Israel isn’t a democracy but it’s an ethnocracy

In yet another attempt to deny the existence of apartheid in Israel, Kevin McCarthy ( Letters, 27 October) begins by making a false comparison between Palestinian citizens of Israel and the traveller community in Ireland.

A law does not exist in Ireland that excludes any traveller from buying land or a home on roughly 93% of the territory as it does in Israel for non-Jews. Mr McCarthy again supplies examples of those few Israeli ‘citizens’ who have succeeded in Israel, but similar examples existed in apartheid South Africa concerning non-whites, and, like Israel, it was still an apartheid state.

More conspicuous, however, is Mr McCarthy’s reference to Israel as a democracy, and not a ‘Jewish democracy’ — perhaps because to do so would confirm that it is precisely that — a democracy for Jews only. It is therefore, in fact, an ethnocracy and fits perfectly the definition of such a state provided by the Israeli geography Professor Oren Yiftachel: ‘ethnocracies, despite exhibiting several democratic features, lack a democratic structure… as such, they tend to breach key democratic tenets, such as equal citizenship…’