Israeli Democracy (1)

During my gap-year in Israel, I took part in a seminar led by an Israeli-Arab at Givat Haviva. After his speech, in which he outlined the discrimination Arabs face in Israeli society, he invited us to ask questions. “Do you think there will ever be an Arab Prime Minister?” asked one girl, to which the rest of us responded with peels of laughter. It was as if she had asked a Catholic priest if the Pope will ever star in a porn-film. 

Today, in the wake of Barack Obama’s victory in the US Presidential election, more and more people are starting to think about that question. And few have answered it as directly and honestly as Daniel Gordis, South Jerusalem’s self-proclaimed conscience of enlightened Anglo-Israelis, whose dispatches from Jerusalem are disseminated as Hasbara around the world.

In his native Los Angeles for the US elections, Gordis begins by emphasising how moved he was by Obama’s victory: “Like Jews, African Americans have known more than their share of suffering, and to see them transcend yet another barrier moved many of us precisely because in some ways their story is akin to ours. The authors of Negro spirituals who sang of getting out of “Egypt land” understood that, perhaps before we did.” Moreover, Obama’s victory provided more vindication for the American dream: “Ultimately, though, the power of that day stemmed from the sense that America had discovered its purpose, had found once again the capacity to be about something…Americans had good reason to be proud.”

Indeed they did. But what about Israel, and the implications of Obama’s victory for its future? Much has been written about the implications of Obama’s victory for the Arab-Israeli conflict, but what about the implications of Obama’s victory for the future of Zionism? After concluding that many Israelis and Americans judge Israel according to American standards of liberal democracy, Gordis bluntly asks the question my fellow gap-year student had asked ten years ago: “Could Israel ever elect an Israeli Arab as a Prime Minister?”

Gordis begins his answer by accepting that Israeli-Arabs have been victims of discrimination. In the spheres of infrastructure and education, not to mention day-to-day life, like blacks in the US, “there is much work to be done.” But. “The work to be done should not blind us to Israel’s very purpose. And Israel’s purpose is fundamentally different from the United States.” What is that purpose? “Israel was established as the sole country in which the Jews could flourish as only a majority culture can, where they would shape the contours of their society and home its collective narrative…If Israel one day were to have a Knesset in which a majority of the members were Arab [a rather different question to that of an Israeli-Arab Prime Minister, but there you go], Israel will have failed in its purpose.”

Those of us on the left-wing of the Zionist spectrum are often accused by supposedly more radical thinkers of pursuing the impossible task of trying to square the circle by trying to reconciling Zionism with democracy. It can’t be done, they say, as long as Israel constitutes itself along ethnic lines. Once it changes its identity and defines itself as a “state for all its citizens”, and accepts the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees, it will be a pariah no more.

But nor will it be Israel. This is why Gordis and I would be united in our opposition to the various one-state solutions that have been offered, at least as long as they constitute themselves on anti-Zionist lines. My criticism of Gordis, then, is that he is also missing the point of Israel. The notion of a Jewish State does not mean discriminating in favour of Jews. It means that the national culture – the language and festivals and public memory – will predominantly reflect the Jewish experience. But this should be a national culture in which anybody should be able to actively participate, just as Britain’s national culture of Shakespeare and the English Civil War and Dr Who on Christmas Day was available to me, a third-generation Brit whose grandparents had migrated from Germany less than fifty years before my birth. This is the aim, I think, of the Hebrew Repulic, of cultural Zionism.

Gordis seems to be arguing that normalisation – the raison d’etre of Zionism – is impossible. Despite this, he wants to have his cake and eat it. “Navigating this course will never be simple. To remain both Jewish and democratic, Israel will have to preserve a substantial demographic majority. That will require nuanced decision-making.” I recognise the whimpishness in that “nuanced”. It’s the ’nuanced’ of someone who isn’t quite brave enough to spell out what he means, because he knows that it would instantly undermine his claim to believe in democracy.

Gordis’ single external justification for allowing Israel to be uniquely discriminatory (we can assume that he would not appreciate it if a French thinker, for example, used similar arguments to suggest that French-Jewish aspirations should not extend beyond having running sewage and adequate schools in their towns) is a pithy quotation from Montesquieu - ”Each state has a purpose that is particular to it.” It’s hard to understand his meaning without the context, but this seems to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. As I’ll discuss in a future post, the international system is relatively unconcerned about how states define themselves internally, a state of affairs which has its advantages and disadvantages. But Israel was very clear about its purpose: to be a Jewish and Democratic state. The way Gordis sees it, this is an impossibility. In that sense, he’s thrown in his lot with the anti-Zionists.

The idea that the existence of minorities exposes Zionism for what it is is false. On the contrary, strong minorities are necessary for Zionism’s fulfillment. Zionism is succeeding when four Thai children wander the Tel Aviv streets speaking Hebrew, or when an Israeli-Arab author sits in Berlin writing in it. No doubt their relationship with the Jewish state is complicated, as is mine. The point is that they are forming an integral part of its core. Strengthening these positive associations is the vital task Zionism faces today. Indeed, it’s arguably a more important task than solving the conflict.  If we can achieve the dream of integration, the fulfillment of the Hebrew Republic, speculations about an Israeli-Arab Prime Minister will be unnecessary.