Editorial Article
Review of the 2010 Israel Democracy Institute Conference
on the Demise of The Jewish State of Israel
University of Haifa – Sami Smooha (Department of
Sociology) claims the Jewish State of Israel cannot be “both
democratic and Jewish”;
Sami Smooha, who is professor of sociology at the University
of Haifa, said that Israel is neither a liberal nor a
constitutional democracy, but something special. In the past he has
termed Israel an “ethnic democracy,” but he now declined to use any
term containing the word “democracy” to describe Israel. He
emphasizes that he is a sociologist, not a political philosopher,
and as such he maintains that Israel cannot be both democratic and
Jewish. ... As an antidote to Israel’s specialness Smooha recommends
a special kind of anti-Semitism. Smooha argues that Israel’s Jews
don’t want a Jewish and democratic state but rather a Zionist and
democratic state, which is somehow worse. A “Zionist” state
maintains that it is connected to all the world’s Jews and engages
in Zionist “projects,” such as settling Jews in Israel, trying to
create an amalgamated Jewish identity out of new immigrants, and
consolidating Jewish dominance through law and politics. ...
Smooha’s call for an “end to the millet system” is code for
repealing legislation that takes into account the Jewish identity of
Israeli citizens. ...Smooha’s vision is an Israel without a national
or ethnic identity, albeit a state with a lot of Jews—much like
Florida. There would be this significant difference: Unlike Florida,
in this state a particular ethnic minority does get to be
recognized as an official “national minority,” with cultural
autonomy and other semi-national rights.
... He wants the Palestinians to be Palestinians and the
Jews to be democratic, and essentially he calls on Israel’s Jews to
discriminate against themselves. His justification is that the Jews
are colonial settlers and therefore don’t really have rights. He did
say that he thinks Israel’s Jews have the right to
self-determination though not sovereignty. But it is hard to see how
Jewish self-determination could find expression if his laundry list
of policy recommendations were adopted.
A Report on the
IDI Conference on Turning Israel Into a Bi-national State
By Dr. Yitzhak Klein
8/6/2010
On May 26-27 the Israel Democracy
Institute (IDI) conducted a two-day seminar entitled “A Bi-national
[Jewish and Palestinian-YK] State: A Critical Look.”
A bi-national state implies the demise of a sovereign Jewish state
in the Middle East.
The seminar included such notables
as philosophers Avishai Margalit and Haim Gans, jurist Ruth Gavison,
Sami Smooha, the sociologist of Palestinians with Israeli
citizenship, Alexander Yakovson, and Michael Walzer. Other foreign
academics present included Van Parijs, of the University of Louvain,
Belgium and Ivo Banac, now at Yale, who discussed the prospects of
creating a bi-national state in Belgium and the failure of
multi-nationalism in former Yugoslavia, respectively. The seminar
produced a few surprises, though participants with a history of
opposing a bi-national state largely did so and those with a history
of supporting it, such as Meron Benvenisti and Sarah Ossetsky-Lazar
of the Van Leer Institute, did not change their tune. Only the most
significant presentations will be dealt with here.
Survey data presented at the
conference were unequivocal. Israeli Jews, by an overwhelming
majority, want to live in a Jewish state, not a bi-national state.
They are not about to give up their country. Most Palestinians in
Judaea and Samaria do not want to share a state with the Jews
either. Only “Palestinians with Israeli citizenship” (a term we
prefer because it makes clear which side people are on - henceforth
“PWIS”), who don’t want to live either in a Palestinian state or a
Jewish state, favor the idea—by an 85-90% majority
Advocates and Admirers of
Bi-nationalism
Meron Benvenisti
repeated the argument he has made for two decades now. The territory
between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean has become a
political and economic whole. Territorial, demographic or economic
disengagement between Judaea and Samaria and pre-1967 Israel is
unachievable. Therefore the only choices are supposedly between a
situation of inequality, where Jews rule and Palestinians are ruled,
and a unified or a bi-national state in which everyone between the
Jordan and the sea has equal rights. Benvenisti said that his
preference would be for the Zionist vision of a Jewish nation-state,
but it has become impossible to sustain one in practice.
A similar theme was sounded by
Sarah Ossetzky-Lazar of the Van Leer Institute. She made clear
the context of her advocacy of a joint Jewish-Palestinian state in
her opening remarks: “I don’t want to use the term ‘apartheid,’ so
you won’t chew me up [literally “eat me”]. Noted.
