Direct indignation at true ethnocratic regimes

If Israel is an ethnocracy, I wonder how your correspondent (Letters, November 2) would define other states in the region? Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow Jews to come and work in the kingdom, let alone live there.

Dubai, Tunisia, Algeria,Qatar, Oman, Bahrein, Kuwait, Lebanon and Syria are among the countries that won’t allow holders of Israeli passports to enter their countries even on a visit.

Middle Eastern Arab countries which had long-standing Jewish communities, some going back to Biblical times, have expelled their Jewish populations or caused them to flee because of discrimination and persecution, since the establishment of the State of Israel. Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen Algeria and Tunisia are now virtually or entirely Jew-free.

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has said: “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli — civilian or soldier — on our lands” on an official visit to Cairo, July 2013. Meanwhile, under Palestinian laws, which govern ownership of land under the Palestinian Authority, it is forbidden to sell any land to ‘infidels’. Individuals who sell land to Israelis may be sentenced to death. Your letter writer acknowledges what he calls “petty apartheid” doesn’t exist in Israel, and that both Jews and Arabs “share much common space and utilities”. Perhaps he would now care to redirect his indignation towards societies that really go in for ethnocracy.

R. Linda Hart

Haifa

Israel