“The Mistreatment and Discrimination Against Palestinians Is Not Unprecedented. . . . It's Baked Into the Foundation of the Political System in Israel”

Yousef Munayyer on how Palestinians continue to pay the price in the midst of unprecedented protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to empower the far right.

Yousef Munayyer is a Palestinian-American analyst and senior non-resident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington DC. He appeared earlier today on Democracy Now! where he shared his perspective on the massive protests in Israel in response to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to overhaul and weaken the country’s judiciary.

Following is part of what he said.

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The protesters in the streets are focused on what they see as a threat to them, and not really a threat to Palestinians, by [Netanyahu’s proposed] legislative reforms, which aim to further weaken the court system in Israel. It’s important to point out that this is a process that did not start with this government and that the court system in Israel has been weakened for some time. But with this government, a religious nationalist government, there are many Israelis who see the government’s agenda as a major power grab that’s attempting to reshape Israeli society in a way that will disadvantage them, [with] “them” being primarily non-religious, nationalist Israelis and secular Israelis. And so, they are perceiving for the first time a threat [. . .] to the court system that will actually weaken their rights. The rights, of course, of Palestinians have not been upheld, whether [they are] Palestinian citizens of Israel or Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem. They have not been upheld by these courts for a very long time. It was not until, though, that these communities in Israel who are protesting today recognized a direct threat to their own rights that they decided to mobilize in mass in this way.

And I think this really underscores just how deep the consensus is within Israel about the apartheid system and discrimination against Palestinians. Clearly, Israeli society has always had the capacity – we’re seeing it on display now – to challenge their government’s policies when they understand them to be unfair. But it seems that Israeli society does not think its treatment of Palestinians, which, of course, the human rights community and many others, including Israeli human rights organizations, concluded amounts to apartheid – they don’t seem to see a problem with that. What we’re seeing in the streets today is unprecedented as far as Israeli society goes, but the mistreatment and discrimination against Palestinians is not unprecedented at all and is baked into the foundation of the political system in Israel.

Yousef Munayyer also shed light on the significance of Israel not having a written constitution, and how this factors into the situation today.

This is one of the core points here, because you have two different branches of government: the parliament, and the government that was put together through the parliamentary elections, and the courts, which are essentially locked in a battle over power. And the parliament and the government is demanding that it has the authority to essentially claim greater powers over the courts, be able to override court decisions with a simple majority.

These kinds of matters are usually outlined in a foundational document, in a supreme law like a constitution, that limits the powers of different branches of government and makes clear rules about where power lies and in what situations. Israel doesn’t have a constitution, and it doesn’t have a constitution for very important reasons. In fact, when Israel was created and declared in 1948 in their Declaration of Independence, they promised that they would adopt a constitution within a few months after declaring independence, in line with the expectations of the international community and the United Nations when they put forward the 1947 partition plan. And, in fact, the Declaration of Independence copied language from that partition plan about the need to guarantee rights of equality for people regardless of religion and ethnic origin, and so on and so forth.

At the time, Israel was interested in gaining international legitimacy, but what they found was, if they were going to adopt a constitution, they’d have to limit state power in ways that would make it much harder for them to carry out their settler-colonial project in Palestine. If they had to accept equality before the law, they couldn’t take land away from Palestinians and privilege Jews coming in from outside of the country to take their place. And so, they didn’t end up adopting a constitution and allowed the state to have maximum flexibility to carry out the settler-colonial project. And, in fact, that project, which continues to this day, is one of the main reasons why Israeli politics has gone so far right that you see the kind of extremists in government today that in years prior were on the fringes of society.

For the complete March 28, 2023 Democracy Now! segment, “Palestinians to Pay the Price as Netanyahu Pauses Judicial Overhaul While Further Empowering Far Right,” click here.


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Progressive Perspectives on the Ongoing Israeli-Palestinian “Nightmare”
• Something to Think About – July 29, 2018
• Noura Erakat: Quote of the Day – May 15, 2018
• For Some Jews, Israel’s Treatment of Palestinians is Yet Another Jewish Tragedy
• Remembering the Six-Day War and Its Ongoing Aftermath
• David Norris: Quote of the Day – August 12, 2014
• Something to Think About – July 18, 2014
• “We Will Come Together in Our Pain”
• Thoughts on Prayer in a “Summer of Strife”