There Should NOT Be a Jewish State!

Nor a White State, Nor a Christian State, Nor a Slave-based Confederacy State, Nor an Islamic State, Nor a Master-Race Third Reich State, Nor an Apartheid South Africa State...

WHEN ONE FULLY UNDERSTANDS WHY THIS ENORMOUS WONDERFUL DEMONSTRATION AGAINST ECONOMIC OPPRESSION, WITH THE SUPPORT OF 85% OR 90% OF THE ISRAELI POPULATION, WON NONE OF ITS JUST DEMANDS, THEN ONE WILL UNDERSTAND WHY THERE SHOULD NOT BE A JEWISH STATE. READ ON TO LEARN WHY.

In July of 2011 people in Israel (mainly, but not only Jews) launched a huge wave of protests against the Israeli government over the issue of their economic impoverishment.

"The 2011 Israeli social justice protests (Hebrew: מְחָאַת צֶדֶק חֶבְרָתִי‎), which are also referred to by various other names in the media, were a series of demonstrations in Israel beginning in July 2011 involving hundreds of thousands of protesters from a variety of socio-economic and religious backgrounds opposing the continuing rise in the cost of living (particularly housing) and the deterioration of public services such as health and education. A common rallying cry at the demonstrations was the chant; "The people demand social justice!".​

"As the protests expanded during August 2011, the demonstrations began to also focus on other related issues relating to the social order and power structure in Israel." 

The movement kept growing and growing, with mass demonstrations and people pitching tents on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. The movement reached its peak on September 3, 2011:

“On Saturday, September 3, an estimated 450,000 people participated in several demonstrations which were held over various locations across Israel and which were referred to by protest organizers as ‘The March of the Million.”

This wonderful movement of ordinary Israelis against their economic oppression by the Israeli ruling class had the support of 85% to 90% (according to newspaper polls) of the entire Israeli population. But it won NONE of its just demands, all because Israel is a Zionist state, as explained below.

Many people, despite knowing that Palestinians got the wrong end of the stick when the Jewish state of Israel was carved out of their country, support Israel for one reason: they oppose anti-Semitism, which led to the Holocaust and the deaths of more than five million European Jews. The dogma of Zionism [5] has been established in the minds of many: If one hates anti-Semitism then one must support the idea of a Jewish state and everything necessary to ensure its existence in the face of its enemies, no matter the consequences.

But this Zionist dogma is both morally and practically wrong. It is wrong for two fundamental reasons.​

• The project of a Jewish state in Palestine--by which the Zionist movement means a state in which Jews must always be a large majority [4] (which is accomplished by violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians who were the majority in what is now Israel), and in which only Jews constitute the sovereign authority (theoretically; in fact it is Jewish billionaires who have the real power)--is based on morally wrong discrimination (read the apartheid laws here for within Israel) against Palestinians. This is why sincere Jewish leaders like Albert Einstein opposed a Jewish state. [1]​

• Jewish leaders of the Zionist movement, in their drive to establish and strengthen a Jewish state,  have systematically betrayed ordinary Jews [2, and this is just the tip of the sordid iceberg!], especially during the Holocaust, with crimes that deserve to be labeled anti-Semitic. Read the sordid details here. The real reason these Zionist leaders want the Jewish state of Israel to exist is because it enables them to be a powerful and privileged elite, at the expense of everybody else, both Jews and non-Jews. They want, in other words, a Jewish working class of their own off of which to get rich and powerful.

What is the PURPOSE of the Israeli Government’s Violence Against, and Oppression of, Palestinians?

For the top leaders of the Zionist movement (in contrast to ordinary Jews who had either fanatical religious beliefs or just practical personal aims) the purpose of Israel’s violence against, and oppression of, Palestinians is NOT to make Israeli Jews safe. Not at all! The purpose is to make Palestinians FURIOUS and INTENSELY ANGRY at Israel, and even at Jews in general due to the fact that Israel attacks Palestinians IN THE NAME OF THE JEWS—using the military force of a SELF-DECLARED ‘JEWISH STATE.’

Why would anybody want to make Palestinians furious at Israel and at Jews?

Here’s why. The people who want to make Palestinians angry this way are not ordinary Israeli Jews. For them, the Palestinian anger is a terrible thing. Israel, just like the United States [3], has a billionaire ruling class. It is the billionaire ruling class of Israel (see some of its members below) who want, and NEED, Palestinians to be furious at Israel. Why?