Sami Smooha,
who is professor of sociology at the
University of Haifa,
said that Israel is neither a liberal nor a constitutional
democracy, but something special. In the past he has termed Israel
an “ethnic democracy,” but he now declined to use any term
containing the word “democracy” to describe Israel. He emphasizes
that he is a sociologist, not a political philosopher, and as such
he maintains that Israel cannot be both democratic and Jewish. In
fact, this contradiction cannot be eliminated; but by being aware of
it one can reduce its effects. As an antidote to Israel’s
specialness Smooha recommends a special kind of anti-Semitism.
Smooha argues that Israel’s Jews
don’t want a Jewish and democratic state but rather a Zionist and
democratic state, which is somehow worse. A “Zionist” state
maintains that it is connected to all the world’s Jews and engages
in Zionist “projects,” such as settling Jews in Israel, trying to
create an amalgamated Jewish identity out of new immigrants, and
consolidating Jewish dominance through law and politics. “We don’t
need to protect the Jewishness of the state!” Smooha cried. “It’s
too protected! We need to strengthen democracy!”
Smooha takes as his point of
reference the official “Future Vision” document of the PWIS. He
argued that, with a few changes, the PWIS’ vision of Palestinian
autonomy and Jews’ desire for a sovereign state of their own could
be reconciled. To do so would require “strengthening Israeli
democracy at the expense of Jewishness” as well as creating
Palestinian autonomy within Israel. To accomplish the former he
recommended:
·
Creating a
Palestinian state in the West Bank
·
Doing away
with “Israel’s millet system” (his term)
·
Doing away
with “special” security regulations (e.g., those that bar
Palestinians from sensitive military positions).
·
Abolishing
the special status of the JNF and Jewish Agency
·
Strengthening a common Israeli civic identity in the public domain.
Smooha’s call for an “end to the
millet system” is code for repealing legislation that takes into
account the Jewish identity of Israeli citizens. Ostensibly ending
the “millet system” would mean ending it for PWIS as well.
But no: Smooha calls for giving the PWIS their own national autonomy
by:
·
Recognizing
the PWIS by law as a national minority
·
“Settling”
the Bedouin question in Israel’s south (by handing over national
lands to Bedouin squatters)
·
Implementing
Affirmative Action for PWIS
·
Implementing
Arab cultural autonomy
·
Paying
compensation for expropriated Arab lands
·
Taking PWIS
parties into political coalitions and putting PWIS into positions of
power.
·
Consulting
PWIS leaders on issues of concern to their community.
Smooha here adopts most of the PWIS
wish list as it appears in the “Future Vision” document. He only
omits the demand for a Palestinian right of return and the claim for
an Arab veto over Israeli legislation. Surprisingly, Smooha calls
for PWIS to do national service.
Smooha’s vision is an Israel without
a national or ethnic identity, albeit a state with a lot of
Jews—much like Florida. There would be this significant difference:
Unlike Florida, in this state a particular ethnic minority does
get to be recognized as an official “national minority,” with
cultural autonomy and other semi-national rights.
Smooha’s proposal for “reconciling”
Jewish and PWIS aspirations turns out to be worse than other
proposals for a bi-national state, because he denies to Israel’s
Jews the same autonomy he reserves for Palestinians. He wants the
Palestinians to be Palestinians and the Jews to be democratic, and
essentially he calls on Israel’s Jews to discriminate against
themselves. His justification is that the Jews are colonial settlers
and therefore don’t really have rights. He did say that he thinks
Israel’s Jews have the right to self-determination though not
sovereignty. But it is hard to see how Jewish self-determination
could find expression if his laundry list of policy recommendations
were adopted.
Philosopher Avishai Margalit,
once at Hebrew University, now (in retirement) at Princeton, began
by claiming at the conference to be against a bi-national state, but
then turned out to be one of its most passionate advocates. He
thinks a bi-national state is impossible to achieve—but not that it
is wrong. His remarks were devoted almost entirely to defending the
idea and its advocates from the 1930s and today. In doing so he
engaged in some astounding historical revisionism. His main points:
·
Because
Israel’s legitimacy is being
questioned today, the public atmosphere in Israel is tense and
characterized by a search for traitors. [Warning: If you open any
page on this website you are evidently “searching for traitors.”]
Those in power today are not prepared to admit that they are chiefly
responsible for Israel’s delegitimization.
·
In the 20s
and 30s bi-nationalists were considered a legitimate part of the
Zionist camp. Ben Gurion took them seriously and debated their
position. When Jews constituted no more than a third of the
population of Palestine it was unrealistic to presume that Zionism
would lead to the creation of a sovereign Jewish state.
