A Country's Most Valuable Export Is Not A Prodcut Or A Service But Rather A Myth.

Last night I was able to attend Dr. Jamal Zahalka's
(member of Israel's Knesset) lecture as the last
keynote speaker at the Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) at
the U of T. Dr. Zhalka's opening statement was about a
very valuable Israeli export describing it as the Most
Important Export: the concept that Israel is a
democracy.

Dr. Zahalka's lecture was not yet another attack on
Israeli policies and practices and he did not throw
around details documenting atrocities and so on. Arabs
have done that for years without any success and
listeners largely tune out when they hear such
arguments against Israel and dismiss them as
Anti-Semitism citing the FACT THAT "ISRAEL IS A
DEMOCRACY TRYING TO DFENED ITSELF". What made Dr.
Zhalka's lecture interesting is the concept of Israel
EXPORTING a MYTH and buyers are willing to pay
exuberant sums of money, efforts, and morale compass
for it. There are endless buyers of such export
ranging from the traditional western politicians,
academics, and religious leaders to even Arab masses.

From the get go, Dr. Zhalka did not claim to be
neutral but stated that he will try to be objective.
He then went on to support his statement that Israel's
democracy is a myth by arguing that Israel's very
existence as a state for the Jews from outside
Palestine dictates that it can't be democratic for all
its citizens (because of the conflict it created
between Christians and Muslims on one side and Jews on
the other side). Simply put, democracies serve the
interests of the majority and Jews were a minority in
Palestine at the time of starting the process of the
creation of the state. To insist that Israel be
democratic is to change the demographics so that Jews
are the majority and Christians and Muslims are a
minority. To forcibly change the demographics of a
country is an undemocratic process.

The tragedy that befell the Palestinian people was due
to two things: first, the plan of outsiders to create
a state for the Jews and second and most significant,
insistence that such a state be democratic. The
insistence on the state of Israel being democratic
dictated that its demographics must change and that
its Muslim and Christian population must be
out-rooted. Palestinians would have been better off if
outsiders had decided to create an apartheid state
(like South Africa for example) whereby few powerful
European and Arab Jews ruled a mostly poor Christian
and Muslim Arab population because then there would
have been no need to expel the Palestinians and
eventually over time all would have learned to live in
one democratic country.

Demographics are the reason why Israel STILL IS NOT a
democratic state. As Israeli Arab population grows
very fast, the state is trying to ensure they do not
become a significant minority (the cutoff percentage
according to Dr. Zhalka is 30% of the total
population) let alone a majority. Laws are enacted to
prevent such growth. Such laws are enacted in “the
most democratic way”: they are proposed by the
government, debated in the Knesset, and voted on. To
an outside observer this is great democracy at work
but it does not take too much research to realize that
such laws have one clear objective: to discriminate
against Arabs in such a way that their population does
not grow. Democracies do not discriminate against
their minorities.