Perhaps you have heard about the strange campaign ad recently released by Israel’s Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked. It describes her favorite perfume
called Fascism. But she believes it smells like Democracy.
I am posting a copy of the ad with accompanying English translation below. Take a look:
Throughout her political career, Shaked has objected whenever the Supreme Court has (periodically) defended the civil rights of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
She despises “liberal” activists who condemn Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and described all Palestinians as inherently violent people who deserve to be eradicated.
She was a prominent advocate for Israel’s recently approved Jewish Nation-
State Law which explicitly defines Israel as a state of, for and by Jews and Jews alone.
In other words, Shaked’s ad is mocking anyone who fails to understand what has, in fact, always been the truth about Israel — Israel’s political Zionism provides democracy for its Jewish population and no one else.
At least Shaked has the cajones to discard political double-speak. Unlike most politicians, she says what she means.
George Orwell once wrote that “political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Nothing embodies Orwell’s maxim on the political abuse of language more graphically than Zionism’s stranglehold on the definition of “acceptable discourse” concerning Israel.
Take, for instance, Israel’s insistence on referring to itself as the only democracy in the Middle East.
Shaked believes in that lie as much as any successful politician in Israel. It’s a given. What sets her apart however is her willingness to say what she actually means, what in fact every Zionist politician means by those words.
Israel has never been a democracy for all its citizens. But that stark reality has always been obscured by the smoke and mirrors of Zionist propaganda and its successful redefinition of words like democracy.
Shaked, on the other hand, is a rare phenomenon: she is an honest Zionist.
She has publicly declared that if genuine democracy (e.g. equal treatment for everyone before the law) happens to threaten Zionist Israel’s status as an exclusively Jewish state populated and governed by a Jewish majority (which it certainly does), then Israel must give up its pretense of democracy.
That is the point of her ad. And, even though few will admit to it, that is why her ad has caused such a stir within Israel and around the world.
Shaked is not playing the traditional Zionist word-games. And for that, at least, I admire her.
She presents the ugly face of political Zionism for what it is: a mask.
It may be a lovely mask for Israel’s Jewish majority – just as Shaked could be a model if she wanted a new career – but for Israel’s Palestinian minority, Zionism has always meant fascism.