The Israeli billionaire class needs Palestinians to be furious at Israel so that it can easily portray Palestinians to Israeli Jews as antisemites who want to kill all the Jews. But why does the Israeli billionaire class want to portray Palestinians to Israeli Jews this way?

The reason is this. The billionaires of Israel severely economically oppress the Israeli Jewish working class, to get and stay very rich at the expense of ordinary Israeli Jews. Naturally, working class Israeli Jews hate this, which is why, in 2011, there were massive demonstrations by 450,000 mostly Israeli Jews (with the support of 85% or 90% according to newspaper polls) of the entire Israeli population) against their economic oppression and against the rulers of Israel. Read in detail about these demonstrations here; this is a MUST read!

Read the article containing this photo here.

The ONLY way that the Israeli billionaire ruling class gets away with oppressing its Jewish have-nots is by using the Palestinians as a frightening bogeyman enemy. Israeli rulers pretend to be the protectors of Israeli Jews against their “real enemy—the Palestinians.” Whenever Israeli have-nots begin to fight the Israeli billionaire class to end their oppression, the Israeli rulers seize on the latest Palestine conflict violence and tell the Israeli have-nots, “You need to be patriotic and support your government that is protecting you from your real enemy, and stop your protests and demonstrations now!” This is exactly how Netanyahu killed the huge 2011 Israeli movement against economic oppression. Please read all about this, again in detail here.

Israeli rulers NEED ordinary Israeli Jews to FEAR Palestinians. This is why, in 1961 Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, lied to Israeli Jews by declaring with no evidence whatsoever that Arab armies intended to “push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive.”

Subsequently, Israel’s leaders realized that the Palestinian organization, the PLO, (despite engaging is some immoral terrorist violence against non-combatant Israeli civilians) was not sufficiently frightening to Israeli Jews. Why not? Because the PLO’s official aim (before being pressured into being for the horrible “two state solution”) was to make all of mandate Palestine (“from the River to the Sea”) be a single secular democratic state in which Jews and non-Jews would live as equals under the law in peace with each other. For Israel’s rulers, this was terrible! Too many Israeli Jews agreed with the PLO’s aim or at least hardly considered it an existential threat.

This is why Israel’s rulers decided to begin funding Hamas and working to keep it in power, because Hamas’s aim was indeed frightening to Israeli Jews; it was to make Islam sovereign in all of Mandate Palestine. More importantly, perhaps, was Hamas’s practice of terrorist violence against non-combatant Israeli Jews, initially with suicide bombs at Israeli bus stops and restaurants, then rockets aimed at civilians in Israeli towns, and of course finally the October 7 terror attack against Israeli non-combatant civilians. (Note that if Hamas had waged the CLASS WAR on behalf of all the have-nots against all the haves, it would have gained support from Israeli have-nots and thus weakened the Zionist Israeli ruling class’s power; but it did not do this, and would certainly have not received money from Israel’s rulers if it had!) Please read in detail how the Israeli government has for decades been funding Hamas and working to keep it in power here.

BUT WHAT ABOUT ALL THE HAMAS TERRORISM AGAINST ISRAELI CIVILIANS? CAN ISRAEL ALLOW THIS TO GO ON?

The first thing to say here is this:

If the Israeli government stopped treating Palestinians like dirt, i.e., if it ended the ethnic cleansing, allowed them to exercise their Right of Return to the part of Palestine now called Israel from which they were driven (most of the people in Gaza today are refugees because they or their parents or grandparents were violently expelled from what is now called Israel by Zionist forces in 1948 or later), made them equal under the law with Jews and provided just compensation for the theft by Zionists of their land and property, then virtually no Palestinians would support any violence against anyone just because they were Jewish or Israeli, and virtually all Palestinians would consider anybody who carried out such violence to be criminally immoral.

Peace, however, is the very LAST thing that Israel’s rulers want. They know that if there were peace, based on justice, then those 450,000 mostly Jewish Israelis who, with the support of 85% or 90% of the Israeli population, demonstrated against the Israeli government in 2011 would not have been so easily persuaded to stop their huge demonstrations by Netanyahu’s bogeyman enemy ruse. Israeli rulers know that peace would make it more likely that their have-nots would remove the billionaires who oppress them from power.

