Nothing would be more absurd than to claim, as the Western leaders often do, that Israel is a democracy (in fact “the only one” in the whole of Middle East). Some in the West do it to justify the Israeli subjugation of Palestinian people. Let us forget the apartheid nature of the Israeli state. Let us forget the Nuremberg laws in operation in occupied territories. How can anyone forget that the very founding of the state of Israel in 1948 was the most explicit violation of the social equality and individual rights of the native Arabs, asks Afnan Hussein Fatani in the second part of her article on Israeli practices in the occupied territories.
God has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing, and over their vision is a veil and for them awaits great punishment. (The Qur’an: 1:7)
To my mind, the month of May has become synonymous with mayhem, murder and massacres and a lot of other malicious and macabre M-words. The pity of it is that it used to be associated with springtime and the Mayflower, that romantic vessel carrying dreams of freedom, equality and justice for all. But that was long ago and far away, before the dream of democracy turned into a nightmare. Before Palestine, the land of milk and honey, was turned into a blood bath by intransigent Israeli soldiers and hi-tech American weaponry.
To many in the Arab and Muslim world, the word “democracy” has become a problematic issue, especially when it is used to describe the Zionist regime in Israel. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, democracy means the “principles of social equality and individual rights.” How can Israel be a democracy when in 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 3379 defining Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination?”
Indeed, the very founding of the state of Israel in 1948 was the most explicit violation of social equality and the individual rights of the native Arab population. What is so democratic about Western leaders assembling to uphold by brute force promises made more than 2000 years ago during the exile of Jews in Babylon in the 5th century BC. Shouldn’t such wild claims be first verified independently? According to our version of events, and according to the older and more authentic Barnabas Gospel (as well as the Dead Sea scrolls) dating back to the 1st century AD(during the time of John the Baptist), God promised the land to all of Abraham’s offspring, that is to his first-born son Ishmael, to Isaac, and to his 11 other sons by the two Canaanite wives he married after Sarah’s death, Qantura and Hajoon. (The most familiar of his later sons is Midian, an ancestor of Moses’ Midianite wife as mentioned in the Bible and the Qur’an.) Keep in mind that God’s promise to Abraham was made long before the birth of any of his sons; he was 86 when Ishmael was born, and 100 at the time of Isaac’s birth. Hence, if we were to take God’s promise to Abraham literally, then the land does not belong exclusively to Isaac’s descendants and certainly not to immigrant Israelis from Europe and America; it rightfully belongs to all the native-born people of the region including the Palestinian of Canaan, be they Jews, Christians, or Muslims. As the Bible asserts, Abraham is the father of many: “I have made you a father of many nations” (Romans 4: 13-17) — “In your seed will I bless all of the tribes of the earth” (The Gospel of Barnabas).
It was basically illegal for Western leaders to dispossess the Arabs, Ishmael’s descendants, of their legitimate inheritance so as to reinstate a group of Ashkenazi settlers and squatters like Begin, Shamir and Sharon, who are not of the tribe of Israel nor even genealogically related to Abraham in any remote way, just because they happen to be Jewish by faith. If that were the case, then the Vatican should lawfully be divided among all the Catholics of the world, from Ireland to the Philippines. In a definitive passage in the Old Testament, the Prophet Amos refutes these wild Zionist claims of racial superiority and exclusive land rights:
“Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? Says the Lord. Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt and the Philistines from Crete, and the Syrians from Kir? Behold, the eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from the surface of the ground. (9: 7-8)
Never in the Old Testament is the idea of the chosen people offered by way of justifying low moral standards and mass murder. God never glorifies the misbehaving children of Israel; indeed He curses them for failing to uphold the words of the Torah. What is certain is that all the Hebrew prophets emphasize social justice: “You will have one law for the stranger and for the native; for I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 224:22)
As many Western theologians have repeatedly pointed out, the conception of the chosen people in the Hebrew Bible is a spiritual rather than a racial conception. (See Walter Kaufmann, Religions in Four Dimensions, 1976.) The children of Israel were “chosen” to maintain and spread what had been revealed to them, namely the belief in God and the morality that goes with it: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.” (3:2). They were never chosen to kill and plunder with immunity or to walk with arrogance and covet the land that is not theirs. The last of the Ten Commandments specifically says: “You shall not desire your neighbor’s house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s.” It is this Israeli covetousness, this unquenched desire for more land, more fields, more settlements, more temples that is the cause of all the hatred and violence in the Holy Land.
As to the alleged unconditional promise that God made to Moses, the promise of Palestine, the land of milk and honey. Well, the Bible states that God retracted this promise to punish the Israelites for their incessant iniquity: “From that day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt to this day, I sent to you all my servants the prophets, day upon day; yet they did not listen to me, or incline their ear, but stiffened their neck.” (7:22 ff).
They were specifically forbidden from entering Jerusalem, and God made them vow never to migrate to the Holy land in large numbers, never to enter the land by force, and never to rebel against the people of the world. They were to wait out their punishment in exile until the second coming of Christ. (Sources: Ruth Blau, “Les Gardien de la Cite,” p. 60).
