Against The PINKWASHING of Israel

[Spider Jerusalem]

19. "Israel's progressive nature on social issues"?

It's fundamentally dishonest to compare Israel to other non-progressive Middle Eastern nations. The actual point of comparison for Israel, as a self-proclaimed, Western-style liberal democracy, is other Western liberal democracies. On that score? it fares quite poorly.

Israel is, very possibly, the most racist country in the developed world. This doesn't come as much of a surprise when one considers that Israel alone among Western democracies is founded on the basis of a specifically ethnic nationalism. I invite you to imagine, if you would, what would happen if the director of the OMB or another relevant US Federal agency stood up in a press conference to announce that cuts to child welfare benefits had been successful, because they saw a reduction in the black, or Hispanic, birthrate. What do you think the reaction would be, in the US? There'd be an outcry, no? Yet that's precisely what Netanhayu boasted about, only with Arabs as the relevant minority, when Likud were in opposition. And what do you think would happen if a significant number of evangelical Christian leaders in the USA stood up and said that Americans should refuse to rent houses or apartments to Hispanics? Do you think that a poll would show that over half the public agreed with them? Because that's what happened in Israel when a group of rabbis called for a ban on renting to Arabs. How would you feel about a government-sponsored advertising campaign in the USA designed to discourage people from marrying outside their religious or ethnic group? Because Israel had those, too, until people got offended.