How Will History Judge Us After Gaza / Pankaj Mishra

If you think of democracy as simply something that’s constituted by regular elections and if you don’t think that an ethno-nationalist state that badly treats about 20% of its population, which is the Arab population, which enforces a brutal state of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, which treats the people living there as 3rd class citizens, which periodically bombs them. Kills them in large numbers. I think we are stretching here, quite dramatically, the definition of democracy. I think it’s a nice rhetorical move on the part of Israel supporters to claim that Israel is a democracy and for that reason morally superior to the people it oppresses and morally superior to its neighbors. But I think we are looking at a democracy where majority opinion is in favor of genocide and ethnic cleansing. I think we do have to radically redefine our notion of democracy and try to fill it a little bit more with positive content. Otherwise, democracy equals murderous majoritarianism and that’s what we’re looking at in Israel right now.