From The National
The backlash against Israeli propaganda, including a growing international boycott movement, has driven the country's right wing into even greater defiance.
For most of the seven decades after its establishment, Israel went to extraordinary lengths to craft an image of itself as a "light unto the nations."
It claimed to have "made the desert bloom" by planting forests over the razed houses of 750,000 Palestinians it exiled in 1948. Soldiers in the "most moral army in the world" reputedly cried as they were compelled to shoot Palestinian "infiltrators" trying to return home. And all this occurred in what Israelis claimed was the Middle East's "only democracy."
An industry known as hasbara -- a euphemism for propaganda -- recruited Jews in Israel and abroad to a campaign to persuade the world that the Palestinians' dispossession was for the good of mankind. Israel's achievements in science, agriculture and medicine were extolled.
But in a more interconnected world, that propaganda campaign is swiftly unravelling. Phone cameras now record "moral" soldiers executing unarmed Palestinians in Gaza or beating up children in Hebron.
The backlash, including a growing international boycott movement, has driven Israel's right wing into even greater defiance and self-righteousness. It no longer conceals its goal to aggressively realize a longed-for "Greater Israel."
A parallel process is overtaking Israel's traditional left but has been far less noticeable. It too is stubbornly committed to its ideological legacy -- the creation of a supposed "Jewish and democratic state" after 1948.
And just as the immorality of Israel's belligerent rule in the occupied territories is under ever greater scrutiny, so too is its claim to be a democracy conferring equal rights on all citizens.
Israel includes a large minority of 1.8 million Palestinian citizens, the remnants of those who survived the expulsions required for its creation. Although Palestinian citizens have the vote, it was an easy generosity after Israel gerrymandered the electoral constituency in 1948 to ensure Palestinians remained a permanent and decisive minority.
In a system of residential apartheid, Palestinian citizens have been confined to ghettos on a tiny fraction of land while Israel has "nationalized" 93 percent of its territory for Jews around the world.
But after decades of repression, including an initial 20 years living under military rule, the Palestinian minority has gradually grown more confident in highlighting Israel's political deficiencies.
In recent days, Palestinian legislators have submitted three legislative measures before parliament to explode the illusion that Israel is a western-style liberal democracy.
None stood the faintest chance of being passed in a system rigged to keep Palestinian lawmakers out of any of Israel's complex but entirely Zionist coalition governments.
The first measure sought to revoke the quasi-governmental status of major international Zionist organizations like the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Jewish Agency.
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