Israeli Democracy
Israel is indeed the only democratic state in the Middle East region, but it is a democracy in the strict sense only for Jews. In a similar way, South Africa was at one time the only democratic state in Africa, apart from the island nation of Mauritius. But a one-race democracy is an affront to democratic values. The term for this is "Herrenvolk democracy" ("ruling race democracy").
Of course, it is often pointed out that Arab citizens of Israel have the right to vote and run for office, whereas South African Blacks in the apartheid era did not. But the majority of Arabs subject to the political control of Israel live in the Occupied Territories, in conditions of military dictatorship. They have no suffrage, no say over their own lives. Moreover, Arab citizens of Israel lived under a martial law regime that applied only to them between 1948 and 1966. They were subject to arbitrary detention, deportation, censorship, etc. In the years since the end of the military government, Israeli Arabs have been subject to covert and sometimes overt repression of their political activity, such as by the practice of "town arrest" (forced confinement for mere political belief or association.) Adalah, a civil rights organization for Israeli Arabs, recently announced a campaign to try to replace the "Jewish state" concept with a non-sectarian democratic constitution. This is an entirely peaceful, legal movement for change. But Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence service, as well as the Prime Minister's office, have said publicly that they will work to stop it. (cf. Yoav Stern, "Prime Minister's Office to Balad (Arab political party): 'We will thwart anti-Israel activity even if legal'" , in HA'ARETZ, 3/17/07. ) Thus political activity for Israeli Arabs exists within strict limits, which would not pass constitutional muster in the US.
Comparisons between Israel and the Arab states on grounds of democracy are unfair because Israel was founded by Europeans, who for historical reasons enjoyed a head start in both economic and political development. Democracy in the Western world came about only after centuries of struggle, setback and readjustment. It is therefore very superficial to criticize third world peoples for the troubles they have had in democratizing in their first few decades of political independence.
Another peculiarity about Israel involves its character as a specifically sectarian state, which is hard to reconcile with democratic values. It is not the only sectarian state in the world today. Pakistan is a state for Indian Muslims, and Lebanon is a coalitional power-sharing regime between different sects. But neither of these examples is very encouraging. Zionism, in arguing that the Jewish people were a nation rather than a religious community, made a novel and unprecedented claim in the 19th Century. But in practice, it was never able to escape from religious definitions of Jewishness. For the fact was that in the centuries following the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, Jews were scattered all over the planet, spoke many languages, participated in many separate cultures, etc. The only thing they had in common, that distinguished them from the peoples among whom they lived; the only concrete and specific communal identity they had was their religious heritage.
And so today Zionism confronts a fundamental contradiction. Jewishness is a nationality that one can be born into, like other nationalities (French, Japanese, Turkish etc. ) But it is also a nationality which one can acquire by conversion. A long standing principle of democratic societies is freedom of conscience; typically known in America as the "separation of church and state." Among other things, this means that a state has no business trying to enforce a religious identity on somebody and no business judging the quality or authenticity of somebody's religious belief. But ironically, even though the majority of Israeli Jews are not religious, there is in Israel a public religious establishment which deals with such questions. An atheist Jew born in the US has a right to emigrate to Israel under the "law of return". But if that same person happened to convert to Christianity or some other religion, he would lose his eligibility. Thus, even apart from the whole question of the rights of the Arabs, the "Jewish state" concept remains problematic from the standpoint of democratic norms. "Who is a Jew?" is a profound existential and spiritual question: as such, arguably, it is the sort of question that no properly democratic government can decently answer.
The UN General Assembly in Nov. 1975 passed a resolution identifying Zionism as a form of "racialism and racial discrimination". A similar statement was mooted at the international conference on racism held in Durban, South Africa in Sept. 2001. The US political establishment took violent exception to original UN declaration. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the US Ambassador to the UN, was practically apoplectic with rage, and US policy making circles dismissed the measure as an example of third world "extremism" run amok. The US successfully got the resolution rescinded in the 1990's, if I remember right. The start of the Oslo peace process in Sept. 1993 convinced many people that the "Zionism is racism" idea was unnecessarily polarizing and a relic of a bygone era, since Arafat himself had publicly acknowledged Israel's "right to exist" (originally in Nov. 1988; then again in the PLO-Israel Declaration of Principles in 1993)
The UN member states that equated Zionism with racism were mostly ex-colonial societies whose historical experience of suffering gave them a feeling of kinship with the dispossessed Palestinians, whereas US elites tended to sympathize with the Jews, the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. There was thus an enormous gap of perception between the two sides. In my view, Zionism was not in its origin an ideology of racial supremacy, as the Afrikaner nationalist ideology was. But it could not be implemented in practice without a massive violation of the human rights of the indigenous people of Palestine.
In practice, Palestinians have never been regarded by the US and the Western powers as human beings whose lives are as precious and valuable as Jewish lives. The tacit premise of all major Western policy about Palestine since the Balfour Declaration of 1917 has been that Palestinians just don't count. Moreover, Israel could not establish its identity as a Jewish state without systematic dispossession of the indigenous population, and discrimination against the remnant left behind in 1948. The Zionist regime established one-sect hegemony over a territory with a ethnically mixed population through forced removal of the native peoples; just as was done in Algeria by the colons and in South Africa by the white governments. Thus, however much the American political establishment bristled at the 1975 UN resolution, it does not seem to be unfair and is certainly not, as was once optimistically hoped, a relic of a bygone era.