In Deuteronomy 27:26, Moses ordained that on the day when the children of Israel should cross the Jordan River into the promised land, an imposing series of twelve curses would befall them. To quote a few that remind us of current Israeli practices:
— “Cursed be whoever removes his neighbor’s landmark!”
— “Cursed be whoever violates the rights of the stranger, the orphan, and the widow!”
— “Cursed be whoever slays his neighbor in secret!”
After every curse, the refrain is repeated: “And all the people shall say: Amen.”
The appalling truth that US President Bush and other Western leaders know only too well is that there never was and never will be such a thing as democracy in Israel. Certainly, in the West Bank and Gaza no democracy has ever applied for 35 years. There are no anti-discriminatory laws in any city, town or neighborhood in Israel. Can the Israeli policy of displacement, banishment and settling the occupied Arab territories with recent arrivals from Russia and Brooklyn be called democratic? In Israel non-Jews and Palestinian Arabs are treated as second-class citizens and never accorded the same rights under the law as Jews. A leading Jewish academic, Dr. David Rabeeya, has described a caste system where the non-European Jews and Arabs are clearly at the bottom. Another prominent Jew, Professor Norman Finkelstein, compares the situation to blacks in the American South before the civil rights movement. As he explains, the wholesale importation of Russian Jews was to ensure the demographic majority of secular European Jews over their Sephardic countrymen for generations to come. Fifty percent of the so-called Russian Jews are not Jewish simply because “the Israeli establishment likes the blue eyed, blond-haired Aryan types as a racial group. The Russians look right even if they are not Jewish, and they preserve the Ashkensai elite’s dominance.” (Counterpunch, Dec. 13, 2001) There’s Israeli democracy for you. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Consider the following horrendous facts:
1. There are over 140 illegal settlements in the occupied territories involving as many as 400,00 people.
2. There are 3.8 million Palestinian refugees in Israel registered in 59 scattered refugee camps.
3. 6,000 Israelis live on approximately 25 percent of Gaza which has a population of one million.
4. Non-Jewish Israelis cannot buy or lease land in Israel.
5. Palestinian license plates in Israel are color-coded to distinguish Jews from non-Jews.
6. Millions of Palestinians are still forced to sit in the back of planes, trains and buses.
7. Roads in Israel are Jews-only or settler-only roads. Palestinians cannot travel on these roads, nor can they cross over them at will.
8. Israel routinely confiscates bank accounts, businesses, and land and refuses to pay compensation to those who suffer the confiscation. This is in accordance with the laws of the Talmud: “What a Jew steals from a Gentile he may keep.” (Sanhedrin 57a)
9. Israel allots 85 percent of the water resources in the occupied territories for Jews and the remaining 15 percent is divided among Palestinians in the territories. For example in Hebron, 85 percent of the water is given to about 500 settlers, while 15 percent must be divided among Hebron’s 120,000 Palestinians.
10. Palestinian villages and homes are systematically destroyed with bulldozers and Israeli settlements are erected in their place. Once reduced to rubble, Palestinian towns are given Hebrew names. The first Zionist settlement in the area was Yizre’el in 1948 which replaced the destroyed and cleansed Palestinian village of Zir’in.
11. Israeli courts systematically give Jewish settlers a sentence of a fine and community service for beating any Palestinian boy to death or maiming him for life. This is in accordance with the law of the Talmud: “When a Jew murders a Gentile, there will be no death penalty.” (Sanhedrin 57a)
12. To travel from one city in the West Bank to another, Palestinians, pedestrians and drivers alike, must obtain so-called “freedom of movement permits” which are valid from 5 a.m until 7 p.m and are renewable on a monthly basis. These restrictive permits, ingeniously dubbed “freedom of movement permits,” are designed to ensure the security of a few settlers 50 meters away in Beit El or 200 meters away in Ma’ale Adumin at the expense of 3.5 million Palestinians. (See JPN May 22: Hass: Israel forces internal movement permits on Palestinians)
13. The Israeli education minister has called for the prosecution of professors from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem because they have expressed their support for soldiers who refuse to serve in the territories.
14. Between 1996 and 1999 the Israeli Ministry of Interior confiscated 2,200 Jerusalem ID cards of families (roughly 8,800 individuals). These natives of Jerusalem whose families have lived there for hundreds of years, under Ottoman, British and Jordanian rule, were given tourist visas, valid for four weeks and were told to leave Jerusalem by a set date.
So why is President Bush and the US Senate insisting that Israel is a democracy?
The answers can be found in Christian Zionism, or what has been defined as “Christian support for Zionism,” a radical and racist movement which originated in the 1820s when a group of influential Christian leaders began to claim that the borders of the land promised to Abraham and the descendants of Isaac, from the Nile to the Euphrates, will become the future borders of the state of Israel and that the Jewish temple as described by the Prophet Ezekiel must one day be built in place of the Holy Mosque of Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. But that’s another macabre, malicious, malignant M-story.
— Dr. Afnan Hussein Fatani is professor of stylistics at King Abdul Aziz University. Currently she is a visiting professor at Dar Al-Hekma College, Jeddah. (To be continued)