Saving Israel From Itself
A secular future for the Jewish state
By Bernard Avishai
Harpers Magazine | February 9, 2005.
http://www.harpers.org/SavingIsraelFromItself.html
In the winter of 2002, I moved to Jerusalem for the third time, to
join my new wife, a professor at the Hebrew University, and teach at
an Israeli business school. It was not the best of times to move to
Israel, for the Al-Aqsa Intifada was at its most terrifying and the
Sharon government was preparing its response in Operation Defensive
Shield. When I met one old friend, she put her hand to the back of my
head and started feeling around through my hair. "I'm looking for the
hole," she said. I had spent the better part of the 1970s living in
Israel, and most of the 1980s visiting and writing about the country,
so the new disturbances, and the little ironic gestures of solidarity,
were not unfamiliar. But something had changed, certainly among my
graying friends: a sadder-but-wiser air, a barely suppressed hunger to
speak of big categories and formative years.
Recent events�Sharon's plan for Gaza, Arafat's death�have raised hopes
for new diplomacy but do not alleviate the tension. People call the
conflict the matzav, the "situation." Listen to talk shows, go out to
dinner, and what leaks into nearly every conversation is uncertainty
about how to envision Israel going forward in its existing boundaries.
I don't just mean geographic boundaries. I mean legal, institutional,
and cultural limits. Nearly everybody here will tell you that they see
Israel as Jewish and democratic. Almost nobody can tell you what this
means.
Not that Israelis aren't hearing clear arguments. The most common,
which is widely considered hard-headed, argues that the occupation has
presented Israel with a "demographic" threat. Maintain the occupation,
the argument goes, lose the "Jewish majority" between the Jordan River
and the Mediterranean, and Israel must become either an apartheid
state or a binational state�a "Jewish state" or a "democratic
state"�not both. Less commonly asserted, and widely considered
hard-hearted, is an argument about Israel irrespective of its
occupation. A Jewish state cannot be democratic, this argument goes,
because a state in which the world's Jewish people and the Jewish
religion have exclusive privileges is inherently discriminatory
against non-Jewish citizens. Some kind of binationalism, if not
inevitable, is more or less preferable. Both arguments are made by
people in and around Israel, though only the former is made by people
in and around the Israeli government.
So on the one hand are people whose preoccupation with "a Jewish
majority" suggests an intuitive grasp of what it takes to preserve
Jewish culture but whose grasp of building democracy is shallow and
mechanical, who are painting by numbers�and (intentionally or not)
laying the groundwork for ethnic cleansing. On the other hand are
people who are more exacting about democracy but who've completely
missed how radically, and for the better, historic Zionism has changed
Jewish culture. The first group calls the second naive, the patsies of
anti-Semites. The second group calls the first "racists" and
"colonialists." Little wonder people are disquieted and can't explain
why. It is becoming nearly impossible to say what has been right�and
plainly wrong�about Israel since its founding and what needs to be
done to save it.
Now, as before, the focus will be on occupied territory. But a quarter
of Israel's schoolchildren are Arabs. Were the West Bank and Gaza to
disappear, and Israel did nothing to reform itself, it would face
another intifada in a generation, this time from within. Israeli Jews
know this in their guts, if not from their debate. Listen only to
them, and the "situation" seems hopeless. Israel's deficiencies as a
"democratic state" were always most transparent to Arab Israelis.
Paradoxically, it is only when I am speaking with them that I feel
assured of the promise of a "Jewish state." It will take at least a
generation to fully realize this promise. That is the length of time
it took all of us to create the disaster we will now have to unmake.
* * *
Arthur Koestler once wrote that becoming a Communist was an affair of
the heart; in the summer of 1931, in Berlin, he fell in love with the
Five Year Plan. In the summer of 1967, I fell in love with the Jewish
National Fund�the old Zionist holding company, which formally owned
the land on which most of Israel's farming collectives had been built.
I was eighteen, and had just finished my first year at McGill
University. In what still seems to me an exhilarating rush of events,
I arrived in Israel about a week after the end of the Six Day War and
wound up volunteering to work on Kfar Yehoshua, the moshav (or
cooperative farm) of an indomitable couple whose close neighbor had
been killed early in the war. They were now working his widow's dairy
farm in addition to their own, so they needed an extra hand�a
volunteer, they took pains to explain, since members of the moshav
would not hire wage-laborers, certainly not Arabs, whom they refused
"to exploit."
They made it plain that Israel's collectives enjoyed a certain
authentic self-reliance. The old Hebrew motto of Labor Zionism was
"kibbush avodah," "the conquest of labor," by which the real thing to
be conquered was a Diaspora Jew's civilized lethargy. And what had
made it all possible was the Jewish National Fund, or Keren Kayemeth,
whose green logo was still painted on the sign to Kfar Yehoshua.