·
Actually
Jewish bi-nationalists in the 1920s and 1930s never really had a
program [thus Margalit]. They were more a state of mind than people
with a program. They adopted their positions because they feared the
Zionist revisionist movement, which threatened to create a Fascist
Jewish state, according to Margalit. They feared a militarized
state. They feared having power, having any state.
·
Margalit is
skeptical about their program but approves of their state of
mind.
·
For the past
42 years there has been an “apartheid situation” in
Judaea and Samaria. Israel’s
presence beyond the Green Line is not about to go away. The choices
Israel faces, he insists, are between being a bi-national apartheid
state or a democratic bi-national state. He prefers the latter.
The debate over bi-nationalism
within the Yishuv in the 1930s was between different wings of the
Jewish left. However Israel today is ruled by a mutated form of the
old Zionist revisionism, so the issue has become acute. We report
Margalit’s discourse as he delivered it, without attempting to
impose a forced consistency upon his remarks. His main point was
that the choice Israel faces today is not a foreign policy choice
but a choice over whether or not to resign itself to the forces of
darkness. But then again, he believes the choice has already been
made, and it is the choice of darkness.
Astonishingly, Margalit remains
psychologically trapped in the petty quarrels and antipathies of the
Yishuv of eighty years ago. He sees the question of bi-nationalism
through the keyhole of his bitter hatred of the Zionist Right, of
that time as well as of today. He sees Zionist conservatives, then
as now, as kin to fascists and as advocates of apartheid. They may
have really motivated the far-leftist Brit Shalom’s opposition to a
Jewish state in the 20s and 30s of the last century. Margalit
accuses them, and not people who label Israel as fascist and
apartheid, of being responsible for Israel’s delegitimization today.
Margalit’s positions are intellectually dishonest.
Margalit embraces and celebrates the
powerlessness that characterized 20th century advocates
of bi-nationalism and which made them so admirable in his eyes. But
then Jews seized the power he despises—Jews who actually think
Jewish power is something good, to be used to defend Jewish lives
and sovereignty. In Margalit’s view only the abandonment of the
State of Israel can save the Jews’ souls—but Margalit doesn’t
recommend it (wink, wink). He notes that the Jews certainly don’t
want a bi-national state and wouldn’t feel secure in one.
***
One surprise in the conference was
in the position of Chaim Gans, a far-leftist law professor at Tel
Aviv University, whose earlier work supported the idea of a Jewish
state within the 1967 borders. Gans now argues that, in theory,
Zionist ambitions can be achieved by giving Jews cultural autonomy,
parallel to that of the Palestinians, within a culturally neutral
liberal bi-national state.
Opponents of Bi-nationalism
Some of the arguments put forward by
opponents of a bi-national state were encouragingly Zionist. Ruth
Gavison responded directly to Smooha by saying that sovereignty
is an essential component of the Jews’ quest for control of the fate
of their own community and of their own public space, and that they
deserve to have it. As for the PWIS—Gavison used the term “Arab
Israelis”—they are not just fighting for their rights.
They are fighting against the Jews’ rights and the Jews’
claim to sovereignty. She noted that the preliminary for achieving
minority rights world over is to refrain from threatening the rights
of the ethnic majority.
Gavison said that bi-nationalism
might be “more just in the abstract,” but only if the two nations
involved actually wanted a bi-national state and viewed their future
as being tied together. This was emphatically not the
case in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. She said that it was
harmful for Jews committed to liberal Zionism to bemoan how bad
things supposedly are in Israel. They need patience for what will be
a long haul. The only way to achieve peace eventually is if the
Palestinians are first convinced that they cannot simply wait the
Jews out.
Yedidia Stern
(Law, Bar Ilan and Director of Research at IDI) argued that Israel
had to choose between land (beyond the Green Line) and Jewish
identity, and claimed to be a partisan of Jewish identity. He
advocated two positions: first, that Israel should, in his view, be
a Jewish state, rejecting the PWIS’ position; and second, that
giving up on Judaea and Samaria would convert Israel’s problem from
maintaining Jewish identity to one of being fair to an ethnic
minority. He said that the main problem was reconciling liberalism
with the demand for a state with a Jewish identity, and that the
major challenge was in determining how a Jewish state, one founded
on Jewish culture and ethics, relates to minorities. He did not
indicate how this was to be done, except to state forcefully that it
was a job for politics and not for the courts.
