Posted on 06/21/2002 5:02:02 PM PDT by liberallarry
To ask the question, "Can the State of Israel be both a Jewish and a democratic state?" has become very fashionable, and very painful, in recent years. I suspect that most observers of the Jewish-Arab conflict imagine that this question became a major problem before our eyes as the conflict between Jews and Palestinians has became ever more embittered.
I have read much Zionist writing which imagines that in earlier times, nearer the beginnings of the new Jewish settlement in Palestine, the Jewish society was accepted as the model of democracy for Arabs. This happy vision even used to be celebrated in the 1970s and into the 1980s by Arab writers such as Edward Said who kept talking about the glories of the Jews before the Jews got it into their heads in the 1940s to establish a Jewish state.
Let me say at the very outset of these remarks that I do not believe either myth. Jews and Arabs have not lived in this land peacefully, not really from the very beginning of the Zionist venture more than one hundred years ago, because Arabs have understood very well that the creation of a Jewish state in this land would deny them its Arab character. At no point in the history of this land have the local Arabs agreed to surrender their claim to this land which they regard as theirs.
We Jews have insisted that our connection to this land is not subject to the will of the majority, certainly not a majority of Arabs and not even a majority of Jews. There can be no doubt whatsoever on what the most pervasive version of the Jewish claim for sovereignty in this land is based: the historical connection expressed most strongly in the text and practices of the Jewish religion has never been broken, and has been reaffirmed by Jews wherever they are and it is reaffirmed every day by Jews wherever they might be.
The second premise is based on need. Vladimir Jabotinsky addressed this question, with great force and eloquence, in 1937, when he spoke in London in the House of Lords before the Peel Commission which was investigating the seemingly insoluble problem of Jewish and Arab claims and counterclaims to the Holy Land. Jabotinsky pointed out that it is, indeed, a deprivation of some Arabs to deny them sovereignty in one of the lands in which they were a majority, but for the whole of the Arab nation this is a minor hurt, because Arabs have other places to live and to foster their traditions. Jews have only this land, only here can they create the power to survive on their own terms.
Jabotinsky was using the concept of "affirmative action" a decade or so before the term was invented in America to describe the aim and need of blacks: a persecuted people requires unique help in order to give in an equal chance to make of itself what it wants to be. Yes, such action, of any kind does inconvenience and even does harm to those who might be in its way. It is the responsibility of those who impose such a solution to ease the discomfort of those who are harmed and, most certainly, it is the responsibility of those who benefit from "affirmative action" to cause as little harm as possible to individuals.
In this historic speech, Jabotinsky did not make much of the Balfour Declaration, but he might have because the dilemma to which he addressed himself is written out, clearly and unmistakably, in the language of the diplomatic document issued by the British in November 1917, which represented the international assent of the allied powers who were on the way to the Zionist aims in Palestine.
The primary objective of this document is to declare that the Jewish people as a whole has the principal right of national self-expression in Palestine. This proposition shines through those few historic lines even though the more unmistakable formulation, that Palestine be declared the Jewish national home and be given to the Jews, was not in the document, chiefly because some Jewish opponents of Zionism used their influence on the British war cabinet to keep it out.
But there is no doubt left that even by this weakened formulation that the Jewish right of self-determination and the effort to build a national home is not being conferred upon the few thousand who were then living in Palestine and who were then a small minority. The Balfour Declaration gave the Jews of the world the primary right in Palestine. The framers of this document then went on to say that those who would exercise this right were obligated not to diminish the rights of the Arab inhabitants of the land.
The only way that sense can be made of these two conflicting assertions is to understand that that the Jews were being given the right to establish in Palestine whatever they might need to establish the national character of the country and its society, provided they did not deny the Arab inhabitants personal rights and personal equality. There was no talk here of precisely defining minority rights for Arabs, or of a vision of a binational state, or, for that matter, the most modest and constraining vision of a "Jewish national home" remaining a permanent minority in an Arab country.
On the contrary, no reading of the Balfour Declaration can reach any other interpretation of this document than the proposition that the Jews who would come to Israel in substantial numbers would become its majority and determine the nature of its future by the lights of their traditions and culture, provided that they protected for Arabs as individuals the same personal rights that would belong to Jews in a democratic society.
The Balfour Declaration thus decreed a Jewish state which should behave toward all its citizens as a democratic state. So, the fundamental dilemma was not created by the "new Zionists," or the "post Zionists," or the Arab makers of intifada or trainers of suicide bombers. This is a consequence of the very nature of the encounter of the Zionist movement and the Arabs from the very beginning.