Members did not own their land, my friends explained; the land had
been leased in perpetuity from the Keren Kayemeth, which had raised
money abroad, penny by penny, then bought Arab estates in the 1920s,
'30s, and '40s, eventually distributing parcels to socialist halutzim,
Zionism's pioneers, their parents. As a child, I had myself slipped
change into the Keren Kayemeth's little blue tin collection boxes, for
the fund kept on raising money for reforestation after the state was
founded in 1948, after Israel could as easily expropriate land as have
the Zionist fund buy it�and large tracts were expropriated after the
1948 war, effacing some 400 Arab villages. Anyway, we were now done
with wars, and Kfar Yehoshua's land remained the "inalienable property
of the Jewish people," that is, mine. I worked until I dropped. After
about a month I was smitten: the warmth of welcome, the �lan of
revolution, the conviction that just war had brought lasting
peace�that Israelis had won the former and Jews deserved the
latter�the pleasingly triangular smell of cow's milk, cow's feed, and
cow's shit rising into Hebrew air.
This was not exactly love at first sight. My father had been a
socialist-Zionist boy scout in Bialystok in the 1920s, and later a
Zionist "leader" in immigrant Jewish Montreal. I had never really
thought much about what his "Zionism" meant, except that it covered
the bases for "modern" Jews. I understood, vaguely, that Zionism meant
Jews could have fruit trees, fighter jets, a tan. More vivid was the
prestige of the Hebrew language, which I had suspected since childhood
contained a world worth knowing. When I was a pupil at Montreal's
Talmud Torah School, half my class's day had been devoted to Hebrew
studies, beginning in the second grade with readings from Breisheit,
the Book of Genesis. Whereas the ABCs conjured scrubbed little boys
watching girls play with kittens, the Alef Bet conjured families torn
up by arbitrary fathers, jealous mothers, and rival brothers, all
devoted to enigmatic things like "sacrifice" and "birthright," or
stirred by the promise of mysterious power. Hebrew stories seemed
absolute, and talking about them seemed a kind of responsibility.
Zionism's personal (or, if you were at McGill, "ideological")
requirement, that Jews should go and live in Israel, had always been
finessed in my family. My father's line, which I never quite bought,
was that sending one's money was "as Zionist" as sending oneself,
though he often lamented that his "big mistake" was not joining his
own pioneering group, which had founded Kibbutz Kfar Menachem in 1939.
In May 1967, after my father told me that Israel was being "strangled"
by Egypt's blockade of the Straits of Tiran, he sat me down at the
kitchen table and sketched a map on a napkin, explaining how Israel,
whose reserves had been mobilized, would soon have to attack in Gaza.
I became fixed on the vain fantasy I had had as a child�that were I to
be lined up to board a cattle car, I would charge the guards in an
ecstatic rage rather than get on the train. That is what "Israelis"
did. In any case, I now had the body of a strong young man and told
myself coldly that I could not just see it all end. I quit my job at
Expo '67 and determined to fly to Israel as soon as I could get there.
My father finally went along, but to his relief (and mine), the war
was over before I could leave.
* * *
Nothing prepared me for the atmosphere of the country when I arrived.
It seemed that an entire people had done spontaneously what every
human being should do deliberately�defend one's life, touch one's
roots, spread progress, show magnanimity. The tokens of Israeli
exceptionalism were everywhere. The radio played jingoistic songs, and
no member of the Israeli government, however schlumpy, could appear in
a newsreel without prompting the theater audience to burst into
applause. Moshe Dayan visited West Bank villages and was greeted by
"notables," while Arab children pranced around him, a hand covering an
eye in homage. Captured Russian trucks, looking like giant Ford
pickups, appeared magically on the roads, and blond Swedish volunteers
appeared magically in kibbutz dining rooms. Zionism had been proven
right by, of all things, Zionism's might.
I got to Jerusalem on June 28, driven in a lurching Citro�n by a
family friend, a paratrooper about my own age. We drove toward the
Mandelbaum Gate, the old checkpoint in the divided city, just after
noon, practicing how we might con the guard into letting us proceed to
the Old City. But we found no checkpoint and no guard. We drove on,
passing the shuttered Arab shops on Salah ad-Din Road, stopping the
car a few times to stand silently at piles of rocks, topped by a rifle
and a helmet, the makeshift memorials to friends who had been killed
in the assault. Finally, somewhat bewildered, we flipped on the radio,
only to discover that the Arab city had been annexed and the whole
city declared united an hour before we got there. The government had
decided to integrate all parts of Jerusalem by expanding Jewish
neighborhoods in the Old City and in the eastern part, especially
around Mt. Scopus, where the old Hadassah Hospital and Hebrew
University had been before 1948. An expanse around the Wailing Wall,
we soon discovered, had already been bulldozed. The radio played the
new Zionist anthem, "Jerusalem of Gold," and tears streamed down my
friend's cheeks.
