Ahmed Tibi's Contradictions

I always marvel at MK Ahmed Tibi's willful distortions of the truth. Now, the doctor from Taibeh has seized the stage of the New York Times op-ed page to capitalize on Lieberman and Bibi's latest loyalty oath mischief. That business - a law that applies only to non-Jewish immigrants - is indeed shameful and another expression of the evil and stupidity currently residing in the foreign ministry. But Tibi's argument consists of a lie and a calculated one at that. According to Tibi,

there is far more wrong with the loyalty oath than simply the original intent of applying it only to non-Jews. Swearing allegiance to an Israel that is Jewish and democratic is logically inconsistent and an attempt to relegate Palestinian citizens of Israel to inferior status.

Palestinian citizens of Israel comprise 20 percent of the population. The insistence of some Jewish leaders on the state being “Jewish” is a punch in the gut to Palestinians who for more than 60 years have struggled to achieve equal rights in Israel.

There is racism and discrimination against Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in Israel. But the definition of the state is not the problem and in itself cannot be called racist. Furthermore, there is nothing new about that definition. Tibi apparently is trying to turn back the clock of history with some sleight of hand.

Israel's Declaration of Independence and its Basic Laws already define the country as a "Jewish State." Indeed, the United Nations itself called for its establishment in 1947. There are many people who want to distort the meaning of this simple description. In part, the word "Jewish" lends itself to such distortions because, unfortunately for the Jews, it describes both a confessional identity and a cultural, ethnic, or national one (this apparently confuses many people in the modern world; 300 years ago, few people would have recognized any sort of problem). But the original intent was quite simple: Israel is the "nation-state of the Jews," which means that any person who is "Jewish" may immigrate there. And 62 years later, this continues to be one of the guiding principles of the state. Is there a problem with that? Let Ahmed Tibi say so straight up: I don't believe that there should be a Jewish state.

The problem of course is that Tibi seems to have no issue with the nation-state or with nationalism per se - if he did, he would object to any number of Arab states in the region and nation-states elsewhere. He also would not be suggesting that

The international community could address our situation by calling on Israel to recognize us as a national minority.

Tibi, in other words, wants Kosovo or Bosnia. This is not the game of liberal democracy but of nationalist secession - in other words, exactly the game that Lieberman wants.

Was the Yishuv Indifferent to the Holocaust?

BY AMOS

The notion that the Zionist leadership in the Land of Israel and yishuv society as a whole reacted with indifference to news of the extermination of European Jewry during the Second World War has become almost a commonplace among non-specialists in the subject. In the past two decades, critics of contemporary Israel and the enterprise of Zionism in history, have led the charge in alleging that the yishuv took little interest in the victims of the Holocaust because of its ingrained negative view of Diaspora Jews (shlilat ha-golah) and single-minded devotion to the enterprise of state-building. Tom Segev's The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (1991, English translation published in 1993) unfortunately strengthened this sentiment. Although his book is still a classic - composed in beautiful prose like all his works and revealing a wealth of insights about Israeli society, its third chapter, "Rommel, Rommel, where are you?" paints an exaggerated picture of Zionist callousness toward the plight of European Jewry.

A new work by the Israeli historian Yosef Gorny significantly challenges the revisionist accounts that emerged in the 1990s about the yishuv and the Holocaust. The book, entitled קריאה באין אונים:העיתונות היהודית בארץ ישראל, בבריטניה, בארצות הברית ובברית המועצות לנוכח השואה, בשנים 1939-1945 ("Helpless Cry: The Jewish Press in the Land of Israel, Britain, the U.S., and the Soviet Union during the Shoah, 1939-1945," was published in 2009 and has now been reviewed in Ha'aretz by Dina Porat. The reviewers herself is the author of a pioneering related work, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David: The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939-1945 (Hebrew version in 1986; English translation published by Harvard University Press in 1990).

