You’re surely been reading about the controversy over the Israeli government’s new initiative to declare the country the nation state of the Jewish people. The Israeli government might fall over the issue. American Zionists are up in arms over the proposal, because it would end their beloved Jewish democracy. But here are two important voices saying that there is already no democracy for non-Jews in Israel.
First Omar Barghouti points out in a remarkably-long letter to the New York Times that rights have always been sharply curtailed for Israel’s Palestinian residents, this law is just the final nail in the coffin. Full letter at the link.
Your editorial about Israel’s new nation-state law says the Arab minority is granted “full rights” under current laws “on paper, at least.” Not even theoretically are Palestinian citizens of Israel given full rights, with or without this new law.
Israel already has more than 50 laws that discriminate against its Palestinian Arab citizens in every domain, according to the human rights organization Adalah. The United States Department of State has criticized Israel for its system of “institutional, legal and societal discrimination” against them.
The fact that the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel mentions “equality” for all citizens carries no legal weight. Only the Basic Laws of Israel carry real power, and those omit — deliberately, I would argue — any mention of “equality” and, on the contrary, privilege Jews worldwide over non-Jewish citizens of the state in entitlement to basic rights and access to most of the land controlled by the state.
(Barghouti will speaking at Columbia tonight.)
Next, Shlomo Sand lately published a marvelous little book called How I Stopped Being a Jew. The book came out weeks before the latest Israeli initiative, but it includes the following passage about Israel’s discriminatory definition of citizenship, which has always been there, didn’t just get proposed last month. Sand says that Israel has manipulated Jewish identity to extract maximal political advantage from calling itself the state of the Jews.
Why not belong to a ‘world people’ that had produced so many Nobel laureates, so many scientists, so many film-makers? A local Israeli or Hebrew identity has lost much of its past prestige, and gradually given way to an insistent and hypertrophied Jewish self-identity….
If the United States of America decided tomorrow that it was not the state of all American citizens, but rather the state of those persons around the whole world who identified as Anglo-Saxon Protestants, it would bear a striking resemblance to the Jewish State of Israel. African American, Latin Americans or Jewish Americans would still have the right to take part in elections to the House of Representatives and the Senate, but the representatives of those chambers would have to understand and make known quite clearly that the American state must remain eternally Anglo-Saxon…
Imagine that in France it was suddenly decided to change the constitution and establish that the country was to be defined as a Gallo-Catholic state, and that 80 percent of its territory could be sold only to Gallo-Catholics, while its Protestant, Muslim or Jewish citizens would continue to enjoy the right to vote and be elected. The tribalist, anti-democratic current would soon extend across Europe. In Germany difficulties would arise, bearing on the stigmata of the past, in connection with the official rehabilitation of the earlier ethnocentric principles, yet the Bundestage would successfully overcome the obstacles and decree that foreign immigrants who had already obtained citizenship and taken part in political life could not marry Germans of Aryan Christian origin, with a view to preserving the German ethnos for another thousand years. Great Britain would solemnly proclaim that it no longer belonged to any of its British subjects — the Scots, the Welsh, the citizens descended from immigrants from the former colonies– but was henceforth the state only of the English, those born to an English mother. Spain would cause problems by tearing off the veil of national hypocrisy and declaring that it was no longer the property of all Spaniards but an explicitly Castilian-democratic state which generously granted its Catalan, Andalusian and Basque minorities a limited autonomy.
Were historical changes like these to become a reality, Israel would finally accomplish its destiny of being a ‘light among the nations’. It would feel far more at ease in the world, and clearly less isolated, in its exclusive identitarian policy. But there is a shadow in this picture: measures of this kind are unacceptable in the context of a ‘normal’ democratic state based on Republican principles. Liberal democracy has never been solely an instrument for the regulation of relations between classes; it has also been as an object of identification for all its citizens, who are supposed to believe that they have a property title to it and in this way directly express their sovereignty…
A policy like that of Israel’s toward its minority groups who do not belong to the dominant ethnos is rarely found today outside the post-Communist countries of Eastern Europe, where there exists a nationalist right wing that is significant if not hegemonic.