Nobody thought twice about the families whose houses had just been
razed. Hadn't Jordan used the Old City's Jewish gravestones to pave
their roads? As for the 70,000 Jerusalem Arabs who might be encroached
upon or pushed around, there was land enough for all in the new
"Middle East." Twenty-one countries for them, one for us. One
undivided Jerusalem for us, Mayor Teddy Kollek's liberalism for them.
Only one moment, several weeks later, gave me pause. On a visit with
my cousins to the new campus of Tel Aviv University, I noticed huge
posters with a puzzling map, which seemed exactly like the Arabic map
of Palestine in which Israel has been effaced, only this was a Hebrew
map of Israel on which the West Bank and Gaza were effaced. The
posters, my cousins told me, were from a new organization, the Whole
Land of Israel Movement, which opposed returning any part of the
conquered West Bank, even for peace, since (as their statement read)
"no government in Israel is entitled to give up this entirety, which
represents the inherent and inalienable right of our people from the
beginning of its history." The clear implication of the statement was
that the West Bank should now be settled by Jews.
Even then, this prospect struck me as oddly greedy and provocative,
nothing like what my moshav friends' parents had achieved. The times
were completely different, after all. There was no Hitler, no
proletarian internationalism, no British mandatory government
enforcing property law but keeping Jewish refugees out. Zionists had
settled some land by force in the 1940s. But Jews were desperate then.
When Jean Valjean became a mayor, he didn't continue stealing bread.
My cousins, too, were skeptical. Israel was a Jewish state, they said,
but it was "also democratic." The land was ours but, less
esoterically, it was also theirs. It didn't matter which people wanted
it more or longer. What mattered were boundaries that allowed each
people, Jews and Arabs, to be more or less peacefully self-governing.
When I asked others about the Whole Land of Israel Movement, I was
reassured to find that few people took it seriously. Fewer still
(myself included) noticed that this movement was merely proposing for
the West Bank as a whole what the government, with almost universal
acclaim, had already enacted in Jerusalem.
* * *
It is tempting to look back on those times with a certain wistfulness:
young people, heady victories, reckless enemies, unavoidable hubris.
Wistfulness goes well with what is probably the most common conception
of Israel that educated people in the West have: that it was once a
nicely social-democratic state that is being ruined by the blowback
from its occupation�by its quickly multiplying and pietistic settlers,
whom successive governments somewhat naively tolerated�that if only
Israel could end most terrorist attacks, emancipate itself from the
occupation, and replant most settlers back within the Green Line, the
internationally recognized border prior to 1967, then Zionism could
get back to being itself. This half-truth often is posed against the
big lie�that Zionism was just a remnant of great-power
"colonialism"�and so Jews have an understandable reflex to defend the
moral prestige of historic Zionism and deflect criticism of its
legacy. But even David Ben-Gurion, the country's first prime minister,
knew that Israeli democracy had serious problems before there was an
occupation: specifically, that ultimately it would be folly to
preserve the Zionist movement's improvisations and institutions in a
democratic state. Thinking back to 1967, certainly, it is obvious that
the settlers' ideas and stridency did not just grow out of thin air.
Both emerged from a revolutionary Zionist logic and a powerful Zionist
bureaucracy�right for their time, in the 1930s and '40s, but terribly
wrong once the state was firmly established, after 1967�a Zionism that
automatically assured Jews privileges that other people, non-Jews
subject to Israeli sovereignty, could not get.
I am not speaking here of the reasonable discrimination of a
nation-state in favor of a dominant national culture: a day off for
the Jewish Sabbath, support for the Hebrew University, the Star of
David on the flag. I mean material discrimination by the state in
favor of Jews as individuals. Settlements may seem part of a grand,
premeditated national project, and were to some extent, especially
around Jerusalem. But they were more often a spontaneous series of
decisions by quasi-official Zionist offices to continue putting
families formally defined as "Jewish" in and around where Arabs lived,
or to support Jewish squatters, while excluding non-Jews from living
there.
