Israeli Democracy A Transparent Attempt To Distract From Tyranny

Israel has held elections on average about every two years since about 2005.

Cambridge, MA, April 21 – Human rights activists warned today that the growing likelihood of the Jewish State holding new parliamentary elections this fall constitutes a blatant attempt to mask the dictatorial nature of the governmental system.

Harvard Fellow and former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth joined a number of colleagues to decry Israel’s use of its democracy to distract from its lack of democracy and its oppressive, tyrannical state. In an open letter published in The New York Times and the Washington Post, the activists described Israel’s Opposition Leader Benny Ganz’s call for early elections “a transparent attempt to divert the world’s attention from Israel’s failure to uphold democratic norms.”

Israel has held elections on average about every two years since about 2005, even though the standard legislative term lasts a little more than four years, owing to a fractured electorate that yields only the narrowest majorities for successive unstable coalitions. The writers called the democratic elections a mere cosmetic feature of the system, the same characterization that they gave Israel’s independent judiciary, rule of law, religious freedom, freedom of expression, and other hallmarks of democratic societies.

“It has been clear for a long time that when Israel adheres to policies and institutions of democracy,” the writers also wrote, “they do so not because it values democracy or those institutions, but only as cover for the nefarious depredations of Zionism and supremacy. This is a well-established principle in evaluating the legitimacy of Israel’s behavior. Wherever one can posit a dark ulterior motive, it becomes the default assumption of what drives that behavior or policy.”

Roth and his colleagues from Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the World Health Organization, and twelve other human and civil rights groups also cited the well-known model of “pinkwashing” as precedent: the established assumption on the part of activists that Israel’s openness to, even celebration of, LGBTQ people – with Tel Aviv hosting by far the largest Pride Parade in the Middle East – stems not from genuine care and tolerance but from a desire to distract from the country’s true evil nature.

“Given these axioms about Israel, the world must treat so-called Israeli democracy accordingly,” the letter concluded. “Until Palestinians are free to replace Israeli democracy by whatever means necessary with a violent repressive homophobic misogynistic Islamist theocracy pursuing global genocidal Islamic supremacism, Israel cannot honestly call itself a democracy.”

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