The Unmaking of Israel (24 page)

But the barrier’s barbed wire has been no more successful than the erased Green Line in keeping occupation psychology from infiltrating sovereign Israel. That mind-set sees the entire territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean as the arena in which Jews and Arabs fight for hegemony. It is a pre-state attitude, but guides the actions of the state. In that mind-set, Israeli Palestinians are not second-class citizens; they are at best denizens of the first circle of occupation, at worst a fifth column.

Such thinking shaped government policy. The Likud government that took power in 1977 used the “community settlement” model, as developed at Ofrah, to draw settlers to the West Bank. But the government also began creating the same kind of exclusive community inside Israel, especially to “Judaize the Galilee”—to draw Jews to northern Israel, which has a large Arab population.

As in the West Bank, hilltop neighborhoods of private homes were planted between Arab communities. To move in, prospective residents had to first meet the approval of the community’s admissions committee. The method, I should note, also made it possible to exclude Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry, single parents, or people of the wrong religious stripe, according to the whim of the committee. The more consistent impact, however, was to exclude Arabs.

Yet inside Israel, the attitudes of occupation confronted the attitudes and the institutions of democracy. In 1995 Aadel and Iman Ka’adan, a couple from the Israeli Arab town of Baqa al-Gharbiyah, tried to buy a lot in the nearby community settlement of Katzir. As young, educated professionals eager to live in a place with good schools so their daughters could get into the right universities, they fit the Katzir profile. As Arabs, they were told that there was no point even in applying for membership. The state had allocated the land to the Jewish Agency to create a rural community, and the Jewish Agency establishes communities for Jews only. As citizens of a democracy, the Ka’adans turned to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which filed suit before the High Court of Justice.

In its judgment five years later, citing sources ranging from Genesis to
Brown v. Board of Education
, the court ruled that “equality is one of the foundational principles of the State of Israel,” and that the state must not discriminate against Arab citizens in allocating land. Nor could it use the Jewish Agency as its middleman in order to discriminate, for “what the State cannot do directly, it cannot do indirectly.” After many delays, Katzir’s admissions committee weighed the Ka’adans’ application. It concluded that they were “unsuited” to “fit in socially” and denied their application.

Again, the couple’s lawyers petitioned the High Court. Among the exhibits they presented was the Jewish Agency’s internal policy document written in response to the court’s ruling in 2000. It recommended “not making noise . . . and continuing doing what we are doing”—in other words, continuing to discriminate. Finally, after a hearing in which the justices’ furious comments made clear that the state would lose, the Ka’adans were allowed to buy a lot in Katzir. In 2007, they were able to start building their home. Shortly afterward, a coalition of Israeli human rights organizations—representing Arabs, gays, and Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry—asked the Supreme Court to ban the entire admissions-committee procedure. As of this writing, that case is still pending.

To this point in the story, it illustrates the defining contradiction of Israel’s history, the inner clash between chauvinism and liberalism, between ethnocracy and democracy. More than that, it shows the progress upward, painfully slow but real, of a country weighted by its past but climbing toward its ideals.

In politics, however, most actions produce reactions, often unequal. In recent years, the national figure who has most embodied political reaction is Avigdor Lieberman. Lieberman’s themes are a bellicose foreign policy, the need for a regime based on a powerful, unfettered leader, and—most of all—the danger of domestic enemies.

The enemies list begins with Arab citizens. “Every place in the world where there are two peoples—two religions, two languages—there is friction and conflict,” Lieberman once told me, in an interview in his Knesset office. The solution, he asserted, was total political division, meaning that Israel had to rid itself of its Arab minority.

He also spoke of his admiration for Winston Churchill and for Peter the Great, the early-eighteenth-century autocrat who dragged Russia into modern Europe. He saw both as models of sticking to one’s vision in the face of opposition and mockery. Lieberman said his favorite book, the one that he had read “at least three hundred times,” was the historical novel
Peter the First
. Written during Stalin’s reign by Alexey Tolstoy, a distant cousin of the author of
War and Peace
, it sympathetically portrays Peter the Great and, implicitly, Stalin as well. “To drag the people out of the age-old swamp, open their eyes, prod them in the ribs. Beat them, lick them into shape, teach them”—so the czar describes his life’s mission. When he faces a counterrevolution, “The prisons were filled and thousands of new corpses swayed . . . on the walls of Moscow.” Peter himself participates in the torture of the conspirators. Lieberman said that whenever he needed something to calm himself, he opened the book and began to read.