When I finally moved to Jerusalem in 1972, I was given a virtually
interest-free mortgage to buy an apartment in Jerusalem's French Hill,
a new neighborhood that the state, in collaboration with Zionist
philanthropic agencies, was putting up next to Mt. Scopus in Arab East
Jerusalem. All I had had to do was prove myself a Jew by birth, which
I had done, to an Israeli consul back in Canada. I did not think of
this apartment complex as "a settlement." I did not think it strange
that I was moving into a neighborhood stringently segregated by the
very Zionist laws, dreams, and management I had come to identify with
liberation. The point is, settlements were made in territories beyond
the Green Line so effortlessly after 1967 because the Zionist
institutions that built them and the laws that drove them�The Jewish
Agency, Zionist land banks and mortgage companies, the Law of Return,
regulations supporting the Orthodox Rabbinate's determination of what
a Jew is�had all been going full throttle within the Green Line before
1967. To focus merely on West Bank settlers was always to beg the
question.
After the Yom Kippur War, in the summer of 1974, when I began writing
seriously about these matters, I reported on Henry Kissinger's effort
to mediate a disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria. I
recall standing in a crowd in front of the prime minister's office,
surrounded by a few hundred West Bank settlers; their Gush Emunim
("Bloc of the Faithful") movement was just getting started. Word had
leaked out that Kissinger, then inside with Golda Meir's government,
was pressuring it to evacuate the captured Syrian town of Kuneitra.
When he emerged, the settlers�a phalanx of knitted skullcaps�chanted,
"Jew-boy, Jew-boy," implying that one evacuation would lead to
another, that the renunciation of one inch of promised land was
something only a bare-headed court Jew like Kissinger could have
entertained.
Mrs. Meir gave in to Kissinger on Kuneitra. She upbraided the settlers
for their ugly behavior. And yet everybody knew her prejudices: that
Jews had a right to live anywhere in Eretz (or Greater) Yisrael; that
the Orthodox rabbis in her coalition, although not her type, were at
least the genuine article; that Jerusalem was Israel's "by historic
right"; that pioneering settlement around Jerusalem, or on the Golan
Heights, was heroic; that Western Jews who had never thought to settle
in the Jewish state deserved an Israeli's condescension. These
prejudices reflected a basic cynicism about the fate of Jews in
Western democracy, a cynicism that is even more widespread among
Israeli Jews today, who decry the "anti-Semitism" of the press
covering Israel. Meanwhile, the small band of Gush Emunim has grown to
some 230,000 settlers today, not including those in Jerusalem. Army
intelligence is rumored to have concluded that 10 percent of the
settlers (not including their supporters in Israel proper) would
violently resist being moved, and the army command warns against
political decisions that would force Jews to shed the blood of other Jews.
* * *
Let us be clear: Israel is an open society. According to an Israel
Democracy Institute poll, 81 percent of Jewish Israelis think
"equality before the law" essential. And the judiciary is with them.
The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, enacted in 1992, has
something like the force of a Bill of Rights in Israel. Chief Justice
Aharon Barak has applied the law broadly to protect civil liberties.
Just recently, the court overturned the military censor's effort to
ban Mohammed Bakri's 2002 film, Jenin, Jenin, which implicitly accused
elite Israel Defense Force combat units (in the face of significant
evidence to the contrary) of indifference to civilian casualties
during Operation Defensive Shield. Israel publishes more scientific
papers per capita than any other country, so silencing Israelis
(including Arab Israelis) seems almost unimaginable. Israel is also a
country, however, in which the institutional discrimination I spoke
about has always been so routine as to be hardly noticed, especially
among Jews. The most important continuing inequality is preferential
residency on the land. Israeli Arabs, who are disproportionately
engaged in farming, live mostly in separate towns having jurisdiction
over 2.5 percent of the total land mass of pre-1967 Israel, augmenting
their holdings with private land. This segregated pattern of
settlement results from the fact that about 93 percent of pre-1967
Israel is public land administered by the Israel Lands Administration,
which since its founding in 1960 has essentially taken over the
mission of the prestate Jewish National Fund. Few outside observers
have been able to penetrate the Lands Administration's convoluted
leasing arrangements with Jewish Agency mortgage companies, or with
preferred contractors, or with large secretive holding companies such
as Himanuta. Adding to the complexity, a 2001 Supreme Court ruling
determined that old Jewish National Fund regulations, prohibiting sale
of land to non-Jews, could not be used to keep an Arab couple from
acquiring housing in the established village of Katzir. Yet nobody
doubts that when any new housing developments are completed, only
people with "Jewish nationality" need apply.