This is a fact that is NEVER, absolutely NEVER, reported in the mainstream media! And now you know why, right? U.S. rulers have the same goal as Israeli rulers, to keep the have-nots in fear of each other rather than united against the haves. Read more about this here (PDF, give it time to load).

OF COURSE ISRAEL SHOULD NOT ALLOW THE HAMAS TERRORISM TO CONTINUE.

Israel’s government should immediately do that which would end the terrorism and turn virtually all Palestinians AGAINST Hamas terrorists: stop treating the Palestinians like dirt.

But now you know the reason why the Israeli government will not do that.

BUT SOME ORDINARY NON-HAMAS PALESTINIANS IN GAZA CELEBRATED THE HAMAS TERRORISM AND EVEN EAGERLY PARADED IN THE STREET THE BODY OF AN ISRAELI WOMAN CAPTURED AND KILLED BY HAMAS WHILE THEY ATTACKED THE WOMAN’S BODY (according to a British reporter)

Yes, it is true that by doing absolutely everything they could think of to torment and humiliate and ethnically cleanse Palestinians to make them furious at Israel—the “State of the Jews”—the Israeli ruling class achieved its goal of making some Palestinians hate Israeli Jews. Read here the enormity of what it took to create this hatred in some Palestinians.

For some perspective, however, read here what most Palestinians want, despite the efforts of Hamas and Israel to make them hateful.

But for real perspective now, please think about how you would have responded to these immoral terrorist acts in the past.

Three important historical conflicts that involved terrorism against civilians come to mind: American Indians versus white settlers, black slaves versus whites in the American South, and blacks versus whites in apartheid South Africa.  Below are examples of such terrorism from each of these conflicts -- terrorism against white settlers, white Southerners, and white South Africans.

Jefferson County's last Indian massacre occurred on July 17, 1789, when the family of Richard Chenoweth, builder of Louisville's Fort Nelson, was attacked.  Three of Chenoweth's children and two soldiers guarding them were killed at the family home on Chenoweth Run about a mile west of Floyds Fork. [source here]​

"In August 1831, Nat Turner and his small band of black rebels wreaked fear, violence and murder in Southhampton County, Virginia. Attempting to strike a crushing blow against the institution of slavery, Turner and slave insurgents killed approximately sixty whites, many of whom were children." [http://jsr.fsu.edu/Volume7/Jones.htm]

In South Africa in 1986 Robert McBride, a member of the ANC's special operations unit, bombed Magoos Bar on the Durban beachfront, killing three people and injuring 80, nearly all of them white.

In all three cases the victims were no less innocent than Jewish victims of Palestinian (Hamas) suicide bombers and rockets and the October 7 attack, the violence no less wrong. American Indians, as virtually everybody now concedes, were the victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing. American slaves were the victims of the morally indefensible practice of chattel slavery. Blacks in South Africa were the victims of apartheid.​

White settlers could have responded to the American Indian terrorism in either of two basic ways: increase their support for the U.S. cavalry's genocidal campaign against American Indians, or end the conflict by opposing their government's genocide and seeking to live with American Indians in peace by respecting them as human beings with rights fully equal to their own. 

Southern whites could have responded to Nat Turner by supporting  increased security measures to protect whites from blacks in a slave society, or by abolishing slavery.

White South Africans had to choose between supporting the apartheid government and its draconian methods for controlling the black population under apartheid, or abolishing apartheid.

In these kinds of conflicts, the choice is between standing in solidarity with people who are fighting against a terrible injustice, or using the violence by—or in the name of—oppressed people against innocent civilians as an excuse for taking the side of those perpetuating the injustice.

In every case cited above, the root cause of the conflict was a fundamental injustice; terrorism was merely a response, however indefensible, of some of the victims to the injustice. In every case the morally right response to the terrorism was to abolish the injustice, not to step up security measures against the American Indians or slaves or black South Africans. Note that this is true regardless of the morality or immorality of the terrorist acts.

How would YOU have responded to these historical acts of terrorism? Do you think you should respond to Hamas terrorism any differently?

IT IS ANTISEMITIC NOT TO OPPOSE ZIONISM

If you have read the above carefully, then you will understand why it is antisemitic NOT to oppose Zionism. Zionism is the way that the actual oppressors of Israeli Jews—the top Zionist leaders and Israeli billionaires—get away with it.

