re: the turmoil in Israel re: judicial overhaul legislation
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/07/24/world/israel-protests-vote
https://www.nytimes.com/article/israel-judicial-overhaul-vote.html
The Israeli Medical Association, which represents 97 percent of Israel’s doctors, announced it would strike on Tuesday in much of the country in protest of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to enact the first part of his coalition’s divisive judicial overhaul.
Defenders of Israel then say: “Like any country, it’s not perfect and it’s not perfectly democratic. But critics should note that this sort of oppositional activity would be suppressed in most other Middle East countries. Israel is far more democratic than the latter.”
That’s true, and yet it’s not a valid basis of comparison. People with a European culture and European standard of economic productivity moved into an essentially third-world region, encroaching upon the indigens (as Europeans have done so often during the last five centuries). Relative affluence enables relative democracy. Israel is a cultural island within a sea of . . . “third-worldness” . . .
It’s not so easy to convey to relatively affluent European-culture-derived populations what all the issues are here. A pattern of our civilization is domination of the rest by a small group of imperialist powers (which are, in turn, dominated internally by small layers of hyper-privileged power elites). The System more or less works OK for the privileged and the affluent. There is electrical power reliably all day. There is little food insecurity. Institutions perform decently and put on a friendly face. Governmental authority is somewhat corrupt (dominated by the corporations and the wealthy) but most people are allowed to vote (for what it’s worth) and most votes are really counted. Life in the countries at the periphery is quite different … afflicted with scarcity, corruption, unreliable services, domination by authoritarians. Democracy hardly thrives under those conditions.
Speaking of third …
Israel was born on third base and prides itself on the faux idea that it had hit a triple.