And what exactly is Jewish nationality? Now we are getting to the
other side of the problem, the Zionist movement's historic (and
largely opportunistic) merging of rabbinic and state power. From its
inception, Israel recognized two forms of personal status, ezrahut,
most commonly understood as "citizenship," and leom, which meant
"nationality" or "peoplehood." All citizens are entitled to equality
in civil society, but people legally designated a part of the Jewish
nation are entitled to immediate citizenship, and supplementary
material benefits start from there. The courts came to rule that,
insofar as the Law of Return applied, the child or grandchild of a
Jew, or a convert by a recognized rabbinic authority, is a Jew. Under
the pressure of the National Religious Party�to which Ben-Gurion
pandered in order to maintain his own party's hegemony in the early
1950s�other privileges were reserved for Jews as they are defined by
Orthodox rabbinic courts. Moreover, a burgeoning, official rabbinical
caste now supervises marriage, burial, and kashruth�critical for the
restaurant, food-processing, and tourist industries. There is no civil
marriage in the country, so no state official will marry a Jew to a
non-Jew. Today, some 80,000 children in Jerusalem alone study in
ultra-Orthodox yeshivas, which are state subsidized in numerous ways.
The state directly supports an even larger Dati Leumi ("national
religious") school system. Arabs have their own system, segregated and
underfunded.
One Arab Israeli friend, the novelist Sayed Kashua (author of the
Hebrew novel Dancing Arabs), told me recently that his childhood
friends are feeling hemmed in and enraged, their towns in commercial
despair, many coming under the threat of youth gangs. "When these
towns blow, Israeli Jews will no doubt say it is for political
reasons. But if the government would give us two meters for
development, we'd all be volunteering for the army. Every time there
is a suicide bombing I think two things: thank God my daughter is not
among the victims, and I hope there is an Arab Israeli among the
victims, so they won't blame my daughter."
Terror has always warped debate about these matters, making talk of
Arab rights seem a failure of Jewish nerve. Since the beginning of the
latest intifada, there have been four suicide bombings just blocks
from my Jerusalem home (and Kashua's, for that matter). The cousins
with whom I stayed in 1967 were killed when their TWA plane was blown
out of the skies of Athens by a Palestinian terrorist bomb in 1974. No
sane person could doubt that various barriers against terrorist cells
are justified, or that preemptive attacks on terrorists may be
defensible if innocent bystanders could be protected from harm.
Moreover, terror has prompted an understandable desire for
"separation," manifested in the controversial security fence. It is in
the context of separation that one hears expression of demographic
fears. Israel has 6.8 million citizens, so the argument goes, of whom
about 1.3 million are Arabs. Gaza and the West Bank have another 3.2
million Arabs. The Arab birthrate in Gaza is triple that of Israeli
Jews; in Israel proper and the West Bank, it's double. Now do the
math. If you keep the territories you lose the "Jewish majority"
sometime after 2010. Meanwhile poll after poll shows that 61 percent
of Israelis support Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza and 20 percent more
support the security fence. The New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg put the
choices this way in a chilling article about Jewish settlers last spring:
Israel is faced with two options: keep the settlements, and risk
either apartheid or binationalism; or separate cleanly from the
Palestinians, by withdrawing settlements and raising a wall between
the two sides.
What's wrong with putting matters this way? Notice, first, that Arabs
who are Israeli citizens are casually folded into the demographic
projections. This is not just sloppiness; it betrays a curious slide
into racial simplifications. If one assumes what is manifestly true,
that Israel's young Arab citizens have come into their own (albeit
tensely) in Israel's Hebrew culture, then equality of rights, not
withdrawal behind a border or fence, is the only peace process that
will mitigate fatal tensions between them and Israeli Jews. Even if
terrorism could be crushed, even if the West Bank and Gaza could be
taken completely out of the equation, Israel would still be left with
hundreds of thousands of Arab citizens and a burgeoning number of
young people. If a great proportion of them are not absorbed as equals
into Israel's civil society, the country will face within its 1967
borders virtually the same dynamic that it began to face in the
occupied territories in the 1970s.
Clearly, "democracy" is being debased here to mean only some vague
notion of national self-determination, like the sophomoric "ideology"
I came to Israel with in 1972. For most, a democracy that enshrines
"inalienable rights" seems an invitation to Arabs to swamp Jews, or it
means a celebration of the bourgeois self, which sanctions moving to
America. Old prejudices are at work here, too, casting Israel as a
kind of work-in-progress for the world's Jewish people, justifying its
borders as provisional by, on the one hand, claiming the elastic,
dream borders of ancient Eretz Yisrael and, on the other, recalling
the horrific crimes of sixty years ago�crimes driven by anti-Semitic
attitudes whose traces are still allegedly found in gentile countries.
Who knows, so the argument goes, how many Jews Israel will eventually
have to accommodate, or where the Palestinians will have to be placed
to make Jews safe? Who knows how big Israel will have to be while the
Zionist revolution continues? And until that revolution ends, why not
continue to assure Jews special privileges: refuge, land, housing,
investments�in a word, settlements?
