The right of free speech does not mean the right to express popular views. Popular views do not need any protection. Free speech means the right to utter views that are detested by almost everyone.
It certainly means the right of minorities to express their views by peaceful means. And that is the crux of the matter.
Everybody understands that the right of 90 to evict 30 is a threat to evict the Arabs from the Knesset. The "Arab" faction in the present Knesset comprises 13 members and will probably get larger in the next few elections.
(It's a bit complicated. The "Arab" faction includes a Jewish member, who is much respected. The "Jewish" factions include some token Arab members, who dare not open their mouth on serious matters.)
This is not a law against "terrorist" sympathizers. This is a law against the Arab minority. The Knesset will be Jewish, pure and simple.
Going back to God's deal with Ben-Gurion, It will be a Jewish state in all of the country, without being democratic.
JEWS HAVE BEEN minorities since the Babylonian exile, some 2,500 years ago. All Jews have been minorities for some thousands of years.
One would have believed that 80 generations are enough to learn how a state should behave towards minorities. Indeed, one could have believed that all the states of the world would be sending delegations to Israel to learn how minorities should be treated. The founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, certainly thought so, and described the idyllic relations between the Jewish state and its Arab inhabitants in his futuristic novel "Altneuland" ("Old-New-Land").
Alas, this did not come to be. The times when a young and fresh Israel attracted progressives from all over the world to see the Kibbutzim and Moshavim (cooperative villages) are long gone. (It now appears that Bernie Sanders, one of the US Democratic candidates for president, once was a volunteer worker in a kibbutz). Even before the proposed law is enacted, Israel is one of the least democratic countries in the Western World, to which Israel wants to belong.
In the West Bank, which is governed by Israel, there live about 2.5 million people who are devoid of any civil and human rights. Just this week Amira Hass, the courageous Israeli chronicler of the occupation, described how the comfortable home of a Palestinian bourgeois family was invaded in the middle of the night by an army squad and they were told to clear their living room, which became an army outpost. The soldiers brought with them a portable chemical WC, but relieved themselves freely from the balcony.
We believed for a time that Israel could remain "the only democracy in the Middle East" while holding large occupied territories. Didn't the British hold hundreds of millions of Indians in subjugation, while the home country remained the world's shining example of democracy? Sure, but an Englishman needed several weeks to sail from Liverpool to Bombay, time enough to change his personality, while one needs only five minutes to cross from Israel into the West Bank.
THE ARAB citizens of Israel proper constitute some 20% of the population. These were the remnants of a large majority, most of whom had fled or were evicted.
This percentage has remained so from the beginning of the state until now, a time in which the population of Israel has grown more than tenfold.
A miracle? Almost. The huge natural increase of the Arab population has been balance by Jewish immigration, first from the Islamic countries, then from Russia, and lately from Ethiopia. They are still 20%, as God foresaw.
The first generation of "Israeli Arabs" -- as Jews called them, much to their dismay -- were meek and docile, still shocked by the immense catastrophe that had befallen their people. For safety's sake, they were subjected to a "military government," which restricted their movements. An Arab could not go from his village to the next, much less buy a tractor or send a son to study, without a written military permit. This system was abolished only after 17 years.
One may wonder why they were granted voting rights at all. Well, since they were so docile, Ben-Gurion, a party man through and through, decided that they would bolster his party's majority at the polls. This indeed did happen.
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