What Does It Mean To Have A Jewish State
March 10, 2016 § 2 Comments
Pew on Tuesday released its study of religion in Israeli society and there are enough interesting findings and figures in it for me to mine a year’s worth of posts. The headlines have focused on one finding in particular though, which seems like a good place to start. Pew found that 48% of Israeli Jews agreed with the statement “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel” while 46% disagreed. Looking at the poll’s crosstabs, this difference of opinion is reflected among most demographic groups with a few exceptions, and it has led people to understandably raise the question of what this means for Israel’s non-Jews and whether Israel has already chosen to prioritize Jewishness over democracy. It is a question that must be dealt with, and it goes to a larger question of what it means to have a Jewish state.
There is context to Pew’s findings on Israeli Jews’ attitudes toward Arabs. The interviews were conducted between October 2014 and May 2015, so while the current lone-wolf terrorism phenomenon is not responsible for the numbers on Arab expulsion or transfer, the polling did begin a couple of months after the most recent war in Gaza and concurrent with the start of vehicular attacks in Jerusalem and the particularly horrific massacre at a synagogue in Har Nof. The polling question itself is also more ambiguous in the original Hebrew used by Pew in the actual questioning than in the English translation and uses wording that is often interpreted by Israelis to refer to compensating Arabs to leave rather than expelling them (מישראל ערבים להעביר או לגרש צריך). The wording also leaves unclear whether this means all Arabs, or only Arabs that commit or support terrorist attacks. In addition, this comes against a backdrop of some Israeli Arab politicians openly cheering on Israel’s avowed enemies, which was demonstrated starkly this week when MKs from Hadash and Balad condemned the Gulf Cooperation Council’s decision to label Hizballah as a terror group on the laughable theory that Hizballah only seeks to defend Lebanon’s territorial integrity (that Israel is not occupying any part of Lebanon according to the United Nations doesn’t appear to matter).
Nevertheless, none of this really matters. It explains why Israeli Jews responded ithe way they did, but it does not and cannot justify it. The number of Israeli Jews that expressed support for expelling Arabs needs to prompt serious introspection. It is the ugly equivalent of Trumpism, no less worthy of condemnation and concern than the nativist throngs who cheer Donald Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. or tell non-white protesters at his rallies to go back to where they came from. The ongoing terrorism against Israeli civilians and the 67% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who support knife attacks on Israelis are only going to harden Israeli Jews’ attitudes toward Arabs and make this situation even worse, but it is an impulse that must be resisted. Israel is a Jewish state rather than a state for only Jews, and Israel’s founders never envisioned it otherwise. Part of having a Jewish state is running that state in accordance with Jewish values, which involve treating the Arab minority in Israel with respect and absolute equality. Democracy demands no less.
Part of having a Jewish state is also focusing on the state’s raison d’être, which brings me to whether democracy also demands that Jews receive no preferential treatment in Israel at all. Shibley Telhami in the Washington Post noted that 79% of Israeli Jews agreed that Jews in Israel deserve preferential treatment, and added, “so much for the notion of democracy with full equal rights for all citizens.” This may seem to make sense at first glance, but the analysis quickly breaks down. As Brent Sasley wrote for Matzav last week, Israel is an ethnic democracy and debating what it means to be Israeli is not a rejection of democracy but a quest to figure out the social and political boundaries of the state. Unless one believes the canard that Zionism is racism, the fact that Israel gives equal rights to all citizens but gives advantages to Jews when it comes to immigration – or that Israeli Jews would like to receive official preferential treatment in other areas – does not make Israel non-democratic, nor does it make Israel racist. It is a manifestation of why Israel exists, which is to right the wrong of millennia of persecution, discrimination, expulsions, and attempts at extermination around the world.
To understand why Israeli Jews believe they should receive preferential treatment, one only needs to look at the Pew numbers on anti-Semitism. 99% of Israeli Jews view anti-Semitism around the world as common, 64% view it as very common, and 76% say it is increasing. The first instance of religious persecution in recorded history was committed by the Seleucids against Jews, giving rise to the Hasmonean revolt and the Hanukkah story. Jews during the Middle Ages were expelled at various times from England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. History’s most devastating and unprecedented genocide was carried out against Jews. Israel was and is deemed necessary to guard against the historically inevitable, and to suggest that Jews should not be able to ensure that Israel remains majority Jewish or that Jews don’t deserve a little affirmative action is to be remarkably blind to Jews’ travails. Few fair-minded people deride the United States’ claim to providing full equal rights for all its citizens because of admissions and hiring preferences for minorities who were subject to past injustice or mistreatment. That Jews have their own state rather than being a minority elsewhere does not change the basic rationale that makes it acceptable to give Jews in Israel a boost the way that affirmative action is acceptable here. It is not racist to have a Jewish state, and it is not racist to worry about what happens if that state one day is no longer majority Jewish.
