"It fundamentally misunderstands Israeli politics and the nature of the Israeli state."

"Ill be speaking to the Joint Christian Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC."

"On May 18, Ill be speaking to Town Hall Seattle and Third Place Books in Seattle, Washington."

"This is explicitly being billed as people coming together across the ideological spectrum to defeat Netanyahu and to save Israeli liberal democracy. So, both Bennett and Lapid have cited what happened in Hungary, where the opposition forces kind of united in a broad tent to defeat Viktor Orban as a kind of model for defeating Netanyahu."

"And so, this appears to be that same dynamic happening in Israel, and I suspect there will be a lot of coverage in the American press that looks at it in this way. Its fundamentally wrong. It fundamentally misunderstands Israeli politics and the nature of the Israeli state. It may be the case that Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid both want Israel to remain a democracy based on the rule of law for Israeli Jews, and that there is a significant contrast with Netanyahu, in his kind of Trump-like way, basically wants to weaken the checks on the power of the Prime Minister in Israel in a way that would essentially allow him to override the rights of Israeli Jews, and of institutions that protect the rights of Israeli Jews, like the Israeli Supreme Court. But this is fundamentally different than what were talking about in Hungary or in the opposition to Trump in the United States, because Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid are not talking about preserving democracy and the rule of law for the 50% of the people who live under Israeli control who are Palestinian. Not at all, right? To understand Israeli politics, one has to always start with the recognition that there are about 7 million Jews and about 7 million Palestinians between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. All of the Jews have citizenship and the right to vote for the government that controls their lives. Of the 7 million Palestinians, about 3 million live in the West Bank, under military law, without citizenship, without the right to vote for the Israeli government that has life and death power over them, and another 2 million in Gaza, similarly cant become citizens of the Israeli state. The Israeli state has killed perhaps 100,000 of them, but theres no voice they have over the Israeli government. And then you have 2 million of those 7 million Palestiniansa minority, less than a thirdwho are citizens of Israel, right? And so, they could be said to be living within a democracy. But even they are not fully equal members of Israels political system. And if anyone had any doubt about how deep the consensus is in Israel that even the minority of Palestinians under Israeli control who hold citizenship, that they are not equal citizens, we only need to look to what Bennett and Lapid just said this week in coming together. Bennett said, weYair Lapid and Naftali Bennettwill create an Israeli government which includes only Zionist parties. What does that mean? That is a way of saying we will not allow any of the parties that get their votes primarily from Palestinian citizens of Israel. We will not allow them into our government coalition because they are not Zionist, right? This Zionist line is basically a code for Palestinian, right? Because actually, some of the ultra-Orthodox parties are not technically necessarily Zionists either, but they dont have a problem with having them in the government. The idea is that basically it has to be a government of Jews, and so even the minority of Palestinians who do have citizenship and the right to vote in Israel, even they cannot be part of this government, right, which is supposedly a government which is designed to protect Israeli democracy, right? But the entire discourse you see here of what democracy means is saturated with the underlying assumption that one is talking about democracy for Jews. Its never even considered, right, that you might actually be talking about democracy for all people. After all, Naftali Bennett, one of the two figures whos supposedly coming together to defend Israeli democracy is the former head of the Yesha Council, the former head of the settler movement in the West Bank. And Bennett also said that this new government would not concede one centimeter of land in the West Bank. So, the idea of talking about this as if its the same as what happened in Hungary, or the same as a Democratic Party effort to defeat Donald Trump, or an effort to overturn the Hindu nationalism in India, is completely misguided, right? It misunderstands the fact that all of Israeli Jewish politics, essentially, takes place within an ethno-nationalist framework, in which the very language of democracy itself is really, largely confined to the idea of democracy for Jews. Democracy for Palestinians is almost not even a subject of conversation when people like Bennett and Lapid talk about the very idea of democracy because the idea of ethno-nationalism, of Jewish supremacy so saturates the Israeli discourse. To understand Israeli politics, it really makes much more sense to think not about Israel as being similar to the US or Hungary, but to think about Israeli politics as being a bit like politics in the Jim Crow South, in which you could have fierce personal divisions between different political factions, and even different divisions about how they might govern as it related to white Southerners, right? But on the question of whether Black Southerners should have the right to vote, and should be considered part of the political process, that was simply off of the table. Because there was a very broad consensus up until the Civil Rights Movement that you had to maintain a system of white supremacy. So, even to talk, therefore, about democracy and maintaining and supporting democracy in Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia in the 1940s and 50s was understood to mean democracy for white people. Thats exactly the same way that Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid are talking about democracy in Israel today: democracy for Jews. And the American politicians and American media, as they look towards this election season, should not fall into this trap. The differences between Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, and Benjamin Netanyahu, on certain issues, again, as it has to do with the relationship between religion and state for Jews in Israel, the role of the judiciary for Jews in Israelbecause the Supreme Court in Israel overwhelmingly does not protect Palestinians, as many studies have shownthat distinction among how they might treat Jews is significant. But on the fundamental question of whether Israel would be a country that provides democracy for its Palestinian citizens, and provides them with equality under the law, this is no protection for democracy at all."