3-16-2014 "What Threatens Israel Most? Democracy - David Lloyd Los Angeles Review of Books [One of 8 essays in the LA Review of Books on the Academic Boycott

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/threatens-israel-democracy

 

“At the heart of this system of exclusion and racial subordination is Israel’s peculiar distinction between citizenship and nationality. In every other democratic state, to be a national is pretty much synonymous with being a citizen, regardless of one’s ethnicity, national origin, or religion. In Israel, the distinction between citizenship (ezrahut) and nationality (le’om) is fundamental and consequential: from this distinction stems a whole series of differential and discriminatory laws and practices that privilege Jewish “nationals” at the expense of Palestinians. The distinction, which the Israeli Supreme Court upheld as recently as 2013, is justified as a means to preserve “the country’s Jewish character” and is the very core of Israel’s polity. But it means that not only is Israel not a “state of all its people,” it is also a state that explicitly and deliberately excludes the significant minority of its citizens who are also its indigenous people….

 

Discrimination takes many forms. Perhaps the most telling is the denial to Palestinians of the right to live on most of Israel’s land, even in places that originally belonged to their families for generations prior to 1948….

 

The most effective means to end the dilemmas that colonialism produces is to end the system of colonialism, not to seek to preserve it in a limited fashion. This is what the movement for boycott and divestment from Israel aims to achieve…

                                                                                                                                                                                

            

Posted by Judith Ferster, AIME member

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