"Israel is committed to the principles of freedom, equality and tolerance for all inhabitants regardless of religion, conscience, race, gender or culture."
- Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs

For over 60 years the state of Israel has been in a public state of denial about its true nature. It claims to be an egalitarian democracy surrounded by totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, "a villa in the heart of the jungle" as the racist Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Barak once put it.

Yet the chasm between the claim of democracy and the reality of exclusivity for Jewish citizens was forcefully opened by the Israeli Knesset (parliament) at the end of May.

The Knesset passed the first reading of a bill that will make it a crime to publicly deny Israel's right to exist as an exclusively Jewish state. To break this law will bring punishment of up to a year in prison.

This is an outrageous attack on Palestinian Israelis (who make up around 20 per cent of the population) who campaign for equal rights for all Israeli citizens. How democratic is it to deny people the right to even call for equal rights for all citizens?
This outrage came just three days after another bill was introduced which, if passed, will ban all commemorations of al-Nakba. Al-Nakba is a day of remembrance which commemorates the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and land during the 1948 establishment of the Israeli state.

That proposed bill would also compel Palestinians who are citizens of Israel to swear allegiance to "the state of the Jewish people". As Jewish Professor Yakov Rabkin recently argued, "This would compare with threatening the Aborigines with forfeiting Australian citizenship unless they recognised the principle of ‘White Australia'".

It would also be like passing a law which threatens three years' imprisonment for anyone commemorating Invasion Day instead of celebrating Australia Day!

These developments cut to the heart of the contradiction between the project of creating a state exclusively for Jewish people and the principles of democracy. Israel can't have it both ways: it is either an exclusive apartheid state built on ethnic cleansing and which practises ethnic and religious discrimination or it is a democracy. It cannot be both. The Knesset is sending a clear message that it is apartheid, not democracy, that is closest to its heart.