Gorny's book lays to rest the myth that the Jewish press in the Land of Israel ignored the victims of the Holocaust or that the yishuv's inhabitants and its leading personalities were indifferent to the fate of European Jewry. According to Porat,

Reading and comparing the various newspapers show that the Jewish press, both within and outside the Land of Israel, covered the Holocaust extensively, with the newspapers here writing about it more. A comparison between Hebrew newspapers Davar, Haaretz and Hamashkif shows that Davar, the Labor movement daily, which has been criticized from all sides (especially by the first to research the issue, S.B. Beit Zvi, in his book "Post Ugandan Zionism on Trial" ), actually published a lot more about the Holocaust than either of the other two papers. At the time, Hamashkif, the Revisionist paper, was incessantly attacking Davar, for explicitly political reasons, to the point that it became an uncontested axiom that Davar was ignoring the Holocaust.

The comparison between the newspapers also shows that they published pretty much whatever information they received about what was happening to the Jews in Europe, including some hair raising stories that were inconceivable at the time in terms of the number of victims and especially the cruelty of the killing methods. Indeed, readers and journalists alike argued during the first half of the war that the many articles describing atrocities were an exaggeration, akin to "spilling blood into the lines of the newspapers," and called on editors to exhibit greater responsibility in the kinds of pieces they published and stop demoralizing the public and creating panic.

The book's title, Kri'ah be-ein onim is a triple entendre, as the word "kri'ah" means both "call" or "shout" as well as "reading" (i.e., the act of reading). It can therefore be translated as either. The phrase "be-ein onim" literally means "without potency," i.e., "powerless" or "helpless." One could therefore translate the title either as "Helpless Cry" (more elegantly, "Cry in the Wilderness") or "Impotent Reading." To add to these possibilities, the plural noun "'onim" (אונים) has a homophone (at least for those Hebrew speakers who do not pronounce 'alef and 'ayin differently), עונים, which means "respondents," - in other words, "Reading/Cry without Response."

I see the charge that "Zionists didn't care about the Holocaust during the war" as related to those works of scholarship and political polemic which talk about Holocaust memory having been manufactured after World War II by Zionists or Jewish elites. Alongside the myth that the yishuv was indifferent to the Holocaust, a myth arose several decades ago that American Jews did not really talk about the Holocaust until 1967, and that it only became a major focus of their attention due to Zionist manipulation. That is the heart of the accusations contained in works like Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life and the (far worse) piece of propaganda by Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. These accounts have also been significantly undermined by recent, heavily empirical scholarship, most notably in Hasia Diner's We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962.

Yehuda Shenhav's New Proletariat: Palestinians, Mizrahim, and Settlers

BY AMOS

Photo: Prof. Yehuda Shenhav

Academics in the heavily politicized social sciences and humanities are constantly staking out new fields to endow themselves with the cachet of radical alterity. Nowhere is this more true than in Israel or among expatriate Israelis in Europe and North America. Only those who find a convincing way to reject everything that is rise to the top. In a long interview published in Ha'aretz several days ago, until now available only in Hebrew, Yehuda Shenhav lays out his latest addition to the discursive landscape of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

His attack at first seems familiar. We know the line that Israel is a colonialist state dominated by an Ashkenazi elite bent on subjugating both Palestinians and mizrahi Jews. But Shenhav, the son of Iraqi immigrants, has moved a few steps beyond this narrative. His critique is directed at the Ashkenazi left and Center - Meretz, Labor, and Kadima, which he faults for viewing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as having its origins in 1967 when, according to them, everything went bad. He lampoons this as Ashkenazi nostalgia for an Israel that was more European and less religious. For Shenhav, the twin fears that Israel will have a Palestinian majority or that it will be a majority mizrahi society lurk behind the Ashkenazi elite's embrace of the two-state solution.

Against the "new nostalgists," he pits a strange "alliance" of Palestinians, Arab Israelis, mizrahim, and settlers. The latter are the true left of Israeli society, whereas the left-wing parties, especially Meretz, are no more than wealthy elites spouting ideology. The settlements, in Shenhav's thinking, seem to be a kind of last bastion of the Israeli welfare state. Mizrahim and Palestinians are linked in their shared identities as refugees.

