Is Israel a Democracy?
Written by Ben Boyang
March ’25
The present population of Israel is 7 million souls. (give or take a few without souls) This includes 2 million Palestinians living in Israel and 600,000 Zionists in the West Bank. Palestinians in the West Bank are not included. So the West Bank is a democracy for Zionists, but a military dictatorship for Palestinians.
There are 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and 2.2 million in Gaza, reduced by approximately 2.4%(50,000 people) in 2024, due to collateral damage. (accidental genocide)
So we have 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians, 2 million of whom can vote.
A voting ratio of 3.5 – 1
This ratio has shifted dramatically over the last century.
In 1920 the Middle East was carved up and dolled out by the winners of WW1. (Being a pompous lot, they gave themselves the illustrious title, The League of Winners Nations)
Britain got Palestine. They decided in their wisdom, to establish a Jewish state based on something they read in an old book of fables. An ancient tale, based on a true story, as they say in Hollywood, all about the 12 tribes of Israel and their glorious kingdom, that may have existed long, long ago, way back when ‘Methuselah was just a lad,’ literally!* They gave this little piece of dirt, so sacred to Judeism,( plus a few other stake holders) the rather prosaic name of ‘The British Mandate.’ They were British after all, what did you expect?
The Zionist saturation of Palestine began as far back as 1840.
At that time the number of Jews in Palestine was 9,000, out of a total population of around 450,000
Jews constituted about 2% of the population, a ratio of 50 -1
They were living amicably with their Arab neighbors, as they had done for millennia.
By 1880, the Jewish population had jumped to 23,000, 5% of the population.
A ration of 20 – 1
In the 1922 Census the population of Palestine was 763,550.
89 percent were Arabs and 11 % were Jews.
That is about 70,000 Jews and 693,000 Arabs, a ratio of about 10 -1
This demographic trend continued until the Jews outnumbered the Arabs,
via the time honoured but gruesome colonial method of extirpation. The Brits began by encouraging the mass migration of Jews to the area. The locals were not impressed. They held a bloody uprising, they lost. In the revolt of 1936–1939, also known as the Great Palestinian Revolt, an estimated 10 percent of the adult Palestinian male population were killed, wounded, deported, or imprisoned. That’s how extirpation works.
The United Nations was created in 1945 by the winners of WW2, They naturally gave themselves veto power over all decisions. That is how wars work. In 1947 the nascent United Nations adopted The British Mandate as their policy. From that moment the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in earnest. By the time the State of Israel was declared on May 14th 1948, the Arab population had been decimated. Plummeting from 1.2 million to 150,000. One of the most horrific acts of ethnic cleansing the world has never seen. This was achieved by terrorism on a mass scale.*
This tragedy is called the Nakbah by the Palestinians
The ratio was now 150,000 Arabs and 650,000 Zionist. (not including the 9,000 indigenous Jewish population, who were not Zionists and to this day, will have nothing to do with the Zionist adventure)
The ratio had flipped and was now 3.3 Zionists for every Arab Palestinian
That is how extirpation works. But it was still not safe to have a democracy, so the Zionists got into some serious ‘branch stacking,’ as we say here in Australia. Every Zionist in the world was invited to come and live in Palestine. Many took up the offer, for obvious reasons. No Palestinians or other groups were allowed to come. The few Arab citizens that were left in the newly minted State of Israel were kept under strict military rule and could not vote until 1966. By then the Zionist population had been boosted to 3 million, due mainly to mass immigration, while the Arab population doubled their numbers entirely via their own labour, in every sense of the word. (Israel has the highest fertility rate in the OECD, double the average. I think this can be described as ‘sexual Nationalism.’ Well done team! Meanwhile the Arab population was not to be outdone, doubling their number to 300,000 in less than 20 years. In 1967 every Arab woman bore an average of 7 children each. We have a winner!
The ratio thus flipped to 10 – 1 in favour of the Zionists, despite the heroic efforts of the Arab women.
At this juncture the-powers-that-be decided, under pressure from their ‘birth mother’, the U.N.** that it was safe to attempt a fledgling democracy of sorts. So they graciously allowed the Arabs the chance to vote, with the implicit understanding that it would be totally ineffectual, whilst ‘ticking the boxes.’
Israel maintained this technical democracy for just 1 year, unable to resist yet another war of territorial conquest, as colonizers are want to do. Snatching the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza in one fell swoop.
Suddenly the number of Palestinians under their control jumped in the West Bank to 860,000, 200,000 of whom promptly pulled up stumps and left, plus 365,000 in Gaza, who had nowhere to go, (they still don’t) making a total of about 1million extra souls living under harsh military rule. There goes your democracy!
