Word: The Israeli election

Jonathan Ofir, Mondoweiss -On the 17th of September, Israelis will be going to elections. Again. The recent April elections failed to result in a governing coalition, the parliament was dispersed, and new elections were scheduled. But it’s not just a repetition in that sense – it’s also a monotonous repetition in the sense that it has happened 21 times since Israel was founded, and nothing has changed, really.

The picture is always the same. Parties who represent Palestinians are marginalized because they are not Jewish and Zionist. They are not wanted in any governing coalition and they never end up in government. It has been so from day 1: for Israel to remain “Jewish and democratic” it basically has to exclude Palestinians from any meaningful national representation.

This political paradigm is merely a reflection of the Zionist ethnic cleansing program, which sits at the heart of its settler-colonialist designs. As Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley put it in their UN report on Israeli Apartheid:

The first general policy of Israel has been one of demographic engineering, in order to establish and maintain an overwhelming Jewish majority in Israel. As in any racial democracy, such a majority allows the trappings of democracy — democratic elections, a strong legislature — without threatening any loss of hegemony by the dominant racial group.