The purpose of the Zionist narrative about the need for Jews to have a “state of their own” is to provide a pretext (that would have the support of naive ordinary Jews) for treating the Palestinians like dirt IN THE NAME OF THE JEWS, for the REAL (unstated, of course) aim of the top Zionist leaders: to make the Palestinians be the frightening bogeyman enemy that the top Zionist leaders and billionaires need to control and oppress and get rich off of Israeli working class people.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO “DEFEND ISRAEL’S RIGHT TO EXIST”?

Defending Israel’s “right to exist” means defending the Israeli billionaire ruling class’s right to commit extreme violent oppression of Palestinians in order to commit extreme economic oppression of Israeli Jews. There is no valid moral reason to “defend Israel’s right to exist,” any more than there is a valid moral reason to defend, say, the right to exist of the slave-based Confederacy or the Master-Race-based Third Reich. Governments or states do not have a right to exist, and ought NOT to exist when, like the State of Israel, they are based on the violent oppression of one ethnic group.

DO JEWS HAVE A RIGHT TO REMAIN IN THE PART OF PALESTINE CALLED ISRAEL?

Yes. Jews have a right to remain in the part of Palestine called Israel, but not as citizens of a Zionist state based on the extreme oppression of Palestinians, and not as the possessors of land and property stolen from Palestinians (see the next section about this), and not as armed thugs who burn the olive trees of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank and violently attack them as trespassers on land “given by God to the Jews.” Jews have a right to live in Palestine as the equals of non-Jews under the law, but not otherwise.

Abolishing the State of Israel does not mean “killing all the Jews” or “pushing the Jews into the sea,” no more than abolishing the slave Confederacy meant killing every white person living south of the Mason-Dixon line, or that abolishing the Third Reich meant killing all Germans, or that abolishing the apartheid South African state meant killing all the whites in South Africa. Zionists, of course, want people to believe that anti-Zionism means killing all the Jews, but it’s just a propaganda lie!

SHOULD JEWS HAVE TO RETURN, OR PAY PALESTINIANS FOR, THE HOUSES AND LAND THAT THEY LIVE IN THAT WERE STOLEN BY ZIONISTS FROM PALESTINIANS?

Yes. But what the Zionists don’t want people to know is that there is a way for Palestinians to have their homes and land returned (if they wish) or be properly compensated for their loss, a way that would be very popular with BOTH most Palestinians AND most Israeli Jews. Read about this way of doing it here. Then you will see WHY the Zionist leaders don’t want people to know about it.

WE NEED TO INFORM THE GENERAL PUBLIC ABOUT THIS

If the general public understood this KEY fact about Zionism—that it is a way for the Israeli billionaire class to get away with oppressing ordinary Israeli Jews—, then Jewish people (working class ones, anyway) who, before knowing the truth were passionately pro-Israel Zionists, would be part of the anti-Zionism movement, and the millions of non-Jews who once supported Israel because they wrongly believed that that was the way to NOT be antisemitic would come to see that the way to NOT be antisemitic is to support the ANTI-Zionism movement.

One big reason why the general public does not understand this key truth about Zionism is because anti-Zionism leaders refuse to express it, and instead agree with the Zionist lie that says Zionist violence is for the purpose of making Jews safe. Read about this failure of the anti-Zionism leaders here and (with regard to Jewish Voice for Peace specifically) here.

As a result of this failure of the anti-Zionism leaders, the anti-Zionism movement remains too weak to win, as I discuss in my “Dear Fellow Anti-Zionist” letter.

And as a further result of this failure of the anti-Zionism leaders, the haves are able to turn the have-nots against each other for divide-and-rule, as I discuss here and here and here.

BUT WHY PICK ON ISRAEL?

Israel’s defenders have a stock argument that goes like this:

"Why do people pick on Israel? Sure, Israel has its faults, just like any country. Its government is not perfect and sometimes it does bad things. What government doesn’t? But how come some people seem to focus only on Israel? Boycott Israel, divest from Israel, they say; but never boycott Russia or China or Saudi Arabia or a host of other countries that do bad things. Israel, they say, violates human rights of Palestinians. If they’re so concerned about human rights, how come they’re not bothered by China’s attack on Tibetans, or Russia’s attack on Chechens, or Saudi Arabia’s attack on women’s human rights? Hmmm. Why would people want to just pick on tiny little Israel, a Jewish state? Only one reason...they’re anti-Semites."