Israel is now in the process of increasing their domain even further. Do not believe they will stop after annexing what is left of Gaza and the West Bank. Check out the patch every I.D.F. soldier wears with pride. It is a map of Greater Israel.
*Ilan Pappe (Israeli historian)- The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
For a brief time early this century the Zionist regime allowed public access to the archives from 1947/8 Pappe based his account on the historical facts contained there in. The archives are now closed.
** Only one book survives from that time, over 2,000 years ago, The Old Testament, a book written by the winners, for the winners. It was so popular they made a sequel, and called it The New Testament. It was a best seller in its time, but most of the world has moved on since then, not the Zionists! These people are living in the Bible: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Slay ever child lest they grow up to exact revenge for the slaughter of their parents. Their collaborators all dutifully repeat in chorus, “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Why does Israel have the right to defend itself? Because it says somewhere in that old and dog eared book, that the Jews may have had a kingdom in the general area about 3,000 years ago. Therefore, all members of the Jewish faith, including every convert they have picked up a long the way, has a God given right to occupy that same area, to the exclusion of all others, whom they may extirpate if they so desire. This flimsy argument is a threadbare and moth eaten garment, riddled with holes, and covering little, yet it is still worn by all the other Western European colonists and their benefactors in the colonies. (their biggest fans, U.S.A., Australia and Canada) to absolve the Zionists of their manifold crimes against humanity.
(BTW, most of the Zionists who run Israel are dual U.S.- Israeli citizens, along with second generation Europeans. Israel can be seen as U.S. and European colonial outpost, plonked slap bang in the middle of Arabia. What could possibly go wrong? Well, it did!)
****This is the modus operandi of all colonist ‘democracies’ – Before allowing the locals to vote in their own country, you must first decimate their population by fair means or foul, poisoning, small pox infection, massacre, ethnic cleansing, genocide, open slather, no rules apply, whilst simultaneously boosting the population of interlopers until you have a ratio of 10 – 1, before you start giving them any sort of control over their own lives.
***When giving a pep-talk to his troops Netanyahu constantly quotes The Bible, “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
“We will turn Gaza into a desert Island.”
(I don’t think he is imagining palm trees and Piña coladas)
“I am puzzled by the constant concern the world is showing for the Palestinians, these horrible inhuman animals.”
– Don Gillerman, Israeli diplomat
All stats gleaned from Wikepedia.
Ben Boyang 2025
Further reading….
Ben's Blog 
Hello Ben. I am calling you out over this flawed diatribe.
As pro-Palestine activists we need to be very cautious about making claims of antisemitism. The political right, who are antisemitic, have weaponised antisemitism and are using false allegations to demonise and persecute pro-Palestine activists.
So, what is the problem with this contribution? It considers ‘the Jews’ as one homogenous blob, and panders to some historic tropes. It is simplistic to the point of inaccuracy. It fails to distinguish between Judaism as an ethnicity and Zionism as a political movement. By targeting ‘the Jews’ it holds all Jewish people responsible, irrespective of their opinion, leaving them vulnerable to attack. Frankly, it is a piece of ugly dogma. It is antisemitic hate speech.
There are plenty of legitimate grounds to criticise the Israeli state. It’s slaughter in Gaza has been described by experts as genocide. Yet the horrible rant that you have engaged in does not assist the Palestinian cause but plays into the hands of reactionary ideologues.
For the record, I have long history on Palestine politics. In the early 1980’s I founded the Wollongong branch of Palestine Human Rights Campaign. In South Africa in the 1990’s I met my life partner, another anti-apartheid activist and a progressive Jew.
As I am not a subscriber to this site I cannot unsubscribe. Remove my email from all your lists.
Thank you,
Phillip Walker
Phil,
The first thing you said was ” we need to be very cautious about making claims of antisemitism.”
Then you go on to make an outrageous claim of antisemitism.
There is nothing antisemetic in this articleI am doing nothing more than collating the numbers in Wikepedia, to show how historically Palestine was swamped with Zionists. There were originally 9000 Jews in Palestine in 1840. They got along well with their fellow Palestinians. They are still there. They are not Zionists. They implacably oppose the attacks on their fellow Palestinians and demonstrate against the genocide’ If you believe in the existence of the Zionist state, you are an enemy of the Palestinians. If you label your comrades’ words as ‘anti-Semetic hate speech.’ you are a splitter that is ruining our solidarity. i think it is better you retire from the battle before you do any more damage. Maybe go back to South Africa where your white friends would cheer you on.
