Leaving the Sinking Ship

When the Jeffrey Goldbergs of this world are openly questioning whether Israel will remain a democracy, then you know the game is up. The piece is "What if Israel ceases to be a Democracy". Of course it is naive and zionist. The assumption that Israel is a democracy today, when Israeli Arabs are second class citizens and the PA is a virtual bantustan, is deeply insulting. Yet he is at least asking the question, which would have been unthinkable two years ago.

Every complacent Israeli right winger should be required to read this article and carefully consider where exactly Bibi's strategy of seeing off Obama is leading them. The interesting point is that Goldberg raises the near-taboo topic of Israel's changing demographic mix :

I'm speaking here of four groups, each ascendant to varying degrees: The
haredim, the ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose community continues to grow at a rapid clip; the working-class religious Sephardim .h.. whose interests are represented in the Knesset by the obscurantist rabbis of the Shas Party; the settler movement, which still seems to get whatever it needs in order to grow; and the million or so recent immigrants from Russia, who support, in distressing numbers, the Putin-like Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister and leader of the "Israel is Our Home" party.

How long is it going to take for the US to realise they're dealing with a bunch of proto-fascist Russians and obsucrantist medievalists. Right now the Russians plus Haredim are almost 40% of Israel's Jewish population. Yet the IDF spokesman is always a nice, American accented white guy....

The interaction of ideology and demographics may be the tipping point in this debate. Goldberg realises that Lieberman is not a flash in the pan - he is a manifestation of long term structural changes. As Bill Clinton said "It's a different Israel today".