The Unmaking of Israel (2 page)

A country, as I said, can be best understood through its contradictions. In some ways, Israel has continued to become more democratic. The 1977 election proved that power could change hands peacefully in Israel, even as it gave the right-wing Likud the keys to government and the opportunity to escalate settlement. The Supreme Court has taken a larger role in protecting civil rights. The elected leadership of Israel’s Palestinian citizens has become more assertive, more independent. The 1993 Oslo Accord signaled recognition—at least by half of the Israeli public—that Israel would have to give up the West Bank and Gaza to remain democratic.

Yet with the Oslo Accord, Israel became the Ambivalent Empire. It turned over the Gaza Strip and fragments of the West Bank to limited Palestinian self-rule, in a seeming down payment on the end of occupation. Advocating a Palestinian state alongside Israel became a centrist political position, instead of a subversive one. Even rightist prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu eventually paid lip service to a two-state solution. Culturally, the debate in academia and the media about the country’s present and past policies became more open than ever.

At the same time, Israel’s entanglement in the West Bank has only deepened. Since 1993, the number of settlers in the West Bank—outside annexed East Jerusalem—has risen from 116,000 to 300,000. The lawbreaking that was always intrinsic to the settlement enterprise is more open in the post-Oslo outposts; the religious radicalism has become more extreme. Leaving the West Bank is all the more difficult because the military cannot be certain its officers and soldiers would carry out orders to do so.

In parallel, the government continues to subsidize the ultra-Orthodox community, fostering another form of religious extremism. Over 20 percent of Israeli Jewish schoolchildren are now in ultra-Orthodox schools. Ultra-Orthodox parties, with their theocratic agenda, have grown more powerful. They not only prevent separation of religion and state but pose a threat to Israel’s economic future. They are also essential members of the political alliance backing West Bank settlement.

The occupied territories are not overseas colonies. The lawlessness, the hypernationalist politics, and the struggle between Jews and Palestinians for control of the land cannot be fenced off beyond an invisible border. Settlers are targeting shared Jewish-Arab cities within Israel; rightist politicians portray Palestinian citizens as Israel’s misfortune. This is one more blow to Israel’s founding commitment to equality for “all its inhabitants,” one more way of dismantling the state.

Let me stress: the trends I’ve introduced here did not grow out of one carefully premeditated policy. Some resulted from ignoring commonsense warnings about long-term rule of another people. Some are the completely unintended consequences of seemingly safe decisions, or of choices made to solve immediate problems. Many are the product of continuing to sanctify values that made sense before 1948, when Jews were seeking self-determination—and that make no sense in an independent state.

But these trends now threaten Israel’s democratic aspirations and its existence. The country must and can choose a new direction. To complete this story, I will explain what Israel must do to put itself back together, to resolve the tension between Jewish independence and liberal democracy, to create the Second Israeli Republic.

Israel is not South Africa; the West Bank is not Algeria. To paraphrase Tolstoy, each troubled country is troubled in its own way. Parallels with the history of others can teach us lessons—as long as we remember that the similarity is incomplete. With that in mind, I’ll mention two historic parallels that shed light on Israel’s situation.

The first is with America. The newborn United States was “a settling ethnocracy,” to use Oren Yiftachel’s term. It enslaved black people and steadily pushed Native Americans from their land. Indeed, Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit describes the compromise struck by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, which allowed slavery to continue, as a cardinal example of a morally indefensible “rotten compromise,” one that establishes or maintains “an inhuman regime, a regime of cruelty and humiliation . . . a regime that does not treat humans as humans.”

Yet the United States was also a revolutionary experiment in democracy that inspired revolutionaries elsewhere. It seems that a polity can be born as both democracy and ethnocracy, its politics built forever after around the contradiction between the two.

