I'm still thinking about my post about Israel not having a true democracy because Tzipi Livni would not include Arab parties in a coalition. Instead she reached out to the rightwing, Shas, but Shas wanted guarantees on Jerusalem. So she can't form a government, and can't openly urge the division of Jerusalem, a necessity to the two-state solution. Barak did something similar in forming a government in 1999, embracing the right so as to escape Arab demands. Whatever happened to one-man, one-vote, if when it really counts, you don't get counted?
I recommend the comments on that post. Particularly Higginslads on Hamas's peaceable statements, and Eurosabra's explanation of the anti-Zionism of the Arab parties in Israel. I have no idea of that political culture, it makes Livni's decision more understandable. It is a different picture; I accept that. But even Eurosabra says it's "chicken and egg." I.e., how radicalized is someone going to be if you deny them rights on a religious basis? If you don't try to get them in the military. If you ethnically cleanse Palestinian lands, and Palestinian holdings in Jaffa?
This goes back to the central question here, of course, which is whether Israel didn't start down the wrong path years ago in its definition of itself as a Jewish state. It is the question that Avraham Burg raises in his new book, which begins with a dedication to Hannah Arendt and which urges Jews to get out of the ghetto. Last night at dinner I told my wife about Livni's political calculus, and she said, "I don't think they realize how racist they are. That's the shocking thing."
One reason Israelis don't understand how this looks is that we protect them from this understanding. We nullify U.N. criticism, we support them in anything they do. Our media and political institutions justify the demonization of any Palestinian who opposes Zionism–even as we have pushed suicide terrorist factions into a coalition government in Iraq, forgiving them their violent resistance, and are now openly discussing the idea of power-sharing with the Taliban (as was suggested on this blog by Ambassador Lane, last summer).
This can't last. The complete ignorance in this country of conditions in Israel/Palestine is insupportable when, as I point out so frequently, Jews here are living the minority dream, and when one of Israel's leading voices here, Alan Dershowitz, is supporting Obama because he will maintain the separation of church and state that so empowered Jews in America. It's just too hypocritical, to be celebrating minority rights here, and upwards of 30 percent of Supreme Court clerks being Jewish, and allowing them to be trashed on the grounds that Israel lives in a bad neighborhood. How much have its militant border-policies and religious exclusivist ideology contributed to the bad neighborhood, and to the radicalization of the Arab parties?
Another reason it can't last is that Obama is about to reframe the American scene, and the world scene, as the Republican National Committee and Republican Jewish Coalition recognize. Israeli religious policies are going to seem more and more out of step with the postracial democratic first world.
It's time for American Jews to start giving their democratic lessons to the Israelis instead of taking their marching orders from the architects of apartheid. In Chutzpah, Dershowitz says that his generation was "too American" to make "aliyah" to Israel, or emigrate there, but we started the Israel lobby here. There's some guilt in that statement. Many Jews feel guilty that they didn't make that ultimate commitment to Israel. Because "aliyah" means going up. Yoredim–the Jews here in the Diaspora–means lower. What if we're not lower? What if we're actually higher? Look at this American-aliyah website, which compares Obama to Hitler. Is that going up? No, it's going down. When I told my wife about these ideas of aliyah and moral superiority, she told me about this thriller she's reading about neo-Nazis in Sweden that is filled with just these sorts of moral distinctions between religious and ethnic groups, on the part of the villains. And some people are enfranchised, and others not.
I offer to Eurosabra a lesson from American history. We used to have segregated armed forces here, and in World War II the black forces fought with valor and distinction. Many of them died. It became an embarrassment to Americans, all kinds of Americans, especially because the white forces were now filled with recently-arrived ethnics who fought alongside one another. A couple months after he recognized Israel in '48, Truman issued an executive order desegregating the military, and spoke of having "the highest standards of democracy" in the military. Obama wouldn't be on the cusp of the presidency if it weren't for bold strokes like that in my country's struggle forward. Can Israel ever ever take a more inclusive step?
