When the behaviour of the state of Israel is brought up in debate, the usual thing that’s levelled in its favour is that it’s “the only democracy in the middle east”. But what does this mean, and to what extent is it true?

Well, in Britain the notion of democracy really only goes back so far as the English Civil War, and the roundhead private landowner Oliver Cromwell, who has been described by the writer & broadcaster Jeremy Paxman as ‘the original democrat’. Who was this democracy for? Well, it was for his own class, the landowners, and not for the likes of the peasantry, the masses in the literal sense of the word.

Likewise in the United States, the constitution was never meant to apply to everybody living in that geographical region – not for instance to slaves, nor to disenfranchised women – only to those who drafted it, a small elite setting up a legal mechanism to formally establish and then safeguard their economic and class interests. Those who have been gradually co-opted into this social contract in more recent times, one gets the distinct feeling, have been granted these technical concessions more as a PR exercise to maintain social stability and the smooth flow of capital rather than as any kind of a social fact. The social facts which remain, the ones that have always been there, are race and class.

Jumping even further back in time, the original democracy is generally considered to be the Greek Republic of the classical era. But what was this built upon, exactly? On sand, or perhaps on the solid bedrock of slavery, once again a democracy that extended only to an elite, a small number of citizens.

Likewise, in Israel and the Occupied Territories today, the only democracy in the Middle East applies its privileges not to the whole of the population, not even to those who hold an Israeli passport, but to a smaller number whose passports bear the chillingly reminiscent term ‘Jew’, and not ‘non-Jew’. During my time as an ISM volunteer this is what really shocked me and got to me: it’s not the spectacular things that you might see that affect you the most, although dodging bullets running through the blind alleys of a refugee camp at night does leave its particular mark; it’s the grinding, mundane, everyday dehumanisation with no way out, no safe haven, no ambassador to turn to, that make things like suicide bombings almost an inevitability.

That’s not to say that Israelis aren’t suffering – on occasion – too: they are, on occasion. But to compare the two sides is like comparing Omagh to Auschwitz. Israelis have grown up with artificial privileges that they don’t want to let go of: in talking with them, you almost always get the undercurrent that the dirty Arabs want to take away their privileges. Likewise - and all too sadly - the mainstay of Israel’s traditional peace movements seem to be saying that we should stop brutalising and murdering people not because brutalising and murdering people is bad, but because it makes Israel look bad. The state of Israel is a European colonial project and its place as it exists and behaves today lies with its original conception, in the 19th Century.

Ted Curtis is the author of 'By theft & murder: a beginner’s guide to the occupation of Palestine' (Spare Change, London, 2003), a diary of ISM activism in December 2001 and March-April 2002.