http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/08/steady-drift-right-israel
While Jonathan Freedland's evident horror at Israel's shift to the right is welcome (Comment,
5 January), his explanations fail to account for the country's steady
drift to the right since its inception and the ineluctable logic of
imposing a Jewish state in someone else's country. The internal
contradictions of a state in which the rights of Jewish and Palestinian
citizens were supposedly "separate but equal" could only be resolved by
the transformation of the state into one of genuine equality, ie a
secular democracy, or by the rising hegemony of those who celebrated
separateness and inequality.
That religious extremism and
rightwing anti-egalitarians have become dominant in Israel is
inextricably linked to the theocratic underpinning of the state. Like
most other European Jews, I lost family in the Holocaust and I have
experienced racism in the country of my birth, but my survival as an
English Jew does not depend on the existence of the state of Israel and
my right to "return" to a country to which I have never been. It depends
on my being treated as a human being with the same rights and needs as
everyone else. The same rights that everyone born in Israel or Palestine
or anywhere else in the world should have.
Keith Lichman
London
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