Democracy and Law in Israel
The 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence promised to base the new country on “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”. It also promised to be faithful to the UN that underwrote the partition of Palestine and whose fortress of international laws was meant to protect Jews and all people henceforth from crimes against humanity. Israel has travelled a long way since its founding, away from democracy, equality and law toward inequality, human rights violations, and legalized land theft by military conquest: a breach of the most basic international law and the UN Charter. The very system of rights that gave birth to Israel has broken down there, with the support of the Trump administration.
Under international law, it’s unlawful for any country to annex land gained by military force. In 1948 Israeli troops immediately spread beyond the 55% of Palestine assigned for their state and seized almost 80%, driving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians off their land and destroying 534 towns and villages. For 70 years, Israel has continually appropriated Palestinian land by wars and illegal settlements while stripping non-Jews of rights in Israel proper.
With the support of the Trump administration, Israel now continues to seize land with complete impunity.
• In February 2018, the Israeli government retroactively legalized land seizure and settler homes on Palestinian land.
• In August 2018 Netanyahu’s government told its Supreme Court that Israel could violate the sovereignty of foreign countries and ignore international law wherever it chose.
• In December 2018 the Knesset formally declared that Israel is not a democracy with equal rights but a Jewish state with rights only for Jews.
• Israel has absorbed all Jerusalem and welcomed President Trump’s declaration that Syrian land (the Golan) belongs to Israel. This declaration paves the way to annexation of the remaining pockets of Palestinian territory in the West Bank and Gaza.
What if in every case where an army moves into someone else’s territory, the world was to say “Aw, you can have it if you stay there long enough”? Didn’t the world struggle to free Europe from German occupation? Didn’t we support the liberation of colonized countries – India and much of Ireland from Britain, Algeria from France, and an end to the apartheid regime in South Africa so its original inhabitants could have equal rights with white settlers there? Is the US now to be an international outlaw, endorsing the theft of land from Syria, punishing Syrians on top of all else they’ve suffered in recent years, while abandoning Palestinians to their fate? Is the US now an agent of military conquest of other people’s countries? Syria isn’t ours to give away to Israel. Nor are the West Bank and Gaza. Nor should our US dollars support a country that denies basic democratic rights and freedoms to its people. Israel set out to be a land of rights and law and so did the US. We’re both failing. What will we do about it?