Nobody should downplay the survey results showing unacceptable levels of intolerance toward Arabs in Israel. Intolerance of minorities is indeed fundamentally antidemocratic, and those attitudes can never be allowed to manifest themselves in Israeli policy. But nobody should turn other numbers in the study into an indictment of Israel as an inherently racist or antidemocratic project. To do so is not only to ignore acceptable practice right here at home, but to ignore the long and terrible history of why Israel is necessary in the first place.
A Tale of Two Letters
July 18, 2012 § Leave a comment
Two letters were issued this week that tell very different stories about where Israel is going. The first was from the Shomron Residents Council and it was addressed to Shimon Peres. The settlement movement has never been in love with Peres, but they are particularly outraged at him at the moment following Peres’s comments last week about the need to take Israel’s demographic challenges into account and end the settlement project. The letter, which was also published as an ad in today’s Ha’aretz, calls for Peres to step down after accusing him of being a Palestinian agent working against Israeli and Jewish interests. It also states that Peres should join Meretz, Balad, or Kadima, but that he cannot continue serving as the president of the state.
Nobody who is thinking clearly would actually accuse Peres, the last remaining politically active member of Israel’s founding generation and literally one of the fathers of the state, of acting against Israel’s interests, so in that respect this is a fundamentally unserious letter. It does, however, tell us something serious about a significant portion of Israeli citizens, which is that they view Israel in a disturbingly parochial and sectarian manner. Calling for Peres to step down for crossing the settlers is rather unremarkable, but calling for him to join Meretz or Balad or Kadima is a statement that speaks volumes. First, it suggests that the settler leadership does not view those parties as legitimate, since it is apparently acceptable for Peres to be a member of Kadima despite not acting in the interests of the Israeli public or the Jewish public. Second, it implies that in order to serve as president of Israel, you must adhere to a certain line with regard to the settlements, and anyone that crosses this line also crosses the boundary of being unfit for office. This is a revolutionary view of citizenship, political participation, and public service. It imagines an Israel that is not simply split between citizens and non-citizens, or even Jews and non-Jews, but one that is officially and legally further fragmented along lines that delineate between acceptable viewpoints and unacceptable viewpoints. Peres is free to join Meretz or Kadima in the eyes of the settlement leadership since these parties, in their view, do not act in the state’s interests and are thus illegitimate.
The second letter was from the Israel Policy Forum and it was addressed to Prime Minister Netanyahu. The IPF letter was a response to the Levy Report, and it expressed the fear that adopting Levy’s recommendations will lead to the end of the two state solution. It referred to the importance of maintaining Israel as both a Jewish and democratic state, and stated that the Levy Report will actually weaken Israel’s hand in its conflict with the Palestinians by providing fodder to the delegitimization crowd. The letter was then signed by 41 leaders of the American Jewish community.
The letter itself was smartly worded with its acknowledgement that the Palestinian Authority has “abdicated leadership by not returning to the negotiating table” and thus negating any warrantless accusations that the letter is an effort to place all blame on Israel, and as I wrote last week, I think that framing the issue of settlements strategically by referencing the serious threat to Israel’s future is the way to go. What is more encouraging though is the list of signatories. Nobody will be surprised that the letter was signed by Charles Bronfman or Rabbi Eric Yoffie, people with a reputation for being in the center or the left on Israel issues. It was also signed by Rabbi Daniel Gordis, who is at the Shalem Center and recently held a well-publicized debate with Peter Beinart, and by Thomas Dine, who used to head up AIPAC. It suggests a different vision of Israel, one in which leaders from all sides of the spectrum are able to cooperate and come to an agreement on the big issues facing the Jewish state. Rather than viewing everything through a narrow prism, folks like Gordis and Dine, who might have very different views on settlements generally than someone like Yoffie, are able to recognize the unique problem that the Levy Report poses. In fact, Gordis wrote in Ha’aretz that he does not necessarily disagree with Levy’s legal reasoning, but that adopting the report would signal an annexation of the West Bank and the official abandonment of the two state solution. The letter represents a hopeful trend of moving away from political and ideological sectarianism and viewing Israel not as a disparate collection of tribal groups but as a whole. Quite frankly, it represents a more hopeful vision than the one displayed just yesterday by Bibi Netanyahu and Shaul Mofaz, who could not maintain a unity government in the face of some tough decisions over whether Israelis should equally share in the burden of service or not. Let’s hope that going forward, the vision contained in the IPF missive trumps the that contained in the Shomrom Residents Council’s one.
