorship of voices decrying it) and the underlying feeling of haughty immunity from your high castle on this. Now, at last, you came out, and wrote a sound and good article, which explains the Gush Emunim ideology, and how most if not all the evils of Israel, as well as the onslaught on democracy there, are interconnected. I thank you, learned a lot from your piece, and my alertness has been made more acute. However, I see a lumping together of disparate things, onto a Gog versus Magog mis-en-scène. The Iranian nuclear weapons race would be there without the Gush Emunim ideology, and so would the so-called "Arab Spring". The Israeli academia would have its snob, épatér-le-bourgeois espousers, and so would the arts. Oslo, even with Rabin at the helm, would not have per se eliminated the existential threat of an Arab and Muslim world, which still, to a large extent, doesn't recognize our right to exist as a Jewish state even within the Green Line, and would still hope by demography or delegitimization, that we somehow be "wiped-off-the face-of the-earth". Yes, there is a semblance of apartheid in Judea and Samaria. But my hunch is, you finally came out of your lofty sense of immunity because you see the danger approaching you and Haaretz, finally. And I say, the one factor you have blatantly left out of your analysis, is the growing, globalized anti-Semitism, which you yourself have decided to cater to for years from within Haaretz. Fortuna Benmayor, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

Perhaps difficult at times to see past the convoluted self confirming layers of hasbara, the veil is of late wearing particularly thin. Eventually of course it will dissipate completely and the claim of democracy will be seen for what it is, a cheap and tacky confidence trick being perpetrated upon the world at the expense of the Palestinians. Enraged at their gullibility the backlash around the world will likely be swingeing and punitive and perhaps deservedly so. Can the Israelis change course, doubtful. Recidivistic tendencies twist beyond recognition the psyche of those afflicted. The truism of 'there are none as blind as those who will not see' will be the inscription on the headstone of both 'Gush Emunim' and the fascist nature of the state of Israel, no matter what that fascism is dressed as at the time.

Thank you for this article. It shows that there are people in Israel who are democrats and have a sense of justice. The only hope for peace - and the survival of Israel - is when it makes peace with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbours. Allowing Israel to be the advance guard of US military foreign policy is a historic mistake of catastrophic proportions.

It reminds me of the entrenched ideological Jewish communists when I lived in E.Europa who only later became enlightened and disappointed in that ideology . Ignoring all the underlying reasons Amos Schocken belongs to that mental stock who does not see out of that mental blockade yet . But time will tell....

I would have liked the Shocken heir to explain to us how to protect jewish sovereignty in Eretz Israel in the next 20 or 30 years

Your article is well-written and well thought-out. I think that you are still quite soft on the situation in the territories. It is indeed nearly identical in spirit and in law to Apartheid. Separation of all matters, different laws for different groups, and vastly different relationships of the state to the two communities support my assertion. Israel must "normalize" and stop forcing the world to accept its exceptionalism. Allowing the Palestinians a viable state will go a great way towards reducing the human rights abuses in the WB and Gaza, and will reduce regional tensions. In fact, the entire premise of Hizbullah, Hamas, (even Syrian foreign policy) would be undermined by an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. I hope that leaders will break away from the racist construct you described and work towards a just peace that will remove the grievances of the Palestinians and allow Israel to be at peace with others- and with itself.

I have asked myself whether this is a question of being left or right when reading and agreeing or disagreeing with the opinion of a writer or the analysis which is presented. My conclusion is that this article is very sober and in its arguments and conclusions just right. If more would understand it this way, there would be a better chance for peace.

irrelevent.....

A brilliant and insightful analysis of the rotten core of Israeli apartheid and Israeli policy to steal all the Palestinan land.

