I received an email with a link to Charles Krauthammer’s article Sea of easy and open bigotry is rising.

Given that Israel has a profoundly democratic political system, the freest press in the Middle East, a fiercely independent judiciary, and astonishing religious and racial diversity within its universities, including affirmative action for Arab students, the charge is rather strange.

I found The Real News Network story Israel’s Bedouin Face Displacement Despite Apparent Gov’t Concessions.

LIA TARACHANSKY, TRNN PRODUCER: On November 30, the Bedouin Arabs of Israel’s Negev Desert launched a coordinated day of protest that saw solidarity around the world. They were protesting the so-called Prawer law that would forcefully urbanize them and on the lands from which their villages would be demolished construct Jewish ones.

Did I miss the profoundly democratic political system’s application to Bedouin citizens of Israel? Are we now to conclude that official apartheid policies can be part of a profoundly democratic system? The gong of cognitive dissonance that is echoing in my head has made it hard for me to think.

Makes me ask “Was the way the native Americans were pushed off their lands by European settlers profoundly democratic? What have we learned from our history?”

For further information on the plan discussed in the video see my subsequent post The Prawer Plan: Bill on the Arrangement of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev.