By Sheldon Richman
October 28, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" - Israel’s
champions owe us an explanation. First, they insist
that Israel is and always must be a Jewish
state, by which most of them mean not religiously
Jewish but of the “Jewish People” everywhere,
including Jews who are citizens of other states and
not looking for a new country. To be Jewish,
according to the prevailing view, it is enough to
have a Jewish mother (or to have been converted by
an approved Orthodox rabbi). Belief in one supreme
creator of the universe, in the Torah as the word of
God, and in Jewish ritual need have nothing whatever
to do with Jewishness. (We ignore here the many
problems with
this conception, such as: how can there be a
secular Judaism?)
The definition of Jew has been bitterly
controversial inside and outside of Israel since its
founding. The point is, as anthropologist Roselle
Tekiner wrote, “When the central task of a state is
to import persons of a select religious/ethnic group
— and to develop the country for their benefit alone
— it is crucially important to be officially
recognized as a bona fide member of that
group.” (This is from the anthology
Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections,
which is not online and is apparently out of print.
But see Tekiner’s article,
“Israel’s Two-Tiered Citizenship Law Bars Non-Jews
From 93 Percent of Its Lands.”)
Second, Israel’s champions insist that Israel is
a democracy — indeed, the only democracy in the
Middle East. They vehemently object whenever someone
demonstrates how
Israel-as-the-state-of-the-Jewish-People must harm
the 25 percent of Israeli citizens who are not
Jewish, most of whom are Arabs.
Israeli law uniquely
distinguishes citizenship from nationality. The
nationality of an Israeli Arab citizen is “Arab” not
Israeli, while the nationality of a Jewish citizen
is “Jewish” not Israeli. Are citizens of any other
country distinguished in law like that? The
prohibition on marriage between Jews and non-Jews
is not the result of political bargaining with
religious parties but of a desire to protect the
Jewish people from impurity. These contortions are
required by Israel’s self-declared status as
something other than the land of all its
citizens. Early Zionists said they wanted Palestine
to be as Jewish as Britain is British and France is
French — a flagrant category mistake that has had
horrific consequences for the Palestinians.
The insistence by Israel’s supporters — that
Israel can be both Jewish and democratic — thus is
puzzling. What does it mean for Israel to be a
Jewish state if that status has no real consequences
for non-Jews? If all it meant was that the Star of
David was on the flag, we might hear far fewer
objections to Israel. But of course it means much
more.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
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To see what it means, one has to look
beyond Israel’s Declaration of
Independence, Basic Law (its de facto
constitution), and specific statutes,
which contain language that on its face
forbids discrimination against non-Jews.
We should know better than to take
official documents at face value. What
matters in any society is the “real
constitution,” the principles that
underlie commonly accepted behavior. The
old Soviet Union’s constitution listed
freedom of the press among the “rights”
of Soviet citizens, and the U.S.
Constitution says that only Congress may
declare war and that “the right of the
people to keep and bear arms shall not
be infringed.”
More pertinent, the 1917 Balfour Declaration,
wherein the British government “view[ed] with favour
the establishment in Palestine of a national home
for the Jewish people,” also stated that “it [was]
clearly understood that nothing shall be done which
may prejudice the civil and religious rights of
existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the
rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any
other country.” We know how that worked out.
So what’s the story inside Israel? (I’m not
talking about the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which
Israel has occupied for 52 years and where
Palestinians have no rights whatever.)
After doing an
interview recently about my new book,
Coming to Palestine, I was challenged by
a listener over my statements that the Israeli
government treats Arab and Jewish criminals
differently depending on whether they shed “Jewish
blood” or “Arab blood” (no such distinction actually
exists) and that political parties can’t call for
changing Israel from a Jewish state to a state of
all its citizens.
Who is right?
Regarding criminal justice, Ha’aretz
columnist Gideon Levy
shows anecdotally that Arab Israeli citizens who
kill Jews can spend more time in prison than Israeli
Jewish citizens who kill Arabs. “Arab blood is
cheaper in Israel,” Levy wrote in 2014, “and Jewish
blood is thicker.” He says things are the same
today. Over the years, many articles have been
published documenting this de facto, though not de
jure, disparity. Indeed, Ha’aretz
reported
in 2011 that
Arab Israelis who have been charged with
certain types of crime are more likely than
their Jewish counterparts to be convicted, and
once convicted they are more likely to be sent
to prison, and for a longer time. These
disparities were found in a recent statistical
study commissioned by Israels Courts
Administration and the Israel Bar Association….