Worse, there is an obvious way to safeguard a "Jewish majority" that
hardly comes up in conversations, though the way most Israelis now
grasp their history should give us pause. I mean ha'transfer, reducing
by forced expulsion or economic pressure the numbers of Arabs living
where Jews do. The fact is, it is impossible to get the "clean"
separation Goldberg speaks of without extensive ethnic cleansing. And
Israelis know this. A June 2002 poll by Tel Aviv University's Jaffe
Center for Strategic Studies revealed that 46 percent of Israelis
entertain the idea of expelling Palestinians.
Benny Elon of the National Union argues openly that if Arabs are not
willing to accept alternate citizenship they should be expelled. Efi
Eitam, leader of the National Religious Party, proposes resettling
Palestinians in the Sinai. In or out of Sharon's coalition these
parties now have 13 (out of 120) Knesset seats, and are gaining
ground. Exclusion of Arabs from Israeli civil life is included in the
platforms of the theocratic parties�Shas, Yahadut Ha'Torah�another 16
Knesset members. We have not even begun to explore attitudes in the
dominant Likud, whose 40 Knesset members, and over 230,000 active
members, anchor Ha'Machane Ha'Leumi, the "National Camp," a coalition
of Greater Israel advocates, ideological hardliners, Russian
immigrants, and less well-educated Mizrahim, immigrants from Arab
countries. Signs for the transfer of Arabs regularly paper the
underpasses on highways between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. They read, NO
ARABS, NO TERROR.
Sharon is withdrawing from Gaza anyway, pointing to the polls that
show a national majority behind the move. But by the end of last
August, 3,700 new housing units were under construction in the West
Bank and Gaza. Jewish Jerusalem is at the heart of the new
construction. Its young people increasingly betray the limited
horizons of the settlers' cult, rooted in Orthodox education.
Ultra-Orthodox haredim (or "awestruck") are now a third of the Jewish
population, and the city has elected a haredi mayor, Uri Lupolianski,
the father of twelve children.
While Sharon is being depicted by the zealots he once coddled as
caving in to Palestinians, the route of his fence is already
responsible for the migration of thousands of them. It is creating
Palestinian enclaves separated from Jerusalem and from one
another�enclaves surrounded by Jewish settlements that are linked by
exclusive highways and bypass roads. It leaves hinterland towns
separated from metropolitan centers, a rupture that denies any
Palestinian business the prospect of viability. About two miles from
my home is the neighborhood of Jabel Mukhaber. The fence is cutting it
off from its sister village, Sheik Sa'ad, whose 2,000 residents are
themselves cut off from the rest of the West Bank by steep cliffs.
They are in danger of being "strangled." One leader of Jabel Mukhaber
told me that a third of those people�their own family members�have
left, while the remaining villagers are living off the gifts of family
abroad. Elsewhere in Jerusalem, the eastern suburb of Abu Dis (home to
Al-Quds University) is cut off from the northern suburb of Hizma by
Jewish settlements�which cuts both off from East Jerusalem's
businesses and hospitals. Yasir Barakat, one of the most established
merchants in the Old City, tells me he knows "nobody whose educated
children are not planning to leave Jerusalem if they can."
Speak of this cruelty with Israelis and someone will counter with
Yasir Arafat's recalcitrance at Camp David during the summer of 2000.
"We offered him 95 percent, and he came back with terror"�I must have
heard the sentence a hundred times. This version of events is not
unchallenged, but let us concede the retrospective logic: that today's
terror could justify, or even seem to justify, Israel's continued
occupation of the territories after 1974, when Jordan recognized the
PLO's hegemony there. Nevertheless, how could terror have justified
Jewish settlement and its transformations? Why should democratic
reasoning ever have been preempted by apocalyptic reasoning? What if,
instead of settling the Palestinians' land, Israeli officials had
simply said they wanted for Palestinians what American officials said
they wanted for the hated Germans in 1948: that the German state's
sovereignty derive from the consent of its governed, that it should
have an integrated population and economy, the rule of law, conditions
for the investment of advanced corporations, schools and universities
that teach liberal values�and that an occupation army, reinforced by a
Western coalition, would stay in place until it was safe to withdraw
and not beyond? What if, at the same time, Israeli leaders had
invested in Israel's Arab citizens at a rate equal to Jews, and
privatized state land and subjected its purchase to market forces?
Would not Israelis and Palestinians be facing a very different reality
today?
This is not the way Israelis are re-imagining their history. Instead,
more and more young people I talk to are becoming resigned to a new
master narrative, which sees the state's founding in an exchange of
populations, beginning with the Shoah and moving to attacks on all
fronts by Arab states in 1948. In this flattened history, 750,000
Palestinian Arabs either fled or were driven from their homes, while
the Arab states dispossessed and expelled some 800,000 Mizrahi Jewish
refugees to Israel, especially during the 1956 Suez war. Israelis were
not perfect, they say, but the pattern is unmistakable.
