Israel for Everyone

Imagine you lived in an impoverished area with virtually no hope for the future. It’s a place where there is little work to be had and your family struggles every day to keep a roof over their heads and find some food to eat.

Then imagine you have an opportunity to go abroad, either to get a degree at a prestigious university or for a really good job that would allow you not only to have a better life, but also to send significant assistance back to your family.

Then imagine that, by taking advantage of that opportunity, you lost your citizenship and could not return home. Over a quarter of a million Palestinians since 1967 have not had to imagine it. They simply lived it.

The Israeli human rights organization, HaMoked, filed a freedom of information request and got the figures from the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The report covered the years 1967 to 1994, when the Palestinian Authority was created.

The implication is that such practices stopped then, as the PA administered civil authority. But B’Tselem reports that the practice continues in East Jerusalem. The high water mark for revoking residency there was reached in 2008, when 4,577 Palestinians lost their residency rights.

This is not news to anyone who has worked with Palestinians, and it is an issue that has been raised not only in that sector but also by Israeli and other human rights organizations for years. The only real story is that Israel has admitted to at least part of the program.

And the name of that program is Get Rid of the Non-Jews.

This is the same attitude that is so visible today with the frightening hostility to refugees who have sought shelter in Israel from potentially life-threatening conditions in their home countries.

One need look no further than Israel’s Minister of the Interior, Eli Yishai, to see the personification of the xenophobic hate that has gripped so many Israelis.

“This is not an operation against the infiltrators (sic),” Yishai said, “But a campaign to preserve the identity of a Zionist Jewish state.”

The term “infiltrator” has an ugly history in Israel, as it was used to refer to Palestinian refugees, whether or not they actually tried to get back to their homes, in the early days of the state. It reflects a base hatred and fear of non-Jews that has always been part of Israel’s character, to some extent for understandable reasons, but which has lately risen to an ugly prominence.

No doubt, many will say that this is the inevitable result of Zionism. And, indeed, the Zionism of Yishai, Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman certainly does bear out such a view, just as the bureaucratic sleight of hand that barred a quarter of a million Palestinians from returning to their homes after time spent abroad to better themselves shows that the attitude has long been present.

Even in the 1948 war, while many nascent Israelis were not in favor of expulsion, the leadership under David Ben-Gurion certainly encouraged Palestinian flight and expelled many Palestinians directly, barring their return after the war and creating the refugee crisis.

Is this what Zionism had to be?

I think not. I do not believe that a Jewish home in Palestine necessitated the demographic obsession that has led to all of these events. But that obsession did take hold of Zionism, on both the left and right wings of it.

And it’s time now to break that hold.

Zionism, like any nationalist movement, is self-focused and privileges its own members over other people. This is endemic to nationalism, and gets magnified when a nationalist movement succeeds and attains state power. When that nationalist movement is engaged in ethnic conflict, the magnification increases exponentially.

That’s been the case since the advent of modern nationalism. But in the 21st century, we have an expectation that such nationalist movements eventually come to terms with that built-in bigotry and move toward a more egalitarian approach to other peoples.

Sadly, Israel seems very much to be heading in the opposite direction.

The violence in South Tel Aviv is not the result of a small, xenophobic minority. A poll by the Peace Index found that 52% of Israeli Jews agreed with Likud MK Miri Regev who called the African refugees a “cancer.” And 1/3 of Israeli Jews went so far as to say they could “identify” with the violence against the refugees (a smaller minority of 19% of Palestinian citizens of Israel also agreed with Regev.) That’s a minority, but a significant one.

One can certainly argue that many people holding these views do so out of economic stress and the fear of the refugees that has been fired up by too many Israeli leaders.

But Yishai’s view, and the paucity of outcry against it, tells a different story. The notion that a few thousand refugees could threaten the “Jewish character of the state” demonstrates a level of paranoia that is astounding.

But perhaps it is to be expected. The obsession with a Jewish majority was understandable, if not condonable, in 1948. The conflict was raging, the fledgling state of Israel faced uncertain prospects, and even the United Nations had come up with a partition plan that strove for a Jewish majority on one side and an Arab majority on the other side of Palestine.

But the fact of the matter is that notions of a Jewish majority in Palestine for the early Zionist leaders of the Mandate era, were based on the dream of massive Jewish immigration. Consider, for example, the words of the father of the Israeli right wing, Ze’ev Jabotinsky:

First of all, I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine. There will always be two nations in Palestine – which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority… I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone. This seems to me a fairly peaceful credo.

Jabotinsky was focused on one thing: Jewish immigration to Palestine, what one might call “positive demographic” thinking, despite his militancy and fascist insistence on forcing the Palestinians to accept Jewish rule in Palestine.

It was really Britain’s Peel Commission that gave birth to the idea of “transferring” Palestinians (and some Jews as well) in a partition plan, creating the notion of “negative demographic” models. This idea was embraced by David Ben-Gurion and, crucially, by Josef Weitz, a major player in the pre-state Yishuv and the Jewish National Fund (JNF).

Jabotinsky was convinced that the Zionist movement could bring enough Jews into Palestine to ensure a Jewish majority. Despite the trauma of the Holocaust and the flight and expulsion of most of the Jews of the Arab world, he was proven wrong.

Rather than accept this reality, Israel has turned to ongoing expulsion and xenophobia.

A Jewish majority, even if one considers that a worthwhile goal, is not worth the price in the suffering of Palestinians and others and the moral rot of both Israel and the many Jews worldwide who feel connected to that country.

Nor is it necessary. There are other ways to fulfill the Zionist dream of self-determination, and the ability for Jews to defend ourselves, if it should be necessary in the future.

Instead of this demographic obsession, Israel could turn to a constitutional future, wherein Israel grants real equality to all of its citizens and guarantees, instead of the current Law of Return, that Israel will be a haven for Jews and Palestinians facing persecution in other countries. It could acknowledge Israel as the home of both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples whose identities were forged there.

The current state of Israel, whatever one thinks about it, was built by the Zionist movement. If it can stand on humanistic, rather than ethnocentric legs, it can continue to have a “Jewish character” no matter the demographics. Indeed, that character can be enhanced, as Jewish communities are and have been all over the world, by its interaction with others.

But it cannot achieve that sort of bright future, much less peace or substantive security, through xenophobia that causes it to turn its back on desperate people (as happened to the Jews during the Holocaust) or by using bureaucratic trickery to artificially maintain a preferred demography, a strategy which is no better than striving for “ethnic purity.”

Both the experience of the Palestinians who lost their residency, and the African refugees facing the ugliest kind of hate today, show a bigotry in Israel that cannot be explained by war or terrorism, much less by anti-Semitism.

It’s just plain bigotry. Such self-serving prejudice might have been understandable, again if not condonable, in the late 1940s. But today, it is simply unacceptable.

Both for the victims of that bigotry and for Israel, it has to be stopped.

Photograph courtesy of Physicians for Human Rights – Israel. Published under a Creative Commons license.