Inevitably, we base our judgment of which side of a country’s personality is its real, underlying character on what happens later—just as the meaning of a novel’s first chapter changes with each successive chapter one reads. Judged in March 1857, after the Supreme Court ruled in the
Dred Scott
decision that a black person could not be a citizen, the United States looked like a country created as an ethnocracy with a democratic false front. Judged on November 5, 2008, the day after it elected its first African American president, it looked like a fundamentally democratic nation. As much as history helps us make sense of the present, the present constantly alters the meaning of the past. As Israeli rule over the Palestinians has dragged on, academic and popular evaluations of Israel’s genesis have grown harsher. If Israel ends the occupation and enhances its democracy, it will redeem not only its future but its past.

The second, very partial parallel is with Pakistan: in that country a series of policies, often adopted for short-term political reasons, has strengthened fundamentalist education, expanded the constituency for theocracy, and given religious radicals a powerful role in the military. More moderate forms of religion, conducive to a modern secular state, have suffered.

Israel certainly has not gone as far down that road. But Pakistan’s experience should serve as a warning. When a country’s leaders act as the patrons of religious movements opposed to an open society, they do double damage: to the state and to the religion. Israeli government sponsorship of the religious settlement movement and of ultra-Orthodoxy has enabled both to become more influential, more unbending, and more intolerant. Judaism has been terribly distorted in the process.

I make this critique not as an opponent of religion, but as a religious Jew. Since this book is not a treatise on Jewish belief, I will only briefly state what appears to me self-evident: the first lessons of Judaism’s sacred texts, in the books of Genesis and Exodus, are that all human beings are created in the divine image and deserve freedom. The reason that the Bible describes humanity as beginning from a single person, as the Talmud explains, is to teach that “whoever destroys one life, it is as if he destroyed an entire world, and whoever sustains one life, it is as if he sustained an entire world.” The purpose of Jews living together in their land, and the condition for them to do so, is to “pursue justice” as a society, and not just as individuals.

One of the most outspoken critics of state-linked religion in Israel was Orthodox scientist and theologian Yeshayahu Leibowitz. “There is no greater degradation of religion than the maintenance of its institutions by a secular state,” he wrote in 1959. After the conquests of June 1967, Leibowitz was also among the first critics of holding on to the occupied territories. The religious right’s view of the Land of Israel and the state of Israel as inherently sacred was idolatrous, Leibowitz argued. Holiness, he said, could not be imputed to soil or to human institutions. Leibowitz, who died in 1994 at the age of ninety-one, is remembered as a strident, raging man—a rationalist philosopher with the impatient fury of a prophet. Going back to his early writings against the occupation, it seems clear to me that he feared not only the corruption of the state but also the corruption of Judaism. Time has shown that his fear was well founded.

One more personal note: I am an Israeli by choice. I came here as a student, and decided thirty years ago to stay as a citizen. My three children were born here. Two are currently serving in the Israel Defense Forces. I am writing this book because I am concerned about my country’s future.

I did not think Israel was a utopia when I chose to live here. I did think it was a society in which average people were unusually engaged politically, and I hoped that this increased the potential for change. I thought there was a chance of realizing liberal Zionism: of creating a society in which Jews are the majority, in which Jewish arguments are the arguments of the general society—but also a society with full rights for non-Jews, a democracy in the fullest sense. I still believe that is possible and necessary, even if much time has been wasted.

What follows is not intended as a history of Israel, nor as a diplomatic plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Rather, it is a selective and personal journey through Israel’s past and present, for the purpose of presenting an argument: that Israel is unmaking itself, and must put itself back together.

Chapter II
Remember the Altalena

“The units have begun moving toward the beach. The separatists have mined the bridge to Kfar Vitkin and set up machine guns. All roads have been blocked by our units,” said the note to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion from his top military aide, Yisrael Galili. “We are concentrating more forces. . . . There is no doubt that our forces will face fire when they approach the beach. We shall act decisively.”

Galili was writing from Camp Dorah, an army base on the Mediterranean coast near the Jewish farming village of Kfar Vitkin. It was early on the morning of June 21, 1948. Five weeks earlier, on May 14, Israel had formally declared its independence, at the end of the British Mandate. In late June, a UN-imposed cease-fire was providing a temporary respite from war with the neighboring Arab countries. Yet Galili was sending troops into action—against Jews. And in a very practical sense, the events of the next day and a half, at Kfar Vitkin and at the Tel Aviv seafront, would mark the actual birth of Israel as a sovereign state, with the government possessing the “monopoly [on] the legitimate use of force.”

