Re “the only democracy in the Middle East”:
Since the beginning – circa 1948 – there have been three distinct and somewhat contradictory forces acting in Israeli politics: (1) the felt need to be a “Jewish state”; (2) the felt need to “be secure”; and (3) the stated desire to be a democracy.
And since that same beginning, virtually every time these three forces came into conflict with each other, the conflict was resolved at the expense of democratic values.
One could elaborate but I am tired, so for now I will just recount what an old friend of mine wrote, not long after the state of Israel acquired its “Occupied Territories”:
In ‘The Greater Israel’ … there will be no Jewish worker or farmer. The Arabs shall be the working people, and we will become a people of managers, inspectors, officers and policemen, and mainly … secret policemen; and [the country will] by necessity become a police state, with the [secret police] being its central institution …
This will affect the spiritual and moral atmosphere in the country and society, it will poison the educational system, and it will stifle all free and critical thought — and all that will be in the Jewish part of the state.
In the Arab [part of the state], the Israeli government will build concentration camps and hangman’s trees. There will be terrible corruption. The subjugated Arabs will try to bribe the Israeli officials in order to obtain licenses, documents, travel passes, and the like, while we will [bribe] Arab leaders in order to buy ourselves Quislings.
This corruption, characteristic of any colonial regime, [will] be true for Israel. The [government] will be forced to deal with the suppression of an Arab protest movement and the acquisition of Arab Quislings. [Perhaps] even the army, and its officers, a people’s army, will deteriorate by becoming an occupation army, and its officers, turned into military governors, will not differ from military governors elsewhere in the world.
My friend wrote this decades ago. By and large he was right – and his detractors, by and large, were wrong.
Incidentally, he also used to say that Nazis could sprout again anywhere if the right toxins were injected into the political bloodstream. Whether he was right about this is left as a not-so-cheerful exercise for the reader.