In effect, this implausible new rainbow of ethnic and religious groups and sub-groups for Shenhav seems to play the role of a revolutionary proletariat that will oppose the forces of neo-liberalism. He argues not for a one-state solution but for a utopia of cantons composed of people with different citizenships and allegiances.

Natan Sharansky, from Refusenik to Likudnik to Publicist

 

BY NOAH S.        

Natan Sharansky, the famous Soviet dissident and Israeli political leader, spoke yesterday evening at the University of California, Berkeley. Freshly appointed by Prime Minister Netanyahu to head the Jewish Agency for Israel, Sharansky is touring college campuses in an attempt to foster a more positive image of Israel among American youth. The audience in the large lecture hall, however—considering the stature of the guest and the amount of publicity for the event—was surprisingly sparse and composed largely (in this author’s estimation, at least) of non-students who were old enough to remember Sharansky when he was a hero for Americans and Jews during the Cold War. But then, this is Berkeley—a “haven” for “anti-Israel forces,” as the student organizers put it—the speaker was Sharansky—famous now more as George W. Bush's favorite author than anything else—and the event was part of the dubiously titled “Caravan for Democracy” series, which is funded by such local favorites as Media Watch International (a group aligned with Likud) and the Jewish National Fund (among other things, since 1901 a major land-owner in Palestine/Israel which still refuses to lease its land to Arabs). It is a shame, though, that more students were not in attendance, because they would have been challenged by a trenchant thinker with a compelling personal story to think through some of the basic justifications for the existence of a Jewish state.

The talk was brilliantly composed and delivered, though problematic upon close scrutiny. Sharansky structured his argument around “two ideas” which he claims share a “deep connection”: “the desire to be free” and “the desire to belong,” or between “democracy” and “identity.” (The connection between the two forms the basis of a course Sharansky is leading at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.) Those familiar with his books The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror (2004) and Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy (2008) will recognize the argument. It is directed mainly against those “intellectuals,” as he called them, who believe in “post-identity,” “post-nationalism,” “post-modernism,” and “multiculturalism” - in other words, the relativists who believe that “nothing is different, that everything is equal.” (Berkeley professors?)  In order to illustrate this caricatured line of thought, Sharansky quoted (God help us) none other than the hippie-icon John Lennon, who asked us in 1971 to “imagine” a world in which there are “no countries,” “no religion,” and “nothing to kill or die for.” (Actually, Sharansky only quoted “nothing to die for.”). The logic of Sharansky’s unnamed intellectuals, represented here by the post-Beatle, holds that “strong identities” like nationalism and religion are “the enemies of peace.” Strong identities in Europe supposedly led to two world wars; war is evil; therefore, identity is evil. For them, being a human rights activist and a nationalist is an internal contradiction. And by this logic, the nation-state of Israel, which claims to be a leader of the free world yet retains its identity as the homeland of only one people, is an anachronism in a post-identity Western world. Sharanksy has set out to prove these critics wrong.

Born Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky in Donetsk, Ukraine (then the Soviet Union) in 1948, Sharansky never saw any contradiction between the desire to be free and the desire to belong because under the Soviet regime both were stifled if you were a Jew. He was neither allowed to voice a dissenting political opinion, nor to learn anything about his religious and cultural heritage. When he attempted to immigrate to Israel in 1973 and was refused passage—thus acquiring the title of refusenik—he became an outspoken dissident and spent years in Soviet prisons. He realized that he had found something—his Jewishness—which he was “willing to die for,” and it gave him the strength to withstand the KGB. In this brief biographical narrative, Sharansky did not take time to discuss why the struggle to express one’s political views and the struggle to express one’s cultural identity publicly—which in his case did coincide—should resonate with people growing up in a free world. A tighter case would have to be made; perhaps those who have read his latest book could chime in here. In any case, the argument offers some insight into the psychology of this Soviet dissident turned militant democrat.

