New Elections Announced: NGOs Slam Israel For Hogging Region’s Democracy

“Israel must relinquish its near-monopoly on this precious resource, to which everyone has a right.”

Jerusalem, May 29 – The increasing likelihood of a second round of parliamentary elections this year in Israel has prompted criticism from human rights organizations that the Jewish state monopolizes democratic resources in the Middle East, repeatedly exercising democratic processes while its neighbors get no chance to engage in the same activities.

Israel held elections on April 9 this year, but ongoing talks to form a governing coalition have yet to bear fruit, raising the prospect of another election if no agreement emerges in the next day. In the meantime, none of the country’s neighbors have held democratic elections in years, with the last Palestinian elections for parliament taking place in 2006, a fact that civil rights groups note indicates Israel claims all the Mideast democracy for itself and does not let anyone else in the area have any.

“It’s disturbing that Israel would flaunt its exercise of democracy while others have none,” charged Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch. “This only adds to the litany of things that Israel has refused to allow others to have. With a little more research, Human Rights Watch could probably produce the right evidence to accuse Israel of actively removing democracy from Palestinians or others for its own use, but that might take a couple of days. First we need to redefine ‘democracy’ to fit whatever Palestinians did before Israel, in addition to defining Palestinians as existing as such before Israel, and not as they actually identified, as Syrians or whatever clan association they had. On that score, much of the work has already been done in the public consciousness.”

Amnesty International issued its critique as well. “It is suspicious – we hesitate to invoke the word Apartheid, but only barely – that the only people Israel allows to participate in its democracy are its own citizens,” an organization statement read, in part. “In the meantime, the peoples of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle East states are left with only a pale imitation of democracy, if any. Israel must relinquish its near-monopoly on this precious resource, to which everyone has a right.”

Activists took pains to clarify that any voluntary provision by Israel of democracy to others in the region would be unacceptable. “It has to be taken by force or imposed by international pressure on Israel,” explained Issa Amro. “Otherwise it makes Arabs into passive recipients, which is only slightly less bad than the shame of having failed to destroy a bunch of Holocaust survivors and refugees they outnumbered and outgunned, and even losing territory to them. To avenge the Arab dishonor of Israel’s existence, anything Arabs get from the Jews has to be taken by force. That’s also why the Palestinians are rejecting Israeli offers of money even though they claim to be in dire financial straits. So if democracy does come to countries outside Israel, it better be because the Middle East Arabs captured it in war, or at least the threat of war.”

Roth added that removing democracy from Israel by force carried\s more importance than whatever happens to that democracy in its new location.

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