Hacker News Reader

Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

If you take over some territory and rule it permanently, and then define the pre-existing population there as non-citizens with no way to change their status, you do not get to count as a democracy. This is what Israel has done in the West Bank.

> The discrimination is based on citizenship status and not on race. Arab Israelis have the same rights as Jewish Israelis.

It is based indirectly on race (inasmuch as "Jewish" is a race; maybe "cultural group" would be more accurate), because any Jewish person in the world can become an Israeli citizen, whereas most Arabs have no way to become citizens unless they are in Israel proper, the Golan Heights, or East Jerusalem. I.e. for people who live in the West Bank (outside East Jerusalem), whether they are Israeli citizens is entirely determined by whether they are Jewish.

View on HN

> If you take over some territory and rule it permanently, and then define the pre-existing population there as non-citizens with no way to change their status, you do not get to count as a democracy

On some timeline this is every population on the planet.

I’m not defending the Nakba. But it’s not a commonly-used exclusionary rule for democracies. If it were, there has never been a democracy on Earth. (And never can be. Everyone lives on territory once occupied by another people.)

I’m not talking about the Nakba, I’m talking about the situation in the West Bank today.

It’s horrible that so many Palestinians had to leave during the Nakba, but since the ones who stayed were eventually granted citizenship and legal equality, I think it’s fair to say that Israel proper is administered democratically today — similar to the situation of Native Americans in the U.S.

But people in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have no way to become Israeli citizens (unless they are Jewish), despite those territories being controlled by Israel, probably permanently. That is clearly undemocratic.

>But people in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have no way to become Israeli citizens (unless they are Jewish) >That is clearly undemocratic

Not only undemocratic, but it is running an apartheid. Not to mention the complete denial of right to return for displaced Palestinians, not even acknowledging it.

> That is clearly undemocratic

Agreed. But that doesn’t unmake Israel a democracy.

I don't see how there is a meaningful difference "administers large chunks of territory undemocratically" and "is not a democracy" in practice.

> don't see how there is a meaningful difference "administers large chunks of territory undemocratically" and "is not a democracy" in practice

The Federalist Papers are the deep dive. The Wikipedia article is a good start [1].

If you’re excluding classic members of a set with your measure, your measure is inconsistent with the classic set. You may argue Athens wasn’t a true democracy, but that obviously puts your definition of a true democracy in a special bucket.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy

If we're quoting Wikipedia:

> South Africa has been a democracy since the end of apartheid in 1994.

People in the present day use the word "democracy" in a way that would exclude either ancient Athens or the Jim Crow-era US. You are the one who's insisting on an unusual definition from thousands of years ago; my definition is the mainstream one. Furthermore, your "classical" definition is irrelevant, since we're talking about Israel the modern state in 2024 which should be judged by present-day standards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com