The [unpublished preliminary] study is unique in
that it is the first of its kind to be
commissioned and funded in part by the courts
administration, and in that it sought to examine
claims by attorneys that Israeli judges deal
more harshly with Arab criminals than with Jews.
Note that government discrimination against
non-Jews across the spectrum of issues is not
usually written into the law, although it
may be. Mostly flagrantly, discrimination is
legally applied to the “right of return.” People
defined as Jews, no matter where they were born or
live, can become Israeli citizens/nationals
virtually on arrival, while Arabs driven from their
ancestral homes in 1947-48 and 1967 may not go back,
much less become full-rights citizens/nationals. Put
concretely, I, an atheist born in Philadelphia to
Jewish parents born in Philadelphia (with roots
likely in the vicinity of the Black Sea), can
“return” [sic] to Israel and become an Israeli
citizen at once, while my friend Raouf Halaby, a
naturalized American citizen born to Arab Christian
parents in west Jerusalem three years before Israel
was founded, may not. The only difference is that my
mother was Jewish, making me, a Spinozist, a Jewish
national in Israel’s eyes, and Raouf’s mother was
not.
Regarding restrictions on political parties, the
Basic Law: The Knesset
states:
A candidates’ list [party] shall not
participate in elections to the Knesset, and a
person shall not be a candidate for election to
the Knesset, if the objects or actions of the
list or the actions of the person, expressly or
by implication, include…:
1. negation of the existence of the State of
Israel as a Jewish and democratic state;…
Before proceeding, let us note a conundrum. The
issue I’m raising here is whether a state be both
Jewish and democratic. The root of the word
democracy is demos, people. So if
the raison d’ętre of Israel is the welfare of only
some of its citizens and millions of certain
others who are citizens and residents of other
countries, how can Israel be a real democracy?
Strictly speaking, considering that word and,
the law’s language legitimizes a party that
“negat[es] the existence of the State of Israel as a
Jewish … state” but not as a democratic state. Would
the Israeli election authorities accept that
distinction? I don’t think so.
In the past the Israeli
Supreme Court has reversed
government bans on a party’s or candidate’s
inclusion in an election. Particular cases will
revolve around the exact wording of a party’s
mission statement or candidate’s platform, and legal
language is subject to endless, unpredictable, and
political interpretation. But, regardless, the
government has the power to ban at its disposal, and
future Supreme Courts may not be so liberal. So the
threat of a ban always looms. Incidentally, a party
or candidate that engages in “incitement to racism”
is also ineligible to participate in elections, yet
this provision has yet to be applied to Jewish
parties and politicians, such as Likud and Benjamin
Netanyahu, that routinely spout racist rhetoric.
Israel’s champions also deny that Arab Israelis —
citizens, mind you — have grossly inferior access to
land, most of which is owned by a “public” authority
and the Jewish National Fund (very little is
privately owned); building and village permits;
public utilities; education; roads; and other
government-controlled services and resources. The
Israeli government has carried out programs in the
Galilee and Negev, known as Judaization, from which
Arab Israelis, especially Bedouins, have been
cleared to make way for Jewish Israelis. Such
restrictions inside Israel have the stink of
apartheid.
In his book
Palestinians in Israel: Segregation,
Discrimination, and Democracy, Ben White
documents that the Israeli government allocates
resources — unsurprisingly — just as one would
expect, considering that Israel by its founding
doctrine is not the land of all of its citizens but
only of some. This doctrine was reinforced last year
in the
Nation-State Law, which
declares that “The right to exercise national
self-determination in the State of Israel is unique
to the Jewish people.”
So, as Israel’s champions say, all Israeli
citizens are indeed equal. It’s just that some —
those whose
nationality is “Jewish” — are more equal
than others — those whose nationality is
“Arab” or anything else but “Jewish.”
Sheldon Richman,
author of
America’s Counter-Revolution: The Constitution
Revisited, keeps the blog Free
Association and is a senior fellow and chair of
the trustees of the Center
for a Stateless Society, and a contributing
editor at Antiwar.com.
He is also the Executive Editor of The Libertarian
Institute.
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