In fact, most of the talk was about Sharansky’s own story, and the move from the personal to the contemporary political came only at the very end, in a rhetorical flourish when he accused European intellectuals of “having nothing to die for.” As a result, he claimed, when faced with a very small minority of possible fundamentalist terrorists whose identity is strong and who are willing to die for their cause, they feel bewildered and defenseless. In the wake of World War II, just as Europeans vowed never to fight again, Zionists vowed never to not fight again. Israel has paid the price in its international image for the post-war move toward pacifism and post-identity among "intellectuals," Sharansky claimed, because it became a nation-state precisely at the moment when the idea of the nation-state became unpopular. The Western nations said accusingly, “We have given up our nationalism, our colonialism - why not you?” Sharansky’s answer is that Israelis need to have a strong identity to fight and die (and kill) for if they are to defend against “all these totalitarian regimes” in its region. One senses that Sharansky’s experience in the Soviet prisons has left its indelible mark upon this man’s political philosophy. 

Benny Morris in Berkeley

This is a team post by Noah K. and Noah S.

On Wednesday, January 28, the University of California-Berkeley's Doe Library hosted Israeli historian Benny Morris. BM was a leading figure among the "New Historians" of the 1980s, a group of scholars who with access to newly opened IDF archives, challenged the then prevailing myths and dogma of Zionist historiography. In 1988, BM published his landmark study The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, which he updated and reissued in 2004. Surrounded by an eager crowd comfortably ensconced on the sofas of the Morrison Room of Doe Library, Morris spoke about his new book, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Morris is often described as a "leftist," and his early work, by presenting the conclusion that thousands of Palestinian Arabs left their homes unwillingly during the 1948 war, must have been warmly received by many critics of the official narrative. Now, he is said to have shifted to the center, perhaps only reflecting the reconfiguration of Israeli politics in the last several decades. Is this new book he's hawking a "centrist" book? At no point in the lecture did BM expressly contradict any of the arguments made in his first book on the refugee problem. The book aims to set his old story of the birth of the refugee problem into a complete narrative of the war, really two wars, a civil war, and a war between the Jews and the Arab states after the initial civil conflict was decided. So the creation of the refugee problem loses something of its status as original sin when set against the backdrop of massacres on both sides -- the kind that BM argues "naturally" occur in civil war -- and against his careful description of the evolution of the war aims of the various parties involved. BM was at a pains to present himself as a dispassionate historian, who writes history "from the documents," and with his conclusions undermines the accounts of Arab propagandists and vulgar Israeli nationalists. He wowed the crowd with dates and figures, citing chapter and verse, but he also made recourse to comparative examples in world history.

He began with his most controversial historical claims. It is a matter of dispute among historians of the Arab-Israeli war about whether the war was, for the Arab armies, jihad, i.e., holy war against infidels. BM seemed convinced that there was sufficient evidence for an answer in the affirmative. He cited Arab generals who compared their war against the Jews to the Muslim struggle against Crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries, and Sunni religious authorities who issued fatwas against Palestinian Jews just months before the Egyptian invasion. The second, related, claim is that the Arab armies were motivated to a certain extent by antisemitism. He presented very little evidence for the latter argument. He did mention that these arguments were probably responsible for the fact that the publisher that originally commissioned the manuscript—Metropolitan Press—ended up not publishing the book. (Yale University Press did.) More on this below.

BM moved on to a chronological account of the two stages of the '48 war: 1) the civil war between Arab and Jewish militias in Palestine (April/May), and 2) the conventional war between the Jewish armies and Arab state armies.

Appropriately, the first question he addressed had to do with war aims. On the Jewish side, BM argued that the original war aim of the Jewish militias in April, 1948, was mere survival and the eventual establishment of a Jewish state. However, as the war progressed, two further aims developed: territorial expansion (past the borders originally allotted in the U.N. partition plan of 1947); and the aim of ridding the area that would eventually become the Jewish state of Arabs, who presented a fifth column. Regarding the third aim, BM differentiated between expulsion—when Jewish soldiers came to Arab villages and commanded residents to leave their homes within x hours—and flight—when Arabs fled their homes in the course of a Jewish attack on their village (Arab militias were based in Arab villages). However, after Arab refugees are not allowed back to their homes after 1948, one could plausibly claim that the whole event was a de facto expulsion. There was no central command on the expulsion issue from Jewish authorities, BM said; some Jewish generals decided not to expel, which account for the fact that at the end of the war, there were 650,000 Jews and still 150,000 Arabs within Israeli borders (who became citizens of the new state).

