Gideon Levy on the sham of Israeli democracy

Gideon Levy: At the end of the day we have to realize that the world is supporting Israel, almost blindly and automatically.  And I don't see a way to change it, but through civil societies, not governments.  Governments will not change.

Q: Towards what goal, then?  Just a democratic state for everyone in that land?

Levy: What else is left?  If the two-state solution is dead, as I think, we are facing only a one-state.  Now one state we have for 50 years.  It's not a new invention now.  Now we have one state.  The only problem is, is that it has nothing to do with democracy because as long as you govern another people in such a brutal way, through military occupying force, you have nothing to do with democracy.  Even if it's only in your backyard.  But it is there.  It is in our backyard.  Even if in the front Israel is this lovely darling of the West, with its lovely, charming liberal democracy for its Jews, in their backyard there is one of the most brutal tyrannies on earth.  

So this cannot be perceived as democracy.  The struggle must be, from now on, to change this reality.  In other words, to change the regime between the river and the Mediterranean.  Changing the regimes means to go for real democracy.  Who is against democracy again?  I would like to know, in this country [the U.S.], in my country, who is opposing democracy?

Q: Well, the problem in Israel is the majority of Israelis who are opposed to real democracy.

Levy: So let's call them by their names.  So they are racist.  So it's an apartheid state.

Q: No argument there, but the question is, is it realistic to believe that that can be overcome, that that can be changed, especially when they have the vital support of the U.S.?  That's why I'm asking, what is more likely to be attained, this unjust two-state solution or something that no Israeli, at least right now, would ever agree to?

Levy: Look, the Israelis don't agree to both.  The Israelis want to have it all.  They want to be Jewish and democratic and occupying.  If it goes according to what the Israelis are ready to do, it means continuing the status quo forever.  Let me be doubtful that this is possible, because no colonial force lasted forever.  And no empire, even, lasted forever.  When it is so rotten from the inside, rotten morally, it cannot last forever.

~ Gideon Levy, "Netanyahu or Not, Israel is Corrupted (2/2)," The Real News Network, 8:45 mark, March 7, 2018

Vijay Prashad how the West sees colonialism

They still have this huge feeling that the West only acts to bring good, never for some bad purpose.  And the reverse of that is the adversaries of the West are always savages.  You see, that's the colonial mindset that the West goes into the colonies to civilize people, but when the colonial rises up and fights back, they are being savages.  

This goes back to the way Western reporters wrote about Khartoum, the Battle of Khartoum in 1884.  They wrote about the Boxer Rebellion in this way.  Every time the Chinese resisted the opium wars and so on, the Chinese were treated as savages in the media, like, "how dare you fight, and if you fight, you fight brutally."  When the Indians rose up in 1857 in the great Indian uprising against British rule, every British newspaper said, "these are savages, they conduct attrocities."  After that war ended, Indians who were caught by the British were strapped to cannons and the cannons were fired as a warning to others not to fight.  I mean, it's a brutal, brutal repression of people.  And yet, that doesn't change the impression of the West as aggressive.  The West is always doing things for human rights and the savages are always wrong.

~ Vijay Prashad, "Critic Vijay Prashad slams the West's belligerent foreign policy," CGTN, 2:45 mark, September 26, 2021