Is Israel a Democracy?

Determining if a country is being democratic is very complex. There are many aspects of democracy.

Luckily there are several organization that try to measure the level of democracy of each country.

The Economist Democracy Index

For example there is the The Economist Democracy Index.

When I looked at the data there were 167 countries listed using a score between 0 and 10 in 4 different aspects.

The countries are divided into 4 groups based on their scores:

While the naming in this table and the ranges are arbitrary, if you look at the actual list of countries, you will see that this means that more than 50% of the countries are not democracies and even among the "Flowed democracies" you'll find a few that you cannot consider democracies.

List of some countries

As you can see Israel is on the 29th. spot, one place ahead of the USA, 5 places ahead of Italy and 7 place ahead of Belgium. The de-facto capital of Europe. We have a lot more work to do and the recent attempts to change the legal system were not in the right direction. Despite that we are in the top 20%.

This information will especially important to keep in mind when we discuss the false accusations of "genocide", "apartheid", and "ethnic cleansing", any of which would have a very strong impact on this index.

I've included in this list a number of countries immediately after Israel and the countries that are neighboring Israel.