"Arab" war aims are more difficult to assess, BM continued, because a) there was no central control among Palestinian Arab militias, and b) Arab archives are closed. What he could say was the following: Common war aims among all Arab armies was 1) the prevention of creation of a Jewish state, and 2) the conquest of as much land as possible in Palestine. BM dismissed the argument that a further aim was to "drive the Jews into the sea" for lack of documentary evidence. He further dismissed the official Arab claim that their goal was to save the Palestinian Arab population.

Moving on to the specific aims of the individual Arab states, BM noted that early on King Abdullah of Jordan accepted the inevitability of Israel's creation and aimed instead "only" to take West Bank for itself. Jordan's aim therefore was not to fight Jews, though it ends up happening anyway. Lebanon, too, despite official propaganda never invaded Jewish territory. These examples throw a wrench in the arguments of Zionist historians who claim that all Arab states wanted to destroy Israel in 1948. Syrian, Egyptian, and Iraqi armies did invade Jewish territory.

BM then addressed the "David and Goliath" myth of traditional Zionist historiography (that the small Jewish army was David compared to the Goliath of the Arab states). It is true, BM said, that in territory and population, Arab states were larger. However, the strength of societies also based on economic power—the yishuv was semi-industrial—as well as on "motivation"—whereas Arab soldiers often traveled long distances to fight their enemy, Jews were fighting for their lives on their own territory. The Holocaust had lent a further sense of urgency. Also, Arabs knew they could flee and live, while Jews felt "at death's door," according to BM. Further, the Jews had better ammunition. Once the U.N. imposed embargo on arms sales to warring parties in the Middle East, the Arab states lost supplies, while the Jewish militias had been stockpiling arms on the black market through Czechoslovakia all along and continued re-supplying throughout the war.

At the tail end of his talk, BM revisited the issue of "war crimes": massacres and the refugee problem. On massacres: BM cited numbers of 800-900 dead Arabs resulting from around two dozen discrete massacres (murders of civilians by Jewish soldiers outside of fighting). There were also massacres of Jews by Arab soldiers, BM said. However, the great disparity between the two numbers was a direct result of the fact that the Jewish militias took 400 Arab towns and settlements, whereas the Arab states conquered only 12 Jewish settlements/kibbutzim. This argument makes numerical sense only if one accepts the argument that massacres are a natural by-product of all wars. BM attempted to put the massacres of the 1948 war into "comparative perspective" by noting that there were days in the Yugoslavian war in which Serbs massacred over 9,000 civilians in just two days. (The number of Bosnians killed there is normally estimated at 8,000.) If there was one point, where, we think, he may have slipped up enough to allow the audience a glimpse of his ideological orientation, it was here. Sure the Hagganah, et al., killed 800 or 900 Arab non-combatants in 1947-8, but the Serbs in Srebrenica in 1995, killed 9,000 in a day! Curiously, he began to call the victims of that massacre "Croats," but caught himself, and said, "I think, no, they were Bosnians." The brutal facts of war, in all their precise and gory details, which BM had so far actually seemed to relish bringing out into the sterile light of our library seemed suddenly less important than the dignity of the Jewish state's first generation

On the refugee problem after the war: There were actually two refugee problems – Palestinian Arabs stranded in Arab countries after fleeing homes in Palestine, and Arab Jews stranded in Arab countries that no longer want them there after 1948. The main difference between these two groups is that the latter were absorbed into Israel, whereas the former group is only partially absorbed into various host countries. BM argued that this situation for the Palestinian Arab refugee was historically anomalous, as normally refugees are assimilated into host countries by second or third generation. Instead, now there are 4.5-5 million Palestinian Arab "refugees" who live off U.N. and other aid.

