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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> The support of Israel relies on two things: the Holocaust and the old Testament.

Come on. Geopolitically, Israel is an important pillar.

The V-Dem Democracy indices ranked in 2024 Iraq, Israel, Mauritania and Tunisia as the Middle Eastern and North African countries with the highest democracy scores. The Economist Group's Democracy Index rated in the region Israel as the only "flawed democracy" and no country as "full democracy" for year 2023.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_the_Middle_East_a...

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This "only democracy in the region" line gets trotted out, but most Palestinians don't get a vote in the government that controls their lives. So "democracy" in the sense that Apartheid South Africa was a democracy, only.

Are you referring to the West Bank or Gaza? Because they’re both not part of Israel. Palestinians in Israel absolutely vote and have their own representatives in government.

If you arbitrarily define parts of the territory you control as not part of your territory, and its population as not your citizens (even though they are entirely subject to your jurisdiction), then you only get partial credit for being a “democracy”, at best.

If Israel were really committed to democratic ideals, they would either make all Palestinians equal citizens of the state (currently Israel, which would presumably be renamed “Palestine” the next day), or, more realistically, they would allow the Palestinian Territories to become an independent state, rather than keeping them permanently occupied and subject to Israeli military law.

this is exactly what other countries do since ages - US, UK, France - just to name a few - they all have territories under their control, but not integrated into the state itself, with population having different, but usually lesser rights than the population of the state proper.

on the other hand, the situation in so-called palestinian territories is completely different. Gaza strip was officially annexed by Egypt, West Bank was officially annexed by Jordan - so the official government would be these countries, and if we're talking about Apartheid, then it would be committed by these countries.

"Both not part of Israel" and yet the people who allegedly own it don't control it.

they don't even want it - because otherwise you can't play the victim card and blame jews for everything. their entire "economy" is based on that.

Does it matter? A country being allied with the US seems to have little to do with whether it's a democracy, see e.g. Taiwan and South Korea during the dictatorship period, or Saudi Arabia now.

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