Dear Ben,
Your rant confirms my view, and I guess there will be no reasoning with you. For the record: 1. Don’t misrepresent. I never claimed to ‘believe in the existence of the Zionist state’ so you should not try to put false words into people mouths. Many of your facts are wrong. For the record, my view can be found here: https://phlipphlopphly.substack.com/p/the-future-from-the-river-to-the 2. In South Africa I lived in an apartheid homeland and was a member of the ANC. That’s lived experience. 3. Similarly, unlike recent fashion purchases my keffiyeh is almost 40 years old, given to me by the PLO when I was there and they were still illegal. A bit more lived experience.
Goodbye, Phillip
Dear Phil,
I did not say you beleived in the existence of the Zionist state. I said ‘if… you believe in the existence of the Zionist state, you are an enemy of the Palestinians.’
This was because i cannot figure out what it is in my article that is anti-semetic hate speech.’ You say the figures are wrong. Take it up with Wikepedia.
I wrote that article because I believe we must undermine the Israeli sense of entitlement. It is based on the claim that all Jews have some connection to Biblical Israel. Yet most modern Jews are decendents of converts to the faith. I do not believe they have a right to occupy Palestine to the exclusion of all others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_converts_to_Judaism.
I read your article and you seem to know a lot about Palestine, but the important thing is to find a chink in the armour.
I still have no idea what it is about my article that makes you think it is anti semetic hate speech. If you are going to throw this sort of libel around you have to back it up with some facts. I feel we have gotten off on the wrong foot. i don’t like making enemies.
Cheers Ben
Posting pro forma:
A response to Ben Laycock’s 26 March 2025 blog post on the Middle East war.
by Sandy Joffe and Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo
In response to your blog ‘Is Israel a Democracy?’, here are a few ‘in response’ comments we would like to see posted on your blog. We note that, since we first alerted you about our post, the Palestinian and Israeli population figures currently on your site have been altered to more correctly reflect the true figures.
First, it is unclear why you wrote this. While it is true that Israel, in many serious ways, is not a democracy, much has already been written about the fact that there is no voice for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and that the Israeli constitution is being disregarded by the radical right government led by Netanyahu. The situation in Gaza is so dire – the ongoing bombing, the weaponisation of starvation, the more than 50,000 deaths – so immense, that dressing it up with sarcasm and inaccurate data is particularly unhelpful. Your tone will likely alienate anyone open to learning or understanding more about the situation there, or provoke anger towards all Jews
Second, your conflations.
While you refer to Palestinians as such, not as Muslims, you conflate Israelis into (all) Jews and (all) Jews to Zionists, as if there were no cultural and, perhaps more particularly, no political differences between us. But there are differences, many of them great, and great enough to have caused rifts between family members, friendship and religiously observant groups. This conflation is not found only in right wing outlets; it is also evident in more mainstream media, including the ABC. This conflation leads to a strengthening of antisemitism, which is, not surprisingly, completely unacceptable to us.
Third, your data.
Although Wikipedia is hardly an authoritative source, it is nevertheless surprising how wrong it got the number of Jewish Israelis. Statista, a neutral data source, puts the Jewish Israeli population, at 2024, at 7.7 million. Other reliable sources, including from academia, concur. Your comment ‘So we have 10 million Jews’ is clearly incorrect.
‘In 2023, the Jewish population had the highest total fertility rate in Israel, at an average of 3 births per woman. Muslim women … 2.81 children. The Druze and Christian religious communities had a total fertility rate of 1.75 and 1.64, respectively.’ The difference between Jewish Israeli fertility and Muslim fertility is not very significant, which raises the question: what is the point about fertility rates you were trying to make?
A final data correction. It is unclear why this matters, but if you are going to make a comment on Israel’s population composition – ‘Most of the Zionists are also from the colonialist nations of western Europe or their colonies in North America and the South Pacific’ – at least use correct data. Jewish Voices for Peace, a left wing Jewish American anti-Zionist and advocacy organisation critical of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories has this to day.
‘Of 7 million Israelis, 35–40% are Mizrahim, 15% are Russian immigrants, 20% are Palestinian Israelis, 2.2% are Ethiopian, and 25–30% are Ashkenazi Jews and others. This means 55–60% of the Israeli population is “nonwhite”; together, Mizrahim and Palestinian Israelis form a majority.’ Of course, there are diaspora Jews to consider, but this matter of population composition is complex.
Finally, your selective history.
