Not a ‘vibrant democracy’
Hannah Allam explored the status of shared values between the United States and Israel on the background of brazenly racist speeches by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (“Alliance under stress,” March 20). To be sure, their principal opponents, Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, are racists, too.
The U.S. and Israel shared values back in 1948, when Zionists established a state for one kind of people in the homeland of the multi-ethnic Palestinian peoples, declaring Israel to be the “Jewish and democratic” state. The past seven decades have seen the dispossession, the concentration, the expulsion and the killing of non-Jewish Palestinian peoples.
But in the U.S., our values evolved differently. A civil rights campaign led to the dismantling of many of the institutions of segregation. Although the U.S. had never formally presented itself as a “white and democratic” state, it gradually ceased to function as one. Our society came to affirm that the human family embraced people of color.
When Americans speak of Israel as a “vibrant democracy,” they are forgetting the second-class status of the 20 percent of Israelis who are Palestinian. They are also forgetting the millions of stateless Palestinians and refugees in the occupied territories and in neighboring countries.
Wayne Kraft
Spokane