What follows is not news – I’m nearly two months behind things. But then again, everything on the internet is simultaneous, isn’t it? So I think it remains worth discussing. Maybe it’s news to you.
On September 30, perhaps the leading Palestinian peace advocate, Sari Nusseibeh, published an essay on why Israel cannot be a “Jewish state.” There are a number of replies out there in cyberspace, including Leon Wieseltier’s excellent comments at The New Republic. See especially Shlomo Avineri’s essay in Haaretz (more below). Nusseibeh’s essay is total sophistry, perhaps dishonest, or, if not, a very grim omen for the future. I don’t begrudge political advocates the freedom to score rhetorical points in high-stakes contests like the Israeli-Arab conflict. Have done it myself sometimes.
But Nusseibeh falsely posits that states can have no ethnic identity beyond commitments to the rights of their citizens. A “Jewish state,” he claims, would necessarily be either theocratic or apartheid, ultimately fated to disenfranchise its minority citizens. Then he really overheats, stirring up fears that the Israeli government actually aspires to expel the Palestinians to fulfill a biblical mandate to displace ancient Canaanites.
Now, I hold no brief on behalf of the Netanyahu government, and certainly not for the messianic ultra-nationalists on the right-wing fringe. Myself, I’d rather see the religious element shrink in Israeli politics. But we’re nowhere near a theocracy in Israel, where “white meat” (pork) is available in grocery stores and movies play on Shabbat. I believe there are some theocracies in the Middle East … but not in the Jewish state.
And we’re nowhere near apartheid within the borders of the Jewish state – a state in which Arab citizens serve in the Knesset and the cabinet. Did that happen in South Africa? I don’t think so. Admittedly, West Bank Palestinians lack the rights they deserve. And, yes, Israeli Palestinians stand in uneasy relationship to a state whose ideology, whose history, whose national anthem are all about Jewish destiny, in which they cannot participate. But this is not radically different from the experience of minority citizens in most of the world’s countries.
Avineri’s essay takes Nusseibeh’s apart thoroughly, and it is worth reading. His central point is indispensible: Nusseibeh is prepared to concede priority to the Jewish religion within the state of Israel, but denies centrality to Israel as a manifestation of the Jewish nation. Israel could reasonably be a “civil, democratic, and pluralistic state whose official religion is Judaism,” Nusseibeh writes, “granting equal civil rights to all citizens.” In practice, this is not so far off from what we actually have, of course.
But such a formulation misprises – perhaps willfully and deceptively – how most Israelis and world Jews understand Israel, as Avineri argues. This state was founded as a response to the Jewish people’s millennia of diaspora and of unbroken connection to a homeland, of unspeakable suffering and of a justified yearning for national self-determination, attained at last. This is one of the ways that Judaism differs from Christianity and Islam: it mingles national/ethnic identity with religious culture. It is unlike the way Christians may be French or Korean, and Muslims may be Arab, Bengali or British. We are Am Israel, the Jewish people. The only claim we have to this homeland is national by definition. Even most religious settlers would concede that a purely religious claim (“the Torah says God gave us this land”) is inadequate to settle international disputes. One who denies a Jewish national connection to the homeland has implicitly reduced this conflict to a case of religious bigotry.
Avineri writes: “Those of us who have no problem recognizing the Palestinians as a people, based on their own self-determination, are thus left with a feeling of bitter disappointment that a Palestinian intellectual and philosopher who – justifiably – insists on the right of the Palestinians as a people to a state of their own, is not ready to accept the self-determination of the Jews as a nation.” Amen to that.
The very idea of a two-state solution is that we are each an independent people and that each of us needs its own country. I recall taking part in a demonstration more than 20 years ago in which Jews and Arabs chanted “two states for two peoples, Israel and Palestine.” It was right then and right now. But rhetoric like Nusseibeh’s evokes the Israeli fear that even the most moderate Palestinians really want a 1.5 state solution: Palestine for the Palestinians alongside a de-Judaized Israel with an incipient Palestinian majority.
Avineri concludes: “The abyss currently separating moderates in Israel from the most moderate of Palestinians is indeed very, very deep and the chances of reconciliation do not appear to be likely.” Grim. I hope it is not true.
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