Among the foreign academics at the
conference, Van Parijs optimistically argued that formal
bi-nationalism is a viable option to resolve the crisis in Belgium,
while Ivo Banac related the sad story of how the multi-national
Yugoslav state broke down. Their presentations inspired Michael
Walzer to comment, “the best way to create a bi-national
state is apparently to have one already.”
Why This Conference?
The most significant aspect of the
conference was the decision of the Israel Democracy Institute to
hold it. The question of whether Israel or any other nation-state
should be replaced by a bi-national state is a perfectly legitimate
subject for academic inquiry. The question of whether the United
States should become a bi-national state, Caucasian-Amerindian or
perhaps Caucasian-Black, is perfectly legitimate—but likely to be
regarded as obscure and, except to a minute community of ideological
fanatics, uninteresting.
When IDI places a subject on its
public agenda, it indicates that in its view that subject is, or
ought to be, within the mainstream of public debate. The IDI is
nominally against a bi-national state, and that came out in the
conference. So why is the IDI giving the subject of a bi-national
state such prominence?
Bi-nationalism is explicitly
demanded in the fundamental document prepared by the PWIS
leadership, “The future vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel.”
For many years the IDI attempted to
induce the Knesset to adopt a draft constitution for Israel, one
that provided for only the thinnest veneer of Jewish identity. It
made prodigious efforts to get PWIS to sign off on that IDI
document. The PWIS balked at the mere definition of Israel in this
text as a “Jewish and democratic state.” Now the leadership of PWIS
have stated formally that the State of Israel was born in sin and
Zionism is illegitimate. Yet they say they are willing to let
Israel’s Jewish majority run its own communal affairs as long as the
Jews express contrition, dismantle Zionism, accept the Palestinian
right of return and give the Arabs a veto over public policy. The
IDI has to decide its attitude toward the formally expressed
position of this group that it once hoped would become an IDI
constituency.
The notion of a bi-national state is
a hot topic in leftist circles in European and American academia.
IDI sees itself as close to these circles, and its desire to be
considered part of them influences its agenda.
Most Israelis don’t share the IDI’s
hang-ups, either about the PWIS or about Western Europe’s
intellectual elites. PWIS and European left-wing intellectuals are
hitting IDI where it hurts, in the IDI’s own perception of itself as
a liberal institution—as defined by the European bon ton.
There has always been a gap between the sentiments of the Israeli
public and the preoccupations of the IDI, which claims to speak for
the mainstream, but the gap is getting wider and more noticeable. As
Avishai Margalit noted, none of the conference participants were
tainted with the stain of conservative Zionism, that stain for which
most Israelis voted last year.
All the Israeli opponents of a
bi-national state were of the opinion that Israel’s presence in
Judaea and Samaria is a problem (some insist that it is a crime) and
that Israel cannot be a just or decent place unless that presence is
ended. Remarkably, the people around the table who did not share
this view were the bi-nationalists, who believe that Israel and
Zionism are the problem (or the crime), and that settlements in
Judaea and Samaria are incidental to the problem because the real
problem really centers around Haifa and Tel Aviv. Nobody who thinks
that Israel has a right to settle Jews in Judaea and Samaria, or
that disastrous aggression would result from Israel’s abandonment of
those areas, was allowed a seat at the table. Not a single person
participating in the conference noted that for 17 years Israel has
been begging and pleading with the Palestinians in Judaea and
Samaria to govern their own affairs. As far as conference
participants were concerned, what goes on in Ramallah and Shechem
and Gaza still merits the term “occupation.”
IDI stacked the conference carefully
and the anti-bi-nationalists got most of the speaking time and had
most of the intellectual firepower. Yet the assumptions of the
anti-bi-nationalists made it very difficult for them to make their
case. If Israel’s presence, civil and military, in Judaea and
Samaria is a moral problem because it oppresses the Palestinians
there, then it’s equally a moral problem within the Green Line
because the PWIS claim to feel oppressed by Zionism and Jewish
sovereignty. The Jews’ arguments that PWIS enjoy Israeli citizenship
and Israeli civil rights, while their counterparts in Ramallah
don’t, are met by PWIS leaders with a cynical smile.
If there are good reasons for Israel
to get out of Ramallah—which it has done—they are equally good for
Israel to get out of Umm El-Fahm, and the reasons for Israel to give
up sovereignty in Ofra are equally reasons to surrender it in Sheikh
Munis—sorry, North Tel Aviv. It is inconsistent to say Israel has no
right to demand that Palestinians should not suffer the presence of
Jews in Samaria but that they SHOULD in Raanana.
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