Israel’s Defenders Say Legal Equality Would Bring Repression and Bloodshed

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guests will be Aslı Bâli, professor international law at Yale, and Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. When I imagine the people I’d want to advise the next Democratic president, Asli and Trita are near the top of my list. They care deeply about the United States but they’re not American exceptionalists, which helps them see past the mythology that prevents so many in Washington from understanding American foreign policy’s actual impact on the rest of the world. In a perfect illustration of the insanity of contemporary Washington, Trita— whose predictions about this criminal and catastrophic war have been proven entirely correct—is being threatened with deportation. We’ll talk about why this war happened, how it has changed the Middle East and world, and whether Washington will ever learn. Please join us. Ask Me Anything This Thursday, June 25, at 4 PM Eastern, we will hold an Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY. Things to Read (Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.) In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Zachary Jablow writes about why the US media still pretends that America’s Mideast wars are about democracy. The Jewish candidate for New York City comptroller who wants to divest from Israel bonds. On the Spiritually Incorrect podcast, I talked about American Christians, American Jews and the US debate over Israel. See you on Thursday and Friday, Peter VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: I’ve done a couple conversations recently with folks who argued that if there were equality under the law in Israel-Palestine—if Jews and Palestinians, were treated equally under the law wherever they lived, whether that was in one state or in two states where Jews and Palestinians both lived and were treated equally under the law, or in a confederation, you know, something in between—that liberal democracy would fail, that there would be some kind of dictatorship or authoritarianism, and also that there would be tremendous, tremendous violence, terrible bloodshed. This was really their primary rejoinder to my argument that, equality under the law would better serve the people who live in Israel-Palestine today than the system where you have now, where Jews enjoy legal rights, and Palestinians either hold no citizenship or a kind of second-class citizenship. And I think it’s just worth pausing on this argument that equality under the law would produce a dictatorship, you know, authoritarianism, and also tremendous bloodshed. What I find odd about the argument is that it’s imagining terrible things in the future that could happen if a true liberal democracy failed, without acknowledging that those same terrible things that folks are warning about exist now. It’s odd to say that an Israel-Palestine that treated everybody equally under the law might not succeed as a liberal democracy, without acknowledging that Israel is not a liberal democracy for Palestinians today. Most of the Palestinians who live under Israeli control, those in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, don’t hold Israeli citizenship—a very small number in East Jerusalem, but generally, vast majority in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem live under the control of the State of Israel. It has life and death power over them, but they can’t be citizens of the state in which they live. They can’t vote for the government that has life and death decision-making power over them. In the West Bank, they live under military law, under a completely different legal system than their Jewish neighbors, right? So, this is not by anyone’s definition, I think, could be considered a liberal democracy. This is the situation in which most Palestinians live. A minority of Palestinians, so-called Arab-Israelis, have a kind of second-class citizenship where they can vote, but the structure of th