Lieberman was born in Soviet Moldova in 1958, and came to Israel at age twenty. After graduating from Hebrew University, he became a Likud functionary and moved to the small West Bank settlement of Nokdim, in the hills southeast of Bethlehem. When Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister in 1996, Lieberman took the position of director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office, the equivalent of a U.S. president’s chief of staff. Lieberman gained a reputation as Netanyahu’s enforcer within the Likud—and the following year was forced to resign in order to repair the prime minister’s shattered relations with his party colleagues.

In the 1999 elections Lieberman ran on his own ticket, flaunting his immigrant identity along with a hard-line rightist platform. Nearly a million immigrants had poured into the country from the former Soviet Union during the previous decade. The number of engineers in Israel quadrupled; the number of physicians doubled. Disappointed professionals became semiskilled laborers, sometimes competing with Israel’s Arab underclass. The name that Lieberman gave his party, Israel Is Our Home, was the loud declaration of those actually not quite at home. Read with the stress on
Our
, it also implied that there were other people in the country who should be considered aliens.

Explaining the psychology of the anti-Semite, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “By treating the Jew as an inferior and pernicious being, I affirm at the same time that I belong to the elite. This elite . . . is an aristocracy of birth.” What shall the person who seeks membership in an aristocracy do if viewing Jews as pernicious is not possible for him? “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him,” Sartre wrote. Lieberman’s message appointed Israel’s Arabs to fill in as hated outsiders who made it possible for others to be insiders.

Israel Is Our Home won four seats in its first election. By the 2009 election, it won fifteen seats, and Lieberman led the third largest party in the Knesset. Over that time, Lieberman’s views on the Palestinian issue underwent an evolution. Initially, he aligned his party with the far-right National Union, which called for the “voluntary transfer” of Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in order to keep the Whole Land of Israel. In 2004, he suddenly declared that he favored partitioning the land between Jews and Palestinians. This fit a trend: at that moment, a whole slice of the right seemed to accept the left’s argument that Israel could not remain a Jewish and democratic country if it kept all of the occupied territories. Deputy prime minister Ehud Olmert, a lifelong advocate of the Whole Land of Israel, had come out for withdrawing from most of the West Bank. Prime Minister Sharon had announced his plan to “disengage” from Gaza.

But Lieberman had his own twist: he proposed that Israel keep its largest West Bank settlements—and cede some of its own territory near the West Bank boundary, areas populated by Arabs who are Israeli citizens and voters. From the Knesset podium, he advocated expelling Arab citizens from elsewhere in Israel to the new Palestinian state.

Before the 2006 election, possibly to avoid having his party disqualified as racist, he stopped speaking of forced population transfer. Instead, his platform called for making citizenship conditional on taking a loyalty oath to the state, the flag, and the national anthem. Any Israeli adult who declined the oath would remain a resident but could not vote. Israel’s flag, with its Jewish star, and its anthem describing the “Jewish soul stirring” have long spurred opposition from Arab citizens, who feel that the symbols exclude them. Lieberman’s plans exploited that position to label them as disloyal and to disenfranchise them. “Such a law is customary in advanced Western countries, chief among them the United States of America,” the party platform claimed. In fact, the proposal appears modeled on the law used by post-Soviet Estonia to deny citizenship to non-Estonians.

The meaning of Lieberman’s political shift was that he changed targets: rather than focus primarily on Palestinians in the occupied territories, he portrayed Israel’s own Palestinian citizens as the primary enemy.

Lieberman’s success in the 2009 election showed that his rhetoric of resentment resonated beyond the immigrant community. But that success was just one facet of the rise of the radical right. The Likud’s moderate wing had bolted three years earlier to form the new, centrist Kadimah party, which largely replaced the Labor Party in representing the centrist Israeli middle class. Afterward, the Likud was pulled further rightward by a group called Jewish Leadership, based among ideologically extreme settlers. The group’s website proclaimed that if it gained power, it would immediately take Israel out of the United Nations, destroy the IDF’s nonlethal crowd-control weapons, and establish an exclusively Jewish upper house in the Knesset.

