Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998, Page 13

Point of View

Celebrating 50 Years of Israeli Make-Believe

By Andrew I. Killgore

“Israel is observing its 50th anniversary, celebrating the vibrant democratic superpower...” —Ethan Bronner, The New York Times, April 23, 1998

Some things make me mad, especially as a white Southerner who grew up in the Alabama of the 1930s and 1940s when blacks couldn’t vote and many poor whites couldn’t either. It was the Alabama of racial segregation and white supremacy, of separate schools and separate drinking fountains for “whites” and “blacks;” where Governor George Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door” to stop black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama; and where Birmingham police chief “Bull” Connor sicced dogs on blacks demanding their rights.

Still I loved Alabama then, despite the fact that there were more whites who claimed that because they were “good” to African Americans, everything was all right than there were whites who sincerely tried to be fair in a system they recognized as basically unjust. But I like Alabama a lot better now when at least all the old legal underpinnings for segregation have been removed, and Alabama is a real democracy where every citizen can vote.

So nowadays I get a sinking feeling every time I read the hype about “democratic” Israel, exemplified by the quote at the beginning of this article from a front-page New York Times item.

Alabama and the rest of the South really have become democratic in the past 50 years with the abolishment of poll taxes and “literacy tests” for voters.

Israel, however, has retrogressed. All the old promises of equality before the law when the state was established in 1948 have long since been betrayed. Today they are echoed only in the pages of the naively dishonest Israel-leaning mainstream U.S. media.

No, the Jewish state is the segregated one today, and just as a Christian fundamentalist South attributed its unequal system to God’s will, Jewish fundamentalists and their secular Zionist allies have arrogated to their purposes a God under whose banner they claim all the land and all the human rights for themselves, and prove that they are “good” to the Palestinians because they offer them jobs at one-quarter the wages paid to Israelis for the same services.

What seems largely missing among Israelis, and totally absent among its American Jewish supporters, are the people trying to be fair-minded personally in an inherently unjust system.

Instead, all I see is The New York Times’ fantasized “vibrant democracy” which, in reality, confiscates Arab lands at will, tortures Palestinians legally, imprisons them for months and years without charges, and sends death squads to deal with those who object—all the while pleading, as did my fellow Southerners of more than half a century ago, that everything they do is according to God’s will.

Please!