It is no accident that Ahad Ha'am, the most acute and unillusioned observer of the Zionist settlements in their earliest phase in the 1880s, asked the "lovers of Zion" to take heed that the land was not empty and that the Arabs were not so primitive that they did not have their own national emotions and political will. The Arabs of Palestine have been at war from the very beginning of their encounter with the Jews who came to settle in the spirit of modern Zionism.
I know of not a single document in all of the last century when Arabs agreed to the kind of Jewish immigration which could transform the political and cultural balance in this land. It is almost equally true that the overwhelming majority of Zionists would not and could not accept any detente with their Arab adversaries in which the Jews yielded control of immigration to their veto. The Zionist settlement in Palestine never wavered in its insistence that the Arab majority in Palestine before 1948 must never be given the right to close the door on the arrival of more Jews by exercising the right to vote in a plebiscite on immigration.
The continuing battle of many decades has now mutated into a new form, or, to be more exact, into two new forms. The "law of return," which guarantees eery Jew the right to come to Israel and to claim citizenship immediately, has been challenged by Arabs as denying them equality, and it has even been attacked by some Jews who want to make an end of it in the name of democracy. The Zionist movement in all of its parts, from right to left, refuses to budge on this point, even though some Jewish intellectuals on the left end of the political spectrum would like to end the law of return in the name of democracy.
I could list many reasons why the Zionists remain so tough minded, but to state the central concern is no doubt enough: If the law of return is nullified, then all would-be immigrants are on an equal footing and at the head of the queue there would immediately appear the three-and-a-half million or so Palestinian refugees who now claim their "right of return." Would a democratic government have the right to say to such claimants that they cannot come back to the places in which their parents or grandparents owned land and houses and businesses?
It is clear to everyone, to Jews and Arabs alike, that the return of Palestinians in large numbers to Israel inside its pre-1967 borders will lead only to war. A theoretical version of democracy, divorced as an abstraction from real life, might raise the right of return of Palestinian refugees to a higher necessity than the right of return of American Jews in search of an all-Jewish society for themselves and their descendants. But Israel and the Jewish people as a whole cannot and will not succumb to the pressure of such demands.
I have heard this issue of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state discussed eloquently and elegantly by leading figures in the Jewish world, and especially in Israel, who insist that there is no problem between these two values. It is an argument that can be advanced if you take account only of the question of individual rights. But the merited praise that is heaped on Israel for being "the only democracy in the Middle East" essentially falls apart when you confront political and social reality. The counter-values of the rights of Jews to their own national identity can lead to arguments for the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from the land. The Arab Palestinian position that the land is theirs and is inalienable can lead, as it has, to the bitter intifada of the last two years, withe declare purpose of making Israel a place too hot for Jews to live in.
This conflict was already well understood by the mid-1930s when the British government appointed the Peel Commission to suggest a solution. This commission concluded that there is no theoretical solution. Jewish nationalism and the Arab resistance to it could not find a middle ground. The Peel Commission suggested that the only thing possible was a kind of rough justice in which each side got part of the land. This estimate of the subject was adopted a decade later in November 1947 by the United Nations which again decreed the partition of the land not because it was politically just, but because it offered some pragmatic hope. It lessened the tensions.
We need to say this again: There is no compromise solution between Israeli and Palestinian nationalism, but there can be some pragmatic detente. Let neither party to the conflict imagine that it can realize its maximalist aims, but let us remember that achieving maximalist aims is often more disastrous than not achieving them.
The deepest political insight of the last century was formulated by Isaiah Berlin, the British political thinker who remained all his life a steadfast Jew and an unshakeable Zionist. Were Isaiah here with us today, I am sure that he would be saying that the pursuit of an ideal, even the most virtuous of ideals, to is very end is a prescription for harm and disaster. What makes the human enterprise possible is that we stop short of our absolutes and find ways of living with one another in the imperfect world which is the only one in which we can all survive.
Text prepared for delivery at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem this week.
Prof. Hertzberg is a former member of the Zionist Executive and author/editor of "The Zionist Idea."
Lone Wolf btt.
Read the article again. He agrees with most of what you say. He's just unwilling to take the final step - expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank and Israel. A step which would be an admission that we still live in a very brutal world - kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.
But Gandhi had a hard time with it too ... and argued about it with his actor friend (who recently wrote a piece about it) for more than 20 years.
The recurring need for animal brutality is an indication of our failure as human beings. Recognition of that fact is what separates Jews from Arabs. We all engage in arm-chair blood lust from time to time ... but it's nothing to be proud of.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.