Jewish Leadership’s supporters signed up as Likud members. When the Likud central committee chose its Knesset candidates for 2009, the group’s representatives voted as a bloc, helping hard-liners fill the party ticket. After a near tie in the national election between the Likud and Kadimah, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu refused to share power with Kadimah, in part because the leader of the centrist party, Tzipi Livni, demanded that the new government pursue peace with the Palestinians based on a two-state solution. Instead he formed a coalition with Lieberman, the religious parties, and the directionless remains of the Labor Party. Lieberman was appointed foreign minister. A legislator from his party, West Bank settler David Rotem, became chair of the Knesset’s influential Law Committee, and the new justice minister, Yaakov Neeman, was Lieberman’s choice.

What followed was an intense effort to use parliamentary power against basic democratic principles. That offensive, I must stress, faced resistance within the Knesset and in the general public. Nonetheless, the tidal wave of legislation aimed against the Arab minority, human rights activists, and critics of the occupation was unprecedented.

Following his party’s platform, Rotem introduced a bill to condition citizenship on a declaration of allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish and Zionist state” and “to the state’s flag, and to the national anthem.” Lacking sufficient support for that sweeping measure, Israel Is Our Home and its right-wing allies submitted more limited measures. One bill from Lieberman’s party proposed that civil servants be required to declare allegiance to “the Jewish and democratic state of Israel.” The clear purpose was to push Arabs out of the civil service. Another bill, cosponsored by the far-right National Union, sought to rein in the country’s cinema industry. Recent Israeli films had won international acclaim for their artistic quality and their searing examination of Israeli society, but the cinema renaissance depended on government subsidies. Under the bill, for a production to receive funding, everyone working on it would have to declare fealty to “the State of Israel, its symbols, and its Jewish and democratic values.”

One of Lieberman’s bills received Netanyahu’s forceful backing. In October 2010, the cabinet voted to back an amendment to Israel’s citizenship law. Rather than simply declaring allegiance to Israel to be naturalized, an immigrant would have to affirm loyalty to Israel as “a Jewish and democratic state.” The proposed amendment did not apply to immigrants coming to Israel under the Law of Return. That is, only people with no ethnic connection to being Jewish would have to declare allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish state.” At the cabinet meeting, Lieberman made clear that he saw the bill as a stepping-stone toward fulfilling his wider program to require a loyalty oath of everyone in the country. The utterly unhidden message was that Palestinian citizens were disloyal and must be excised from the polity.

The right’s second front, in parliament and outside, was against domestic dissent. An organization called Im Tirtzu launched an offensive in early 2010 with a study alleging that Israeli human rights groups were part of a conspiracy to besmirch the army and “deter IDF soldiers and commanders from the very willingness to fight.” The tentacles of the purported conspiracy included the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence, and B’Tselem, which monitors human rights violations in occupied territory. At the center of the plot allegedly stood the New Israel Fund (NIF), a philanthropy that raises funds abroad to support a wide variety of Israeli groups working for civil rights, economic equality, and other liberal causes. By manipulating statistics, Im Tirtzu alleged that NIF-backed organizations had supplied the bulk of negative material from Israel for the United Nations’ highly critical Goldstone Report on the IDF invasion of Gaza in 2009.

Im Tirtzu followed with a personal campaign against NIF president Naomi Chazan, a former Knesset member. Demonstrators outside her house held signs depicting Chazan with a horn sprouting from her forehead—playing on the fact that the Hebrew word for “fund” also means “horn,” but echoing anti-Semitic myths about Jews having horns. Speaking to me, Im Tirtzu chair Ronen Shoval asserted that the various human rights groups were “really the different hands” of the NIF, “which instigates and directs them to incite against IDF soldiers and Israel.” As if deliberately trying to conjure up the ghost of Joseph McCarthy, he also accused NIF-supported groups of using rhetoric that “serves Communist interests.”