Dr. Uzi Arad, the former director of intelligence in the Mossad, has
proposed that if a Palestinian state could be negotiated, Israel's
largest Arab towns in the "little triangle"�from Umm al-Fahm in the
north to Kfar Kassem in the south�should be annexed by it. Not
coincidentally, Arad is also the co-author of a new "Zionist
Manifesto" for Israel, which would give "constitutional status" to
Israel as a "Zionist-Jewish state," a state of world Jewry; a state
that would teach "the feeling of a right to the Promised Land, which
is a central principle of Judaism." The manifesto calls for "the
preservation of democracy for all of its citizens." It does not say if
this is a central principle of Judaism.
* * *
This is where the demographic argument gets you. You put West Bank
Palestinians behind a wall where economic life is virtually
impossible, and you hive off another hundred thousand Arab Israelis
and put them behind the wall too. Meanwhile, you expand your border to
include new Jewish settlements and maintain existing political
economic barriers for Arab Israelis, a barrier of institutional
practice and law, a barrier of land and common ideology. You say Jews
and Arabs must be separated because even if Israel's Arab citizens
will make the most of what liberties Israel gives them, they could not
possibly want to be absorbed into Israel. And after all of this, you
suppose yourself a democracy because you represent the general will of
the "Jewish majority." But is the choice really apartheid or
binationalism?
People who put things this way, presumably to maintain Zionist
momentum, have actually lost touch with what Zionism was mostly about
at its inception, the power and grace of Hebrew culture. They
underestimate the capacity of Israel's cities to absorb new
generations, including Arab citizens and foreign workers, to something
both fully democratic and patently Jewish, yet in a way that does not
presume to straighten the crooked timber�in short, to make Israel
Jewish the way France is French. With the exception of the
ultra-Orthodox, secluded in their spreading neighborhoods, nearly
everybody in Israel (Arabs, too) is marinated in a popular Hebrew
culture in which the international terms of science and business are
incorporated, in which one shuttles from Hebrew fiction to subtitled
Hollywood movies, or CNN, or the Lakers' games, from Mizrahi music to
sentimentalized Jewish holidays, or the beach. Go to a wedding or
funeral in Tel Aviv, or an award ceremony in Haifa, and you'll see
that most feel homage when somebody reads, say, a poem by the late
Yehuda Amichai, not when the rabbi chants perfunctorily from the
traditional liturgy.
Israel's Arabs remain close to the Arab world, and most will not
likely assimilate as completely into Israel as, say, shtetl Jews have
into New York City. But this does not mean they will not assimilate
sufficiently into Hebrew culture to become responsible, even
wonderfully iconoclastic, citizens. "One of the first novels I read,"
Kashua told me, "was Saul Bellow's Herzog in Hebrew translation. Then
I bought all his books. I felt that Jews like Bellow understood me,
understood what a democratic culture means when you're a minority.
Then I loved Primo Levi, then Zadie Smith. Arab literature, even the
Koran, is full of stories of lost empire. The Arabs say, `We were once
great and now have been brought low.' The Jews say, `We were once
slaves, but now we are free.'"
Kashua�who writes only in Hebrew�is unusual, but he is not an anomaly.
Israel's Declaration of Independence declares Israel "a Jewish state,"
as the U.N. intended it to be, but also promises to ensure the
"complete equality of social and political rights to all its
inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex. . . ." When he read
the declaration aloud, Ben-Gurion unselfconsciously substituted the
phrase "Hebrew people" (Am Ivri) for "Jewish people" when referring to
the Zionist home. Perhaps the most original Zionist of them all, Ahad
Ha'am, argued (after his distant hero, Herbert Spencer) for an organic
view of Jewish community, wired together by the Hebrew language,
struggling for existence, competing on progressive sophistication. He
advocated enlightenment, self-reliance, newness. Living in Odessa in
the 1880s, he argued for colonial settlements in Palestine, not
because he wanted a state�not yet�but because he wanted a "Hebrew
national atmosphere" that could provide a new and more congenial space
in which Jews could work out in individual ways what it means to be
Jewish�a place they could ask modern questions in Hebrew. He edited
and mentored the generation that created the state's DNA: A. D.
Gordon, the founder of the kibbutz movement; Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the
creator of the modern Hebrew dictionary; Chaim Weizmann, the moderate
leader of world Zionism during the Mandate; even, indirectly, Ben-Gurion.
It is Zionism's singular tragedy that all of these figures are just
street names today, while "Zionism" is applied to the people with
caravans, Uzis, stylish forelocks, and visits from Pat Robertson.
Once, Israel's sympathizers took Zionism's innovations for granted.