Explaining why there were expulsions and voluntary flight of Palestinian Arabs:

1) Zionists' explanation for the refugee problem was that the Arab states had a advised Palestinian Arabs to flee their homes in order to clear the battlefield for pan-Arab armies, or in order to justify their invasion of the territory.

2) Arab states' explanation for the refugee problem was that the Zionists had designed from the beginning to dispossess and expel the Arabs.

Truth, BM claimed, lies in between. Most Arabs fled from fighting, not because they were advised to by Arab states or forcibly expelled by Jewish soldiers.

By and large, this lecture was about the historian's craft. Amos once told me that he saw BM on Israeli TV arguing with Ilan Pappe -- another of the so-called New Historians. Pappe told BM, "You're not an historian!" And BM, becoming very agitated, retorted in his Anglophone Hebrew, "I'm not an historian?" Indeed, when Pappe came up in the Q&A, BM discussed Pappe's use of Ben-Gurion's diary in order to demonstrate that his rival isn't in fact an historian. An historian, BM, emphasized, writes history from documents. And in the case of the 1948 war, the documents of the yishuv and the fledgling Israeli state, are all we have to work with. The Arab documents haven't seen the light of day, and they aren't likely to soon. We only perceive the Arab position(s) through western eyes: contemporary diplomatic and intelligence assessments. This is the sad reality of the totalitarian political culture in the Arab states. These are the facts. Inevitably, for the history we write, this is for the worse. Then, BM literally threw his hands up. This sense of helplessness in the face of the perceived inadequacy of one, albeit, a massive, crucial segment of the sources, struck me as worth quarreling with. Is Morris giving up too easy? Take the 1967 war and the Soviet role in that conflict as an example. Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez have recently written a book Foxbats Over Dimona: the Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War, which reinterprets official Soviet documents, known for years, in order to rewrite the story of the outbreak of that war, arguing that the USSR was by May 1967 directly intervening with its military in an effort to prevent Israel from producing operational nuclear weapons. However, it was an oral source, I recall, which originally sent Ginor and Remez reviewing old official documents, looking for new ones, and challenging the historiography of '67. A recent veterans' newsletter of some kind published a Ukrainian marine's memory of his unit's orders to invade Israel by way of Haifa if and when the Israelis crossed certain red lines. Would BM's methodology allow him to be sensitive to similar material?

Israeli Arab Parties Disqualified from Elections

Logo of Bala"d (acronym for "National Democratic Assembly")

In a shocking and shameful decision, the Central Elections Committee (see English)  today (English) disqualified Bala"d and Ra"am-Ta"l, two Israeli Arab parties, from running in the upcoming 18th Knesset election. The disqualification hinged on the votes of the representatives from Kadima and the Labor Party on the committee. Kadima apparently endorsed the disqualification of both the parties, while the Labor Party voted only to disqualify Balad. To no one's surprise, the right-wing parties were jubilant about the outcome. Avigdor Liberman, most notably, called it the first step in a bid to outlaw the parties entirely. While the Arab parties themselves boycotted the vote, only Meretz, it appears, voted against the disqualification moves. 

From the coverage, it is unclear on what grounds the parties were disqualified. Past attempts to disqualify the parties were struck down by the Supreme Court. In conversation with Carmia, Meretz's Zehava Gal-On expressed confidence that this would be the likely outcome again, once the disqualification is challenged in the court. Nevertheless, Gal-On expressed consternation about Labor's support for the measure. She said it was "unimaginable that something like this could happen in the State of Israel."

Gal-On is right. I am no fan of these parties and the politics of their leaders. In fact, I abhor them as much as I do their counterparts on the far right. But the rationale given by Eitan Cabel for his support of the disqualification was so flimsy as to seriously cast doubt on the man's judgment. Apparently Cabel objected to the "defiance" of Jamal Zahalka at the committee hearings. Cabel referred to his "patriotic feeling" as having swayed his vote. Is this man serious? Is he really going to jeopardize the most basic democratic institutions of the state because of some vague feeling?  