According to the spirit of its laws, the State of Israel belongs more to non-Israelis than it does to its citizens who live there. It claims to be the national inheritance more of the world’s ‘new Jews’ (for instance, Paul Wolfowitz)… than of the 20 percent of its citizens identified as Arabs, whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were born within its territory. Various nabobs of Jewish origin from around the world thus feel the right to intervene in Israeli life…
Intellectuals who know well that the state of the Jews is their own also figure among the ranks of the new Jews. Bernard-Henri Levy, Alan Dershowitz, …Howard Jacobson, David Horowitz… and numerous other champions of Zionism, active in various fields of the mass media, are quite clear about their political preferences… Jerusalem really is their property…. It is enough to make a short visit to Israel, readily obtain an identity card, and acquire a secondary residence there before returning immediately to their national culture and their mother tongue, while remaining in perpetuity a co-proprietor of the Jewish state– and all this simply for having been lucky enough to be born to a Jewish mother.
The Arab inhabitants of Israel, on the other hand, if they marry a Palestinian of the opposite sex in the occupied territories, do not have the right to bring their spouses to live in Israel, for fear that they will become citizens and thereby increase the number of non-Jews in the Promised Land.
One point on Sand’s argument. Notice how influential he says such an identitarian policy would be if it were adopted by France. The “tribalist, anti-democratic current would soon extend across Europe.” Ah, so the continent’s political culture is so fragile it is subject to viruses. Fair enough. But this goes to the negative influence of Zionism across that “bad neighborhood” we call the Middle East. Injecting a Jewish state into the region in 1948– what were the effects on the political culture? Jewish nationalism has played a role in the rise of radical Islam.
The Israeli government might fall over the issue.
Might? Today, Netanyahu fired ministers Livni & Lapid.
ckg: The racially-overreaching Israelis might fall? Or might triumph!
Israel always rides rough-shod over all who get in its way. And always gets away with it. And knows that. So far. Been on a roll since 1947.
Even the people who (already) condemn its non-democracy usually fail to mention all those potential voters, something like 1/2 of all potential voters, who were summarily removed from the voting rolls by the expulsion by the Palestinian Jews of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs during the war of “1948” (in that part of the Nakba from 1947-1952). Today, even 80% “Jewish” (quotes because of the many so-called Jews from Russia) voter rolls seems not enough; even 90% land unavailable to non-Jews seems not enough. Today the Jewish leadership are on a roll and want a racial purity something like that desired by Germany in the 1940s.
Perhaps Americans, and especially American Jews, will take notice and make a stink. One would hope so, but our Zionist-controlled media and political elites make it unlikely that American policy will change.
By Anglo-Saxon Sand can’t mean anything ethnic since a slim and very long term declining percentage of America’s population is Anglo-Saxon. If by Anglo-Saxon he means speaking English and having some ties to English culture then yes the USA is that. It is culturally much closer to England, Canada, Australia… than any other countries in the world.
As far as Protestant… America accomplishes that by undermining every religion on its soil till it becomes de-facto like a Protestant denomination. American Judaism, American Catholicism, American Hinduism are culturally (and to some extent even theologically) Protestant.
That’s precisely what should be happening to the Palestinians! They should be becoming culturally and religiously Israeli. Their Islam should be overemphasizing those aspects that fit best with a Jewish culture and underplaying those aspects that fit poorly. Their general speech should be migrating through bilingual Hebrew / Arabic towards a Hebrew with a few hundred Arabic phrases intermixed like what’s left of Yiddish. Their taste in movies, music, sex, jokes… should be becoming more Israeli. And at the same time they should be dragging Israeli culture more towards its Mizrahi / Arabic culture and away from its Ashkenazi culture.
Then there would be one Israeli people with a common identity living comfortable in the Middle East. Or the Palestinians can focus on their rights, keep fighting it assimilating into the country in which they now live and be forced out. Jews certainly have been on that side of the fence enough to understand why they might find the alternative more tempting.
The USA uses primarily economic soft pressure to achieve assimilation. But one need only look at the history of immigrant families to see how quickly and how effectively it assimilates. Don’t confuse soft pressure with not desiring the endpoint.
An interesting question in Haaretz, why do American Jews Take more offense to the Nation State bill than the occupation?
The proposal won’t end the supremacist “Jewish democracy” – Israel as a “Jewish State” will remain democratic for Jews – but it strips away the flimsy pretense of Israel being something other than a religion-supremacist state and leaves Zio-supremacists in the increasingly awkward position of having to blatantly defend Jewish supremacism.