Israeli Democracy (2)

Uri Avnery remains the most cutting-edge thinker on the Israeli left. Arguably the only true Progressive Zionist around, he has done more than anyone to articulate what a Hebrew Republic would actually look like. In his latest Gush Shalom missive, however, he draws one analogy too many, and as a result misses the nuances of his particular situation, Zion in the year 2008.

Avnery’s topic is Tzipi Livni’s recent comments regarding Israeli-Arabs. At a meeting with Tel Aviv High School students, Livni said the following: “Once a Palestinian state is established, I can come to the Palestinian citizens, whom we call Israeli Arabs, and say to them, ‘you are citizens with equal rights, but the national solution for you is elsewhere…The idea is to maintain two states for two peoples, that is my path to a democratic nation.” 

In response, Avnery provides his first analogy, that of an excessively idealised United States. “an American politician gets up and declares: The United States was founded by British Protestants who were persecuted for their Puritan beliefs. Therefore, the United States is an Angl0-Saxon Protestant state…the United States is also a Protestant state. Therefore, people with another background – such as Native Americans, Africans, Latinos, Asians and Jews – enjoy full equality. But they must know that the United States is an Anglo-Saxon nation-state, while they belong to other nation-states.” Avenery knows as well as anyone that this analogy ignores all the specifities of Zionist and Israeli history.

He goes on to browse the history of the nation-state, with typical aplomb: complicated ideas and processes simply distilled so as to be digestable to the casual reader. He reminds us that the nation-state is a relatively recent phenomenon, probably dating from the eighteenth century, that it emerged as a system of homogenity, but has now transformed itself into one of difference. Then he returns to the ideal type – America – and the recent election of Barack Hussein Obama. The WASP is no more he tells us; whites of European origin will soon be a minority in the States (and nobody cares), and people aren’t even bothered if English’s hegemony is challenged. “Everyone understands that the future and robustness of the US-American people do not depend on the religion and race of the American people. Therefore, there is no ‘demographic problem’ in America.”

We then arrive – via analogies drawn with Europe – to the crux of the matter, the heart of the storm. “Angela Merkel will not tell her Turkish citizens: “You can enjoy equality here, but you belong to the Turkish nation-state”. One can hardly imagine Gordon Brown telling the British citizens of Pakistani extraction: “Your nation-state is Pakistan.” But what if the leading organisations representing citizens of Turkish/Pakistani origin had issued four policy statements, each denying the majority people the right to express their national rights? Or what would happen if Latin Americans called for Spanish to be given the same status as English?

This is what has happened here. “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel”, for example, calls for Israel to stop defining itself as a Jewish state and become a ‘consensual democracy for both Arabs and Jews’. Nowhere in the document is there any recognition of Jewish national rights in the land. Of course, the context in which these documents emerged is years and years of neglect and discrimination of non-Jewish minorities, an ongoing situation which should be a blot on the conscience of anyone who calls themselves a Zionist (or even, as I’m flirting with these days, a Zionist anti-Zionist), a problem which is potentially far more damaging to the state than the conflict with the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories or the leadership of Iran.

It is a shame, therefore, that Avnery does not spell out the specifics of what an integrated Arab minority would look like. Instead he deals in platitudes: “it will not be a narrow, closed nation-state, compulsively homogenous, based on nationalist-religious-linguistic conformity, hostile to its neighbours. The new nation-state will be open and cosmopolitan, respectful of minorities, a state of all its citizens, integrated in a regional partnership, a part of the global economy, a partner in the joint struggle for the preservation of this little planet.” A realist like me, Avnery recognises that the nation-state has a little life left in it yet; this is why he remains a two-stater when others around him are starting to lose hope. But he knows we need to talk  tachles.

The first practical steps are clear: stop discrimination in government funding to Arab municipalities, invest in the Arab education system, set up a comprehensive national-service programme for post-High School Arab youth, tighten up race discrimination legislation, put in a massive, state-wide effort to combat the burgeoning racism in Israeli society. But that’s only the beginning, the bare bones of what Herzl and Jabotinsky meant when they talked about Zionist democracy.

The next step would be to think about how to make Israeli-Arabs proud Israeli citizens. And this will require gestures from both sides. Israel will have to acknowledge the dispossession of the Palestinian people that the creation of the state entailed; Palestinians will have to acknowledge that Jews also have national rights in Palestine. Whether one-state, two-state, three-states or no-states, a lasting solution will only be found here when both sides acknowledge the other’s national rights, mourn the tragedy that this implies, and then move on. Livni’s comments, absurdly depicted as calls for ethnic cleansing in some anti-Zionist circles, reflect the continued mutual suspicion that has characterised the Arab-Zionist encounter thus far. It is high time that the paradigm was shifted…

Which is why Falsedi is taking a holiday in Umm-el-Fahm over Shabbat…