Let's be clear. The behavior of Zahalka, Ahmed Tibi, and, before his abscondance, of Azmi Bishara in the Knesset is often repulsive. Many reasonable people can find their views odious. But are they inciting to ethnic hatred, as other disqualified parties were found to have done? Can it be proven that they are actively working to eliminate the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people? These are the two conditions for which parties may be disqualified. 

What this looks like is an exercise in stifling dissent. It is an attempt to outlaw "unpopular" opinions. The Arab parties, just like the right-wing, centrist, and left-wing Zionist parties deserve to be criticized, lampooned, vigorously opposed using democratic means. But as long as they are not breaking the law, they cannot be outlawed simply because they don't meet some standard of "patriotism" set by people such as Avigdor Liberman. As long as their struggle is conducted within the means of parliamentary democracy, it must be protected with the utmost resolution. Unless Zahalke et al. are calling for physical attacks against other Israeli citizens and institutions or hoping to accomplish this using the aid of an enemy state or terrorist organization, they have the right to excoriate Israel in whatever terms they see fit. They can even resort to vile, disgusting mischaracterizations of Israeli policy and society to do this. Indeed, they may even lie.  

To me, much of this is depressingly familiar from the days of the Bishara affair. I will not recycle here the arguments I made in its wake. Suffice to say that when so many parliamentarians show a blatant disregard for the basic tenets of liberal democracy, we are in serious trouble. If parties are going to be banned, the evidence must be incontrovertible that they indeed represent forces for which no room exists on the democratic spectrum. Let us hope that the Supreme Court reflects carefully on this matter. Unless there is evidence which has not yet been revealed to the public, a disqualification of Ra"am-Ta"al and Bala"d is unconscionable. 

ADDENDUM: The Parties Law of 1992 has the following limitations on a party's potential registration:

• Any rejection (in the party's goals or activities) of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state.
  
• Any incitement to racism.
  
• Any support of the armed struggle of an enemy state or terrorist organization against the State of Israel
  
• Any hint of a cover for illegal activity.
  

The Jewish State Again

Michel Aflaq, Arab nationalist (Photo)

Before I wrote my post on A Jewish State, several weeks ago, a good friend of mine took objection to my lament that no one seems terribly concerned about the fact that there are many "Islamic States" in the world or that various countries in the region define themselves as "Arab states."

I cannot do justice to his entire argument here, and I anticipate that he will view whatever I post as a distortion of what he was saying. Furthermore, since he has not given me permission to do so, I cannot quote his words directly. Nevertheless, here is my attempt.

According to my friend, the comparison of "the Jewish state" with Islamic states lacks rigor. Islamic states such as the Islamic Republic of Iran are "Islamic," he argues, because they derive their laws from shari'ah (Islamic religious law). But Israel's laws are not derived from halakhah (Jewish religious law). Rather, the Jewishness of the state, according to him, is something that resides in people not texts. Citizenship is linked to blood in a way that citizenship in Islamic states and Arab nationalist ones was never conceived. That is, citizenship in Arab states was not a matter of "Arabness" - as evidence, he cites the Armenian citizens in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, and the Kurdish citizens of Iraq.

I think my friend is confused and mistaken on several fronts, but I have a feeling that this argument resonates with some people. I would like to use this opportunity to resume the discussion we began in the last post, by subjecting the argument above to critique in the comments.

A Jewish State

Theodor Herzl's 1896 work The Jewish State (or the "State of the Jews")

Most Jewish Israelis and most Jews living in the diaspora take it for granted that Israel is "a Jewish state." This particular description does not elicit a great deal of controversy for them; it seems obvious and relatively unproblematic. For many Arabs, whether Christian, Muslim, or atheist, and for many Muslims living outside the Middle East, however, the phrase seems unacceptable, and usually provokes an exclamation of disbelief that such a thing should be possible. To them it seems prima facie racist. Likewise, while most Jews see Zionism as the political expression of a belief in Jewish self-determination, dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for many Arabs and Muslims it is a fascist, genocidal, and/or racist ideology with none of the legitimacy granted to other nationalist movements, including Pan-Arabism.

