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This piece is a tendentious misconstruction of both Israel's past and its present. It has become fashionable in both the US and Israel to accuse any politics with which one disagrees of being "undemocratic" when it's nothing of the sort. Some examples:

The Nation-State law doesn't "supersede" the Declaration of Independence (never mind that the latter doesn't have statutory power).

The efforts to rein in the Supreme Court stem from the Court's shucking any semblance of the restraints typical to those of Western democracies, like the need for standing and the appointment of Justices by the other branches of government. Restoring some balance between the branches is seen as "undemocratic" only by people who are overwhelmingly satisfied with the Court's current ideological composition. Put a few more conservative Justices on it and those same people with be threatening them like Chuck Schumer threatening Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

Reading this is like watchin the peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail yelling "Come see the violence inherent in the system!"

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I like the essay, though I don't know enough about Israel's internal politics to comment on contemporary details.

I think the core conflict between a liberal state respecting minority rights vs an illiberal majoritarian state was present at the beginning, reflecting a heated debate among Zionists in the 1930s and before. The swing away from a liberal perspective was energized by massive immigration from Russia (beginning in the 1970s) and from other countries that lacked a historical tradition of liberal democracy. I first visited Israel in 1974, and was already concerned then by a sense of nascent apartheid thinking. Israel today seem in danger of making decisions that will irrevocably damage its future. I am particularly appalled by what to me seems an obscene political alliance that has been forged with extreme US Christian fundamentalists.

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Gross seems to be saying that before the current illiberal moves, Palestinian-Israelis were treated like equal citizens. Can he name a single Palestinian-Israeli who agrees?

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