Nice try, but this defense of Israel is easily refuted. There are a lot of excellent reasons for singling Israel out, and none of them have anything to do with anti-Semitism.

#1. Jesus put it this way. “Why do you behold the mote in your brother’s eye but consider not the beam in your own eye?” For Americans, Israel's crimes are the beam in our own eye. The crimes of China and Russia and Saudi Arabia, etc., are the motes in the eyes of others. Our government supports Israel with virtually unconditional diplomatic support and vastly more military and economic aid than it gives to any other nation. Israel gets this overwhelming U.S. aid because it serves the aims not of ordinary Americans but of our ruling upper class (see #4 and #5 below.) No other country plays this role and receives this kind of support from our government today.

#2. Israel is not the only nation that carries out ethnic cleansing, but it is the only nation that is founded on the principle of ethnic cleansing. Israel defines itself as a state of the Jews. Unlike every other state on the planet, which all at least purport to be a state of the people who live in it, Israel adamantly insists it is not a state of the people who live in it, one fifth of whom are not Jewish. Israel is not officially a state of its residents. It is officially (not really, as discussed above) a state of “the Jews" and ONLY of the Jews. And by “the Jews” Israel means Jews wherever they live, including Jews who never lived inside Israel and who have no intention of ever living there. Israel insists that its population must be overwhelmingly Jewish and so it drove out 80% of the non-Jews in 1948 and continues to this day to carry out a brutal ethnic cleansing to get rid of the Palestinians by making life so unbearable for them that they will leave Palestine. No other country does this today.

#3. Israel is the only nation that self-righteously accuses any critic of its ethnic cleansing of being a bigot (anti-Semite.) It is the only nation that insists that its racist policies are “a light unto the nations.” If we let Israel get away with this we are contributing not only to its actual ethnic cleansing, but to its glorification of the principle of ethnic cleansing, which aids and abets this crime everywhere in the world. No other country, not even ones that engage in it, glorify ethnic cleansing this way today.

#4. Israel is the only nation that spreads contempt around the world for the idea of democracy by defining it to mean the government choosing the people instead of the other way around. Israel boasts that it is the “only democracy in the Middle East.” Democracy is an extremely good thing. It is a valuable idea that humanity needs to embrace and that elite rulers try to discredit. But democracy means that the people who live in a state choose its government. In Israel, on the contrary, the government, in the name of democracy, has officially* chosen the people–“the Jews”–and has driven 80% of the un-chosen people out of its borders and made the remaining 20% of them second class citizens completely excluded from the category of people who are officially the sovereign authority over the state. No other country does this today.

#5. No other country surpasses Israel’s polarizing of the entire world, between Muslims versus non-Muslims, by carrying out vicious and gratuitous attacks on the same mainly Muslim population for more than seven decades without let up. Israel thereby foments not only a regional ethnic war but a global "War on Terrorism" that serves the same Orwellian social-control needs of all world elites (from the U.S. to China to Russia to Saudi Arabia) that the Cold War served in the past. No other country does this today.

#6. More can be learned about our own United States, and about the source of our own domestic problems and how to solve them, by understanding why it is right to divest from and boycott Israel than by understanding why it might be good to divest from and boycott Russia or China or any other country. The reason is that our domestic problems, like job insecurity, illegal immigration, war, lack of health care, extreme inequality and so on are caused by our corporate and government leaders for the purpose of making us easier for them to control.

These same U.S. leaders have singled out Israel, unique among all other nations, to enjoy their unwavering and overwhelming support for the same reason–Israel helps to foment the global war that makes the world population easier to control. To understand why our leaders support Israel, and why they pretend to seek peace in that region but never put real pressure on Israel to stop its unjust ethnic cleansing, is to gain insight into how these same leaders control us by deliberately creating the very domestic problems they claim to be trying to solve. We need that insight to build a revolutionary movement to create a real democracy in the United States instead of the fake democracy we have now, controlled by a wealthy and privileged upper class.

Of all the foreign nations that we have been lied to about how wonderful they are and how deserving of our support they are, the lies about Israel are the ones that our rulers have used most effectively to get us to support a foreign policy of warmongering designed to strengthen upper class control over working people around the world. No other nation plays this role today.