To me, this discord invites two different lines of inquiry.

1. Of course, arguments must be made for and against. Indeed, I myself have been forced to engage in such arguments ad nauseam, a fact that at this point in my life tends to fill me with resentment as soon as I hear yet another person challenging me to resist their conversionary or enlightening zeal.


2. However, a different line of inquiry would proceed more phenomenologically (I think). It would ask: what do all these different people mean when they talk about a "Jewish state"? Further, it would try to investigate why some people sees this self-description as unproblematic, while others vigorously oppose it; it would, moreover, ask the same thing about the desire of many Jews (in Israel and elsewhere) to have the Palestinians as well as others accept the definition of Israel as a Jewish state. This would be a study of fears, hopes, and their consequences.

To kick things off on the first line of inquiry, I will cite the remarks of John Mearsheimer, made at a lecture delivered at UC Berkeley in late October 2006, which succinctly characterize the realist position when it comes to this question. So as not to be accused of taking things out of context, I have included the entire paragraph of remarks:

We think that the fact that there’s a Jewish state is a good thing given the history of antisemitism and our understanding of how the world works. Here in the US, we have a melting pot society. This is not a Christian or Anglo-Saxon state. It’s a liberal state. There is no one ethnic or religious group that dominates; it’s a melting pot. I don’t like the idea of living in state dominated by one culture. But around world, there are lots of states where people identify themselves largely in terms of culture – take Japan: most people there consider themselves to be Japanese. Same is true with Israel – it’s a Jewish state; the same is true for Germany. It’s not the way I like to do business; but it’s perfectly legitimate way to do it in the international system today. I believe in national self-determination. Zionism is a form of nationalism and perfectly legitimate one. There is nothing wrong with having a Jewish state. We are arguing that Palestinians are also entitled to have a state of their own. If there’s national self-determination for the Jews, it should also exist for the Palestinians. The principal obstacle to establishing Palestinian state at this time is Israel. Israel is interested in colonizing the West Bank and giving the Palestinians nothing more than a few enclaves, keeping them disconnected, controlling borders, air and water. As long as that’s the case, the Palestinians won't have a viable state. The same logic that leads us to support a Jewish state leads us to support a Palestinian state.

The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel

A Jewish and democratic state - for now

About a month ago, the National Committee for the Heads of the Arab Local Authorities and the Supreme Follow-up Committee of the Arabs in Israel released a report on "The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel" (החזון העתידי לערבים הפלסטינים בישראל). It has been almost unanimously rejected by Jewish Israelis from across the political spectrum, although the kind of explosion that one might have expected from its contents has not yet taken place. Among others, Yossi Alpher and Ze'ev Schiff (here is the Hebrew version) have criticized it in the strongest terms. On the other hand, in an op-ed published in the Daily Star, Amal Helow hails the report as a sign that the "Palestinian community within Israel has taken its first steps toward full empowerment."

I have now had a chance to read the report in its entirety, and I want to use this opportunity to kick off a discussion on its substance that will be informed by perspectives from history and political science on democracy, ethnic minorities, and nation states.

I believe that the "Future Vision" report articulates a consensus about the State of Israel - among its Arab citizens as well as its Arab neighbors, and among many in the Western academy - which must be subjected to rigorous critique. It is unfortunate that those who reject the report are likely to be tarred with the brush of intolerance or anachronistic nationalism, and that the only ones who will challenge its conclusions are likely to be Jews. But it seems that the Jews are perpetually out of step with the prevailing forces of the day. Just as they were once too liberal and cosmopolitan when it was fashionable to believe in integral nationalism, they are now too particularistic and nationalistic when the enlightened lords of European pseudo-liberalism have announced the end of the nation state. Of course, as readers of the report will quickly see, its authors can hardly be said to embrace the ideals of their champions in the West. But that is no problem, for exceptions can be made for the oppressed, the subaltern, and the colonized. And at the same time, one can hold the Jews to a higher standard.

Here is the report in English (PDF), Hebrew (PDF), and Hebrew (HTML). I have not seen an Arabic version.