The Only what? in the Middle East?

African refugees living in Israel could face indefinite detention ... Vox

The Only What? In The Middle East?

Israel in turmoil over bill that seeks to legalize ghettos for both Jews and Arabs, and the expulsion of Africans!

AlJazeera (Stanley Cohen): Jim Crow is alive and well in Israel

• Long before Israel erected separate communities, the United States perfected the art of the artificial divide.
• Israel has become better at this "subtle" nuanced sale of an imaginary narrative than we in the US ever dared dream.

Guardian: Law will ‘reveal ugly face of ultranationalist Israel in all its repugnance’

• The proposed legislation would allow the state to “authorise a community composed of people having the same faith and nationality to maintain the exclusive character of that community”.
• In its current state, the draft would also permit Jewish religious law to be implemented in certain cases and remove Arabic as an official language.

This should be interesting: "people having the same faith and nationality". If I didn't know better, I'd think this was dreamed up by somebody wanting to set Israeli citizens at one another's throats.

How does one define "faith" when there are so many different kinds of "faith" in the Jewish religion - from "ultra-orthdox all the way down (up?) to "reform" - not to mention "atheist" of which there are not just a few among people calling themselves Jews.

I guess that's just one of the stickies that will have to be hammered out.

Or will it? Apparently, these democratic Jewish people have already divvied themselves up:

Israel’s Religiously Divided Society

• Deep gulfs among Jews, as well as between Jews and Arabs, over political values and religion’s role in public life
• Although they live in the same small country and share many traditions, highly religious and secular Jews inhabit largely separate social worlds, with relatively few close friends and little intermarriage outside their own groups.

So, certain "communities" already exist voluntarily and all that's needed now is to enforce it by law, since there's always the chance a few bad actors might marry or socialize incorrectly.

One thing's for sure: if this goes through it'll take real hutzpah to call Iran a dictatorship.

But there's still the threat of those pesky African "infiltrators" who may well be the reason Netanyahu is pushing to get this legal show on the road.

DailyBeast: Israel’s Migrant Problem: It’s Not Just About Africans

• The futures of tens of thousands of African migrants hangs in the balance as Netanyahu flip-flops about their fate. At this point, no one knows what will happen to them.

​Image: History Repeats Itself, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: ColumnF.com