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FOOTNOTES (SOURCES)

1. Albert Einstein, on April 17, 1938, in a speech at the Commodore Hotel in New York City, said:​

   "I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from practical consideration, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain -- especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state." [1]

   In January, 1946, in a reply to the question of whether refugee settlement in Palestine demanded a Jewish state, Einstein told the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry:

   "The State idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with narrow-minded and economic obstacles. I believe it is bad. I have always been against it." [2]

   On December 4, 1948 Einstein, Hanna Arendt and a number of other eminent Jews co-signed a letter to the New York Times on the occasion of (future Israeli prime minister) Menachem Begin's visit to the United States. The letter began as follows:​

   "Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

   ​

   "The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents."

   1. 1. Albert Einstein, in Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, New York, 1954, p. 190

   2. Alfred M. Lilienthal, What Price Israel?, 50th Anniversary edition, 2003, pg. 130 

2. “During the Holocaust, Israel’s (to be) first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and other top Zionist leaders opposed any rescue of Jews from the Nazis if it entailed sending the rescued Jews anywhere other than Palestine. Why? Because these top Zionist leaders wanted a Jewish working class of their own to be able to rule over and get rich off of in the new Jewish State in Palestine. In 1938 David Ben-Gurion said:

   ““If I knew that it would be possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel." [Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Henry Holt & Co., New York, First Owl Books Edition 2000, p. 28 ]

3. This academic study reported in the journal Perspectives on Politics [DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595 ] published September 18, 2014, by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, (also described here and here and here) concludes with the following statements:

   "Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."

   "When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."

   "Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."

   In other less academic wording, we have a fake democracy that is actually a dictatorship of the rich.

   The first author, Martin Gilens, is professor of politics at Princeton University. The second author, Benjamin I. Page, is the Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making, Northwestern University.

4. Section 7A(1) of the Basic Law of Israel explicitly prevents Israeli citizens – Arab or Jewish – from using the "democratic" system of Israeli elections to challenge the inferior status of Arabs under the law; it restricts who can run for political office with this language: "A candidates' list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset if among its goals or deeds, either expressly or impliedly, are one of the following: (1) The negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the State of the Jewish People. …" In a 1989 Israeli Supreme Court ruling (reported in the 1991 Israel Law Review, Vol. 25, p. 219, published by the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Justice S. Levine, speaking for the majority, ruled that this law meant that a political party could not run candidates if it intended to achieve the cancellation of one of the fundamental tenets of the State – namely "the existence of a Jewish majority, the granting of preference to Jews in matters of immigration, and the existence of close and reciprocal relations between the State and the Jews of the Diaspora."

   ​

5. Zionism is not a derogatory word. It is the self-declared name of the movement that began in 1896 to create a Jewish state. It began with Theodor Herzl’s publication of his book, titled “The Jewish State.” This book said (falsely!) that all non-Jews were innately (permanently) antisemitic, and therefore the only sensible thing for Jews to do was to create a Jewish state somewhere, a “normal” state but just for Jews, with a majority Jewish population, in which the sovereign power would be only Jews, not all of its citizens. From the very beginning, Zionism thus rejected the principle that the legitimacy of a government is based on the consent of the people it ruled.

   Before the emergence of the modern Zionist movement, Jews and Muslims and Christians lived in peace together (under the Ottoman Empire) in what became after World War I British Mandate Palestine (from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea). The myth that the Muslims and Jews there have been at war with each other from time immemorial is a lie, a propaganda lie.

   The Zionist movement got a green light from Great Britain after WWI to settle large numbers of Jewish immigrants in British-controlled Mandate Palestine. Over subsequent years of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the fact gradually became known to the peasant farmer Palestinians that the Zionist movement aimed to create a Jewish state in Palestine, a state in which officially ONLY Jewish people are sovereign, a state that officially requires a robust Jewish majority population (at least 80% as stated by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion [The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe, p.48]) achieved by expelling most of the original non-Jews from it, a state in which Jews have rights that are denied to (what would become the minority of) non-Jews in it. This is when Palestinian hostility to Zionism began and by 1936 there were Palestinian riots against the Zionists. At this time Zionists (the Jewish National Fund) were buying land from wealthy absentee Palestinian land owners and then evicting the Palestinian peasants who farmed the land, laying the basis for an implicit alliance of Zionists and wealthy Palestinians against the have-not Palestinians.