The pundit class in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world is still seething over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's electoral triumph last week.
On Monday, Dan Perry at the Associated Press took that hysteria to a new level, in effect attempting to discredit Bibi's win by writing that, after all, it may not really be correct to call Israel a democracy. That's because "Palestinians" who are in the occupied territories — whose leaders, and more than likely a majority of its residents would vote to expel all Jews from Israel in a heartbeat if they could — can't vote (bolds are mine):
AP ANALYSIS: IS ISRAEL DEMOCRATIC? NOT SO CLEAR
Is Israel a democracy? The answer is not so straightforward, and it increasingly matters given the diplomatic fallout over hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu's reelection last week.
... (Israel's) its claim to be the only true democracy in the Middle East has been key to its branding and its vitally important claim on U.S. military, diplomatic and financial support. Israel's elections, from campaign rules to vote counts, are indeed not suspect.
But with the occupation of the West Bank grinding on toward the half-century mark, and with Netanyahu's election-day suggestion that no change is imminent, hard questions arise.
... among Israelis themselves, there is increasing angst over the fact that their country of 8 million people also controls some 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians who have no voting rights for its parliament.
If the 2 million Palestinians of Gaza - a territory dominated indirectly by Israel - were added to the equation, then together with the 2 million Arab citizens of "Israel proper" the Holy Land would be home to a population of some 12 million, equally divided between Arabs and Jews.
Of the Arabs, only a third have voting rights. These are the "Israeli Arabs" who live in the areas that became Israel in the 1948-49 war, which established the country's borders.
Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 but Israel never annexed them, both for fear of world reaction and due to concerns about millions more Palestinians gaining the vote.
... The supposedly temporary arrangement shows no sign of a change - at least not one initiated by Israel.
"Israel is galloping toward an anti-democratic, bi-national future saturated with hatred and racism," wrote columnist Ravit Hecht in the liberal Haaretz daily, echoing the rising stridency that has taken root among liberals in the days since the vote.
Perry could have solved his confusion very easily.
All he would have had to do is the following: Ask if any Palestinian leaders, as a condition of citizenship and having the right to vote, would recognize Israel's right to exist. They would not, because they do not.
The vast majority of the people who must live under their "Palestinian" rule, poisoned by a half-century of propaganda which begins in grade school, also would not agree to recognize Israel's right to exist as a condition to citizenship and right to vote.
Why would Israel even begin to contemplate allowing people who won't even recognize their nation's right to exist to vote? If such people ever gained power over all of Israel, the reign of terror, mayhem, massacre and expulsion would be frightening and on a scale rarely seen in world history.
So the vast majority of Palestinians in the occupied territories can't vote, because they aren't citizens and don't want to become citizens.
That doesn't make the people who are Israeli citizens undemocratic.
See how easy that was?
Perry even went so far as to claim that Netanyahu was "trailing in the last campaign days" as if it was an unassailable fact. He doesn't know that. The polls said he was, but we all know that polls can be wrong and/or cooked.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
