Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist cabinet will help expose the reality of Zionism that has existed under a liberal disguise, says a pro-Palestine activist.
Faraan: Charlotte Kates, an international coordinator for the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, made the comments in an interview with Press TV on Sunday. “There is this Zionist narrative of the Israeli occupation regime being a liberal democracy, and what this [cabinet] is doing is helping to expose the reality that Palestinians have been living with for 75 years on a daily basis,” Kates said.
The reality is that this “sham of liberal democracy” is built on the dispossession of Palestinians and the expropriation of their land and property, she added. The activist said that the current conflict in Israel over the future of the court is not a battle between authoritarianism versus democracy, but rather, it is about the best way to “sell Zionism” to the population and to the world at large.
Kates argued that the actions of Netanyahu’s cabinet will in some way help “expose the reality of Zionism that has always existed under the liberal cloaking that is provided by the judicial authorities.” Tens of thousands of protesters have flooded the streets over the past days in Tel Aviv and other cities across the occupied Palestinian territories to slam the so-called planned reforms announced by the regime’s new cabinet earlier this month, including a “derogation clause” that allows Knesset (the regime’s parliament) to override the decisions that are made by the Supreme Court.
“From the beginning, the so-called Israeli civil court system has never been a civil system for Palestinians; … it has always functioned as a weapon and a tool of the Zionist project,” Kates said. She further explained that the court’s rulings were only meant to “preserve Zionism.” This edition of the program is about the mass protests in Israel against Netanyahu and his policies. Israels society is deeply divided and polarized after the formation of the most extremist cabinet under Netanyahu.
‘Israel is apartheid, not liberal democracy’
Miko Peled, an author and human rights activist, also told Press TV that it would be a mistake to think that Israeli protesters are rallying against the oppression and inevitable disaster that is going to come upon Palestinians as a result of the new cabinet. “The Israelis are used to living in a very privileged life politically, socially, and economically, and they are worried that this [cabinet] may be infringing on some of those privileges,” he argued. He described the members of the new cabinet as “racist and violent thugs,” of whom the so-called Israeli society is “quite embarrassed.”
Elsewhere in his remarks, Peled said that while the regime appears to be “a liberal democracy” to Israeli settlers, it is indeed an apartheid regime that cannot be called a democracy. “If you are on the privileged side of the apartheid regime, you enjoy rights that the other side is not,” he said, explaining that Israel governs millions of Palestinians under different laws and a completely different reality, from how much water is allocated to Palestinians, to confiscating their lands or demolishing their homes for no legal reasons.
Israel, he went on, is an apartheid regime without any question and when people say democracy, they talk about the privileges that Israeli Jews enjoy as citizens of Israel. Kates noted that despite all enhanced threats against Palestinians, the resistance is getting stronger and stronger and people are continuing to fight back. “People in the resistance are continuing to fight back, to change the equation, and to challenge the balance of power,” she added.