By “separatists,” Galili meant the Irgun Tzva’i Le’umi, the National Military Organization, a militant right-wing Jewish underground. Hundreds of Irgun members—some of whom had deserted the new Israeli army—held the beach at Kfar Vitkin. Through the night, they had unloaded crates of grease-covered rifles, machine guns, and other arms from a ship called the
Altalena
, anchored just offshore. By the time Galili wrote to Ben-Gurion, Irgun leader Menachem Begin had already rejected an ultimatum to turn the arms over to the army. That rejection was one step in the Irgun’s escalating defiance of the young government.

Defiance was an Irgun tradition, the organization’s pride. The group was born under British mandatory rule of Palestine. It was a breakaway from the Haganah, the militia of the autonomous, elected Jewish institutions in Palestine. Those institutions—the Va’ad Le’umi (National Council) and the Jewish Agency—were dominated by socialist Zionist groups, led by Ben-Gurion’s Mapai party. The Irgun became the military wing of the rightist Revisionist Zionist movement—which itself had bolted the mainstream Zionist Organization in 1935. The splits were predictable; splits and violent rivalries are part of the normal life cycle of national movements.

Revisionist founder Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Russian-born, Italian-educated writer, rejected the Zionist mainstream’s policy of gradual expansion of Jewish numbers, settlements, and institutions in Palestine. He stressed national pride and military power, and demanded immediate creation of a Jewish state in the entire Jewish homeland, the Land of Israel, which, he stressed, included both sides of the Jordan River—taking in all of the present-day kingdom of Jordan. Jabotinsky, who’d written under the pen name Altalena, died in 1940. In 1943, the Polish-born Begin became the Irgun’s commander. Besides Jabotinsky, the formative influence on Begin and his comrades was the Polish radical right, and more widely the European far right, with its belief in the nation as ultimate value, its trust in iron will over pragmatism, and its equal willingness to take power by the vote or the gun. The next year, the Irgun declared an armed revolt against the British, who ruled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate. (The Lehi, an even more extreme break-off from the Irgun, sporadically attacked the British throughout the war; in 1940 and 1941, it sent emissaries to seek an alliance with Nazi Germany against Britain.) While World War II continued, the Haganah tried to crack down on the Irgun; afterward, the groups cooperated for a time in a wider rebellion.

The Irgun would grandiosely give itself sole credit for driving the British from Palestine. But it rejected the UN partition plan. Irgun leaders referred to the government that the Jewish Agency was preparing to establish as a treasonous “government of partition.” The organization’s overseas headquarters in Paris proposed setting up a rival government. Begin decided against trying to seize power, because it would lead to both a bloody civil war and “the defeat of the Irgun.” He did order the Paris HQ to raise a division of volunteers in Europe, arm it, and send it to Palestine aboard a war-surplus American landing ship that the Irgun had bought and renamed the
Altalena
. In Begin’s imagination, the Irgun force would land on May 15, just after the British left, and conquer the parts of Palestine that partition assigned to an Arab state. From all of Europe, though, the Paris activists managed to recruit only a hundred untrained would-be soldiers. Their arms-buying efforts also failed. The ship did not sail.

On May 14, Israel declared independence, with Ben-Gurion as prime minister and defense minister of the provisional government. Less than two weeks later, in the midst of war, the government declared the formation of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), based on the Haganah, as the country’s army. Nationwide conscription began. Separate military forces were banned. On June 1, Galili signed an agreement with Begin to dissolve the Irgun and integrate its 3,600 fighters into the IDF. The Irgun leader had demanded that Irgun soldiers join as a single brigade. Galili wanted them drafted as individuals—but agreed to separate Irgun battalions within IDF brigades. The Irgun would cease its overseas efforts to acquire arms, the accord said.