Israel has over a million Arab citizens, who are functionally, and to a lesser extent substantively, discriminated against by Israeli law. Israel's own Jewish population can hardly be described as monocultural too. Unlike the Diaspora Jewish community in the US - from which American progressives largely derive their ideas about Israeli Jewish cultural identity, and conversely that of Israel - the Israeli Jewish population is radically multicultural - Ethiopian, Iranian, Moroccan, Iraqi, Algerian, eastern European, American, Western European etc.
What Zionist discourses about desiring a monocultural Jewish society in Israel conceal is that there is no such thing as a Jewish monoculture, in Israel, or anywhere else for that matter. What does prevail in Israel is a largely Ashkenazi (read central European, for our purposes) official state culture, which conceals (or buries) a radically multicultural society amongst the country's Jewish population, in addition to its Arab (Christian, Muslim, Druze) and Circassian populations, let alone all of the non-Jewish immigrant workers from Asia and Eastern Europe who've settled in the country.
Best, Joel
On Sep 3, 2006, at 10:31 AM, joanna wrote:
>
>
> Angelus Novus wrote:
>> Is Israel mono-cultural and mono-religious? As I
>> understand, there are substantial Arab and Druze
>> minorities.
>
>
> I can draw only one conclusion from the thread of your arguments: you
> are a zionist and not a very honest one at that.
>
> Joanna
>>
>
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