While a few and only a few points have a semblance of truth. Your article is somewhat an opinion piece under the guise of intellectual debate. However, I can see how pseudo intellectuals would come to such biased conclusions. As momentum against Israel builds over the many decades, you can see how in its defense it has taken on aspects of its enemy as it looks it in the face like a mirror. And true, when one defends oneself sometimes you lose sight of your identity. In doing this, Judaism is tarnished though your intent maybe honorable and certainly more so than say Islam in my opinion. My question to you and your readers, given the atrocious harsh nature of Islam and its horrible human rights violations all over the world and its laws enforceable by death and its despicable version of apartheid. How is it that the world has not mobilized the kind of systematic orchestrated campaign against Islam’s criminal policies? Until I see them taken to task on human rights, freedom of expression, religious freedom, political expression and the right to walk on Islamic soil, though I'm not of the party of Mohammad. Well, frankly I can only think this bias sinister. All of which make international bodies such as the UN seem a farce given they’re signatories to its charter. Perhaps you need to balance your intellectual debate with some spiritual moral fiber? Otherwise you come off a little lopsided, given in the west that is what every member of the party of Mohammad is granted under law. I don't expect that my post will grace your pages given that you’re partial to censure yourself. As a publisher your history shows you to be on occasion hypocritical. Should I need evidence to furnish my argument, I would only need to delve into your staff histories.

What a bunch of propagandish blabber. South Africa has 30 million black people who were oppressed by 2 million whites. Black people there were forced to use separate toilets, sit on separate benches and use separate entrances to buildings. Black people didn't have satellite TV and large buildings like many Israeli arabs do, they lived in non water proof shacks. Activists against the South African government were detained indefinately or killed, and didn't receive free university education in prison, as many arab prisoners do here. Intermarriage between whites and blacks was forbidden by law. How dare you make such a false comparison - you insult the memory of the activist like Steven Biko that died in the struggle for South African freedom .

Marxism, Fascism and conspiracy theories have in common that they are linear. For them everything is planned and there is no room for random events and individual human behaviour. The same (evil) planning is behind everything. Critical doubt or self-reflection is not necessary. No, they have discovered the truth, the key to unlock the mystery. The scary thing about Schocken's conspiracy polemic is that it sounds like a draft for the The Protocols of the Elders of Gush Emunim. Replace Gush Emunim with "the Jews" and you have the commonplace diatribe against Jews that has been used to justify antisemitism since the late nineteenth century. Of course, conspiracy theories are not only a problem for Jews. Islamophobia is also grounded in a conspiracy theory.

Extreme ideological fundamentalists have a tendency to get hysterical, and Israel certainly doesn't have a shortage of those. Both the right wing kind the author talks about, and the left wing kind the author belongs to.

Extreme ideological fundamentalists have a tendency to get hysterical, and Israel certainly doesn't have a shortage of those. Both the right wing kind the author talks about, and the left wing kind the author belongs to.

Extreme ideological fundamentalists have a tendency to get hysterical, and Israel certainly doesn't have a shortage of those. Both the right wing kind the author talks about, and the left wing kind the author belongs to.

I wish we had a bold, independent newspaper like Haaretz in the States. I don't think any US editor has the courage to publish such a brave opinion on the gist of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

One wonders why Schocken does not discuss the main reason why the so-called Gush Emunim ideology has taken root and flourished--namely the absolute failure of the Palestinians to make even one concession to peace. The Palestinians could have had a state long ago had not they been so adamant about destroying ours.

The day that the Israelis lose hope for the redeeming quality of their nation, and it becomes merely a struggle of mechnical and technical survival, Israel will then wither away. It would then disappear, because there is no underlying will to sustain it, by democratic forces. In this sense, the fate of the Jewish state rests not in it's enemies but among it's friends and family.

Unfortunately, Israel has travelled too far down the road of apartheid to be able to turn back from it voluntarily. The international community must therefore impose sanctions that would make the choice of apartheid more painful and costly than the choice of rolling it back.

This is a joke : it is written from the beginning in "Jewish and democratic", the link between state and religion, tne non-right of return, the exemption of military service for haredim and subsidizing their refuse to work.

"slowly"???

Yes discrimination of any kind must be rooted out., Unfortunately people are good at seeing faults of others and not their own.

It's you who maintain the illusion of a democratic, liberal society in Israel. In every discussion you finally hear the argument "but not all Israelis agree, there are other opinions too, read Haaretz ...". You are the cheap, willing helpers of the regime you pretend to fight.

to have a Palestinian state will lead to Israel becoming an apartheid state. In the long run this apartheid state will not be able to continue as such, and that will mean the end of Israel as a Jewish State. The only way for Israel to survive as a Jewsih State is if there is a Palestinian State as well. At the moment Israel is doing everything that in the long-run will lead to its collapse.