You write that ‘Every Jew in the world was invited to come and live in Palestine. Many took up the offer, for obvious reasons’ (italics added). What were those obvious reasons? Is your deliberate vagueness to avoid mentioning the Holocaust? (Just by the way, at least by the late 1960s, there more Jews – approximately double the number – living in New York City alone than there were in Israel and let alone in the rest of the diaspora. So invitation notwithstanding, ‘every Jew in the world’ did not come to Israel.
Given the tone of your article and its disregard for simple as well as complex facts, we wonder if your blog was meant to be taken as a serious contribution to the discussion. To be so glib about this tragedy and the loss of life is deeply immoral.
Sandy Joffe
Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo
11 April 2025
In reply to PhIlip and Sandra and Sandy.
I wrote this article in an attempt to undermine the Zionist’s sense of entitlement.
If my data is inaccurate, please take it up with Wikepedia. I have changed the number of Zionists in Israel to 7million. I don’t think it has altered my argument one iota. I will take your advice and look at Statista. But I don’t think a few wobbly figures negates what I am saying. As for conflating Jews and Zionists, I have sifted through the article several times looking for such conflation but I couldn’t find any. I am perfectly aware that not all Jews are Zionists. I have enormous respect for the contribution of Jewish thought and philosophy to the development of Western Civilization, especially the Left.
Conflating support for the Palestinian cause with antisemitism is a fundamental weapon in the Zionist propaganda tool kit. A weapon used extensively by both Labor and Liberal in order to generate animosity towards Palestine protesters. I would be very careful about joining them, if I were you.
I feel that the genocide in Gaza is a far more serious issue than Neo Nazis painting swastikas on walls. There are many in the Jewish community who obviously do not share my perspective.
I mentioned fertility rates because tribal people often use fertility to get an advantage over their neighboring tribes.
As for my claim that Israel is a Western European colonial enterprise. I have noted that there are now more non-European Jews in Israel. But at the time of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, this was not the case. I believe The Zionist state at that time was ruled mainly by Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, with an enormous amount of help from the very Western European powers that invented colonialism, especially Britain.
I said that ‘every Jew in the world was invited to come to Palestine.’ I did not claim that they all took up the offer.
I am sorry if you thought my article was glib. The intention was anything but glib. I take this issue very seriously, I can assure you. To then say that being glib is deeply immoral is insulting. As for using sarcasm. Sarcasm is one of my favourite tools of trade. I believe it is a very effective tool.
In all my writing I am trying to disseminate facts. I am not too concerned about sensitive people getting upset about slight discrepancies in my account, that do not alter the basic facts of my argument. The fact I am trying to convey is that the state of Israel is not a democracy, and it never was. It was established via military conquest over a defenseless people. It was based on the British Mandate, and facilitated by the British every step of the way making it in my book a classic colonial enterprise.
The fledgling Zionist state conducted a massive ethnic cleansing operation in Palestine in 1948. This is well documented in David Ben Gurian’s diaries in the Israeli national archives. To ignore this is a form of holocaust denial.
That Zionist Jews perpetrated this atrocity only 3 years after the holocaust, says a lot about human nature. I think we naturally assume that persecuted people would be the last to persecute others, but the ethnic cleansing of Palestine shows us that when the tables are turned the oppressed willingly become the oppressors.
The holocaust forced us to reevaluate human nature. We now kow human behaviour is limited only by human imagination, nothing else. The nakbah taught us that those who have been through enormous suffering are not less likely to inflict suffering on others, but more likely. Just like abuse victims are more likely to commit abuse.
I truly believe that the state of Israel has no right to exist. It was a dreadful mistake that should be rectified. A power sharing arrangement such as Northern Ireland would be far more appropriate. That will never happen while the world says ‘Israel has a right to defend itself.’
The United Nations agreed to the British proposal that the Jews who survived the holocaust should be allowed to occupy Palestine. This is because no country in the world would have them, so they dumped them on the Palestinians. This is foreign policy based on shame!
The U.N. gave the Zionists control over a small area of land that contained more Palestinians than Jews. 1 million more. The Zionists proceeded a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing of those Palestinians. This is well documented by Ilan Pappe in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. His date comes straight from the dairies of David Ben Gurion.
This act is more than enough to make the Israeli state illegitimate. Since that atrocity, the Zionists have defied almost every ruling of the U.N. They have been building settlements in the West Bank for almost 80 years. They are a rogue state operating on according to the old testament. They have no place in the modern world!
I believe that we cannot challenge the state of Israel without undermining its legitimacy.
Israel will not collapse until the US empire collapses. But when it does, if we do not have a viable power sharing arrangement in place in Palestine, a bloodbath will ensue.
We cannot establish that arrangement while the world believes that Israel has a right to rule Palestine by military force.
Cheers Ben