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Israel's dystopian dictatorship

September 28, 2015 at 3:22 pm

Israel takes great pride in its propaganda claim to be the “only democracy in the Middle East”. This is something it bangs on about at sanctimonious length in every international forum it has access to.

As well as being totally false for Palestinians (more of which below) it is entirely hypocritical. In reality, Israel has long had an important role in supporting, propping up and being in tacit or open alliance with the region’s worst dictatorships and human rights abusers.

The undemocratic regimes in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia for example. But it also includes the Iran-Contra episode of the 1980s in which Israel was recruited by the US to sell weapons to Iran; the profits were used to aid the terror war of the right-wing Contra army against the revolutionary government of Nicaragua (the US President at the time needed to get around Congress, which had imposed some limits on aid to the Contras after the record of their war crimes became impossible to ignore).

The Hashemite monarchy in Jordan has, despite some conflicts, too often served as a buffer between Palestinian anger and resistance, and Israel. The Black September war of the early 1970s being only one example. More recently, the Jordanian regime has played a key role in training anti-democratic, pro-imperialist forces in the region, such as when it trained and armed the Palestinian Contras led by the former Gaza warlord Mohammed Dahlan, whose failed 2007 coup attempt in the Gaza Strip (backed by Israel and the US) was nipped in the bud by forces loyal to the elected Palestinian Authority government of the time (led by Hamas).

The record of the Israeli alliance with the Egyptian military regime is well-documented and long standing. It goes back to Anwar Sadat, and the unequal peace treaty he signed with Israel. It only flourished under Hosni Mubarak, another unelected dictator. In 2011, when a popular uprising finally unseated Mubarak, the Israeli press was a sight to behold, as Israeli politician after Israeli politician worried and fretted about “our ally in Cairo” being pushed out. They need not have worried too much, since the Deep State apparatus soon reasserted itself, with the military maintaining a grip on power throughout the all-too-brief budding of democracy, and fully reasserting control by brutally crushing all dissent, gunning protesters off the streets and kidnapping, disappearing and now threatening to execute the first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi.

The links between Israel and Saudi Arabia are less well known, but in the last few years have become increasingly open.

The kingdom of horrors and executors is the fount of the worst religious fanaticism in the region, its extremist vision of Wahhabism spreading malignly across the world. All of this is backed by the imperial power in Washington DC and its minor allies such as the UK, but also increasingly Israel too, as I have reported before. For all the cant about wanting to spread “western values” of democracy and human rights to the region, the western powers in fact prop up some of the most regressive forces in the world, and then act all surprised when such support ends up indirectly fuelling hideous chimeras such as al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State.

But not only is “the only democracy in the Middle East” a total hypocrisy of the worst kind, it is also a complete lie.

For Palestinians living under the Israeli regime, Israel represents nothing less than an absolute dictatorship which has complete say over every aspect of their lives. Israeli democratic institutions, such as they are, are largely restricted in law and in practice to Jews only. Only a handful of recent examples is enough to demonstrate this.

Last month Mahmoud Tamimi, a young Palestinian protester in the village of Nabi Saleh was kidnapped by Israeli soldiers during one of the village’s weekly protests against the encroachment of nearby Israeli settlements (which are illegal under international law). Yet he still festers in the dungeons of Israel’s farcical military courts system.

An anonymous Italian volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement who was arrested at the same time as Tamimi reflected on the apartheid nature of this dystopian regime, by observing that he was soon released and acquitted of the false stone-throwing charges, only a day later.

Tamimi, on the other hand, because he is a Palestinian with none of the basic legal rights Israeli law has established under its civilian courts system for its citizens, will be waiting until the end of October (a full two months after soldiers arrested him) to even hear what he is accused of.

Another example, that of 24-year-old Mahmoud Nasser serves to show the Orwellian world of the Israeli injustice system, and the arbitrary nature of life as a Palestinian under Israel’s permanent military regime.

The Shin Bet (Israel’s secret police) has, using conveniently vague language, accused Nasser of “posing a security threat to Israel”. But even in the kangaroo court of the military “justice” system, the judge (who is a soldier too) decided there was not evidence against him. Bizarrely, rather than Nasser then being released for lack of evidence, as one might expect, the court imposed prohibitively expensive “bail” conditions on him anyway, which in effect could lead to him being imprisoned for 18 months or more, essentially because an Israeli spy agency decided it could.

As the ISM (which is raising funds to try and release Nasser) correctly puts it, in fact: “what [Israel] constitutes ‘a security threat’ is interpreted extremely broadly. A variety of actions is criminalized, including non-violent political and cultural expressions, such as putting up posters, writing political slogans, carrying a Palestinian flag or attending a demonstration.”

And of course Israel’s military regime is all-to-often deadly for unarmed Palestinians going about their daily lives. Only last week Israeli soldiers in occupied Hebron brutally murdered 18-year-old Hadeel Haslamoun.

None of this is the behaviour of a democratic country.

An associate editor with The Electronic Intifada, Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist who lives in London.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.