Israel’s election shows its democracy is a sham, but the West can’t stop buying the lie

Israel’s general election last week unmasked beyond question the West’s much-cherished fiction of Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state". That Israel ’s democratic pretensions are taken seriously should in itself be astounding. For decades Israel has been given a free pass - revered even - as the "only democracy in the Middle East". Western establishments have agreed to turn a collective blind eye to Israel’s brutal treatment of millions of Palestinians forced to live under an illegal military occupation.