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Notes -
Would you be able to identify 2 policies supported by the Yashar party which would discriminate against non-Jewish Israeli citizens?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_absentee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_and_Entry_into_Israel_Law
As a threshold issue, I looked at the articles you cited and saw no mention of the Yashar party. Moreover, I don't see how denying citizenship to a non-citizen discriminates against citizens, Jewish or non-Jewish.
Maybe summarize the policies in your own words?
Well, Yashar is sufficiently progressive to suggest Israeli Arabs can serve in the IDF, so they get a point for that.
But they have never even suggested that either discriminatory policy I linked to should be overturned.
Seems to me you are goalpost-moving here.
The policy you point to does not appear to discriminate against non-Jewish Israeli citizens; at a minimum you have not explained how it does. Nor have you shown any evidence that Yashar supports either policy.
I suspect that in this context, accusations of "racism" are fundamentally no different from accusations of "apartheid" and "genocide." In the sense that there is no way to define these words broadly enough to cover Israel (or leading parties in Israel); narrowly enough so that they don't cover lots of other situations which are not normally and widely condemned as "racist"; and not in a way that is obviously gerrymandered so as to apply only to Israel.
For example, lots of countries discriminate in terms of offering citizenship: Japan, Ireland, Poland, just to name a few.
Don't be obtuse. Most Israeli citizens can marry a foreigner and live with their spouse in Israel. Some are not allowed to. Most Israeli citizens can live in any village. Some are not allowed to. In both cases these "some" are Israeli Arabs.
You are free to ask them yourself. Both policies are explicitly opposed only by the Arab parties.
Whoa please tone it down. TIA.
I'm pretty sure that if an Israeli Arab marries a non-Israeli from the United States, they can live with their spouse in Israel, same thing with an Israeli Jew. I'm pretty sure there is an exception if the proposed marriage partner is a non-Israeli from Gaza or J & S, but at the same time, I'm pretty sure that this exception applies to both Jews and Arabs alike. Do you disagree?
I'm pretty sure that any Israeli citizen can live in any village provided that (1) they buy or rent a residence there; and (2) in the case of communities where approval by a committee is required, the committee approves them. Do you disagree with this? Are you saying that some of these committees make discriminatory decisions? Or are you saying that it's "racist" that Arab citizens are not allowed to have real estate handed over to them in situations where that real estate was (allegedly) seized by the state 75 years ago as a the alleged result of their relatives abandoning it?
I don't have the burden of proof here. The claim being made is that the Yashar Party is "racist."
Jim Crow laws were facially neutral too. It didn't stop them being racist.
The same is true of the national quotas in the 1924 Immigration Act in the US, or the "patriality" rules in the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts in the UK, if you think it is possible for an immigration law to be racist in the morally relevant sense.
It is very easy for a competent politician to write facially neutral laws targetting a specific ethnic group, particularly if they are okay with modest collateral damage (as the Jim Crow South definitely was - I'm less sure about the other examples).
As a point of information, I don't think this is correct. For example, a quick search claims this as part of a 1926 Atlanta ordinance:
Not facially neutral.
That may very well be, and I certainly don't deny that facially neutral rules can be discriminatory either in practice or by design (nor am I claiming that facially neutral Jim Crow laws didn't exist), but that brings us back to the problem of defining the word "racist." As Scott has pointed out, the word "racist" is strategically ambiguous. Bad actors would like to pivot back and forth between a broad definition (for tarring their enemies) and a narrow definition (to avoid having their allies similarly tarred). Or to use a gerrymandered definition for similar bad faith reasons.
Personally, I don't have a strong opinion about this. I am well aware that many countries (Israel, Ireland, Poland, Japan, etc.) are discriminatory in terms of who can become a citizen. Many many countries are discriminatory in terms of who can enter and live and work in the country. For example, in my country (the United States) citizens of the Marshall Islands can live and work in the United States without obtaining a visa.
Is this "racist"? I don't have a strong opinion, my main concern is consistency, more or less. When I see people accusing Israel of "racism" for having discriminatory citizenship rules and those people fail to speak up about, say, Japan, it strongly suggests that the criticism is not being made in good faith. That their true objection to Israel is something else. And the key to enforcing consistency is having a clear definition.
As alluded to above, Scott wrote a nice post a few years back about how the words like "racism" are strategically used by social justice types:
Social Justice And Words, Words, Words
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/
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