Today, ironically, only Arab Israelis seem to grasp how radical
Zionism was for Jews. About 70 percent say that the thing that makes
you Israeli is the Hebrew language. Until the intifada began, a larger
proportion of Arab Israelis than Jewish Israelis (over 63 percent)
claimed "Israeli" for their primary national identity.
* * *
Which brings me, finally, to a curious petition, filed with Israel's
High Court of Justice last December. The petitioners are thirty-eight
citizens of Israel, most of them Jews but a number of them Arabs:
businesspeople, professors, entertainers, writers, jurists. Their
petition enjoins the court to order the Ministry of Interior to
inscribe them as "Israeli" in the Registry of Population. Given how
much else is being contested in the country, one would think a
petition to recognize Israelis as "Israeli" is frivolous. It is
anything but that.
The petitioners are asking the state to recognize an inclusive, earned
form of nationality, coterminous with and redundant to citizenship.
They believe that fifty-five years after Israel's founding�when
two-thirds of its citizens have been born in the country, and half of
those are third generation�the experience of Israel itself must be
determinative of national identity. More important, they want to close
the door on discrimination against individuals on religious or racial
grounds.
"I have staked my life on the moral and cultural power of the Jewish
people," says Yoella Har-Shefi, a civil-rights attorney, who is
leading the group, "but you can't say, `Everybody is equal here, it's
just that a Jew is valued differently'�and if there is international
or internal protest, well, that's proof that `the whole world is
against us.' If Arab citizens can't become `Israelis,' the country
will come apart. We are sitting on the edge of a volcano, because
Israel is the only country on earth that does not recognize itself."
The state's attorney has so far responded to this petition predictably
enough, arguing that it will divide the Jewish people�that it
"undermines the very principles under which the State of Israel was
created." Barak's court has not yet ruled definitively. But whatever
the outcome, the petitioners are right to see that Israel's real
challenge in the coming generation is not only to get back into a
peace process but to shore this up with a democratic revolution in
civil rights; that is, to get Israeli Jews to "recognize" Israel. This
Israel would not be a binational state; it would be a Hebrew republic,
though what would be wrong, ultimately, with Israelis and Palestinians
entering into some mutually convenient federal structure�or joining a
larger one�to share jurisdictions that cannot be effectively exercised
by either nation-state alone; to work on their roads, commercial
links, water, labor standards, monetary policy, immigration, tourism,
telecommunications policy, and more? The need for security cooperation
around Jerusalem and its holy sites is obvious enough, and would
probably require some international policing. I have yet to meet an
Israeli businessperson who would not want Israel included in the
European Community. Carl Hahn, the former chairman of Volkswagen, and
an architect of European integration, told me recently that Israel
would "certainly strengthen" the EU. But there is a caveat: "Israel
must have peace with its neighbors and civil rights that conform to
European law."
Turkey, which has been Israel's partner in so many economic and
military ventures, is in advanced discussions with the EU. Why not an
Israel subject to the EU's collective security provisions, or formally
joined to NATO, so that an attack on Israel would prompt a collective
response? That Israel would still be a "Jewish state," whose national
literary and artistic masterpieces, created in Hebrew, would be open
to the cultural and scientific currents of the developed world. But it
would also be a country in which any citizen of the EU could choose to
work, or start a business, and eventually go through a defined process
of naturalization; that is, learn how to make the most of the Jewish
nation's civil society. And something very much like this process of
naturalization would be the key to the advancement and integration of
Israel's Arab minority, who would be learning to be Israeli from
primary school on, though individuals might well choose to live in the
Palestinian state or to work in any country in Europe.
Israel would have to replace the Law of Return, but it could still
have laws that prefer immigrants who are Diaspora Jews or victims of
anti-Semitism. Greece has similar laws. At the same time, Israel would
be a state in which, by law, the religious imaginations of citizens
would be a matter of private conscience and voluntary assembly. It
would be a state in which anyone could marry anyone, no religious
institution would be supported by state funds, and all young citizens
would be conscripted for some form of national service.
A pipe dream? Perhaps. The alternative, however, is a nightmare, and
not only for Palestinians. According to recent polls, nearly half of
Israel's young people "do not feel connected" to the state, and a
quarter of them do not see their future here. If the attitudes of my
own business students are relevant, the brightest and most highly
educated are as infatuated with America today as I was with Israel in
1967. There will be many interpretations of this poll, but one thing
is clear: The absence of a coherent democratic vision cannot compete
with the presence of a coherent, if outdated, Zionist vision. There
will also be laments about how the Jewish state was supposed to be a
"light unto the nations." Perhaps Israel could just learn from the
European nations for a while�not too much to ask, with its nemesis
dead, its champion backtracking, its patron in too deep, and its once
noble revolution in doubt.
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