The Unmaking of Israel (25 page)

Afterward, the campaign moved to parliament, where right-wing Knesset members threatened legislation and investigations to expose the sources of funding to human rights organizations. Early in 2011, for instance, the Knesset plenum approved sending two resolutions to committee. One, submitted by an Israel Is Our Home legislator, called for a parliamentary commission to investigate “foreign foundations and governments” supposedly funding Israeli organizations to take part in “the campaign of delegitimization against IDF soldiers.” The second, submitted by Likud member Danny Danon, demanded a Knesset inquiry into the role of “foreign bodies and governments in funding anti-state activities and organized attempts to purchase its land.” When the vote sparked intense public criticism, Lieberman responded by charging, “We’re talking about groups that are nothing more than collaborators with terror, whose only purpose is weakening the IDF.”

Israeli law already required nonprofit organizations to submit detailed financial reports to the state’s Registrar of NPOs, which makes those reports available to the public. So the parliamentary efforts to “reveal” their funding sources were pure theater. The goal was to attack civil society, the most vibrant part of Israeli democracy, and to portray challenges to government policy in Gaza and the West Bank as subversive.

Danon’s allegations that terror groups could be buying Israeli land alluded to the right’s third front—preventing Arab citizens from buying or renting homes where they wished in the country. Outside the realm of parliament, the most vocal figure in that effort was Shmuel Eliahu, the chief rabbi of the Galilee city of Safed. The local college attracted many students from surrounding Arab communities, who often sought housing in town during their studies. In late 2010, Eliahu published a manifesto saying that Jewish religious law prohibited selling or renting homes or land to non-Jews anywhere in the Land of Israel.

“Their way of life is different from ours, they despise us and they harass us to the point of endangering lives,” Eliahu wrote. Anyone who sold to a non-Jew, he said, caused financial damage to his neighbors by lowering property values. To prevent this, he said, people should publicly admonish the offender, “keep away from him, avoid doing business with him . . . until he reverses the great damage he has done to the public.” Initially, the manifesto was cosigned mainly by other rabbis from Safed; when Eliahu came under public criticism, he gathered the signatures of the state-salaried rabbis of dozens of other towns and settlements for his racist interpretation of Judaism.

Within the parliamentary realm, meanwhile, the Knesset passed a bill that aimed at preserving the restrictive admissions-committee system in community settlements, even before the High Court of Justice ruled on it. Sponsored by members of four parties—including the centrist Kadimah—the law protected the committees’ authority to reject candidates who “do not match the social-cultural fabric” of a community. As the Ka’adan case showed, that was enough to enshrine housing segregation in community settlements. Indeed, the legislation’s purpose was to write a new ending to the Ka’adan story, an ending in which chauvinism defeated liberalism, in which the country’s past won out over its ideals.

The article appeared in
Olam Katan
(Small World), a free weekly given out in synagogues on the Sabbath, in the summer of 2010. It announced that Israel’s single national police force had a new recruitment program, aimed at men who’d studied in Orthodox pre-army academies and gone on to serve as army officers. It offered them a three-and-a-half-year course, at the end of which each would receive a BA and a police rank equivalent to being an officer in the military. Part of that time they would spend engaged in religious study—at the Elisha academy in the West Bank. That is, they would prepare for a law-enforcement career at an outpost established in defiance of the law.

Yehonatan Chetboun, chair of the Raananim movement, which was working with the police on the project, explained to
Olam Katan
how he would show young religious Zionists the importance of serving in the police: “I’ll invite them for a nighttime patrol with me and the station commander in Lod or Ramleh, so they understand that the central issues facing the Israel Police are the most meaningful national issues.” Lod and Ramleh, of course, are Israeli cities where Palestinian citizens of Israel make up a large part of the population. The way to attract army veterans, in Chetboun’s explanation, was to show them that police work inside Israel will be a seamless continuation of the ethnic conflict in occupied territory. For the police force, the payoff would be enlisting “people at a very high level,” a top police officer said.

The program was beginning small, with thirty-five recruits. It was another barely noticeable change, launched by a state agency to meet immediate practical needs, with little thought about consequences. In one more way, the occupation was coming home.

None of this has happened without resistance. Rather it is part of the cycle of action, reaction, and counterreaction. The attack on civil society is evidence that Israelis, voluntarily organizing, have determinedly tracked and opposed the abuses of power in the occupied territories and within Israel. The attempt to disenfranchise Palestinian citizens testifies to their concerted effort to assert their equality and their identity. In turn, the bids to conduct parliamentary witch hunts have provoked criticism not just from the left, but from some of Likud’s veteran politicians.

Yet it has proven impossible to maintain a regime in occupied territories in which Palestinians and Jews live under separate laws, or under no laws at all, without undermining law and democracy within Israel. By acting like a movement rather than a democratic state beyond the Green Line, Israel has become less of a state in its own territory.

Only months after Israel conquered the West Bank, philosopher and dissident Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that continuing the occupation would “undermine the social structure we have created and cause the corruption of individuals, both Jew and Arab.” Leibowitz’s warning has proved all too prophetic. One reason for reaching a two-state solution is to bring peace. Another, at least as important, is to begin the work of repairing Israel itself.

Chapter VIII
The Reestablishment of Israel

I write from an Israel with a divided soul. It is not only defined by its contradictions; it is at risk of being torn apart by them. It is a country with uncertain borders and a government that ignores its own laws. Its democratic ideals, much as they have helped shape its history, are on the verge of being remembered among the false political promises of twentieth-century ideologies.

What will Israel be in five years, or twenty? Will it be the Second Israeli Republic, a thriving democracy within smaller borders? Or a pariah state where one ethnic group rules over another? Or a territory marked on the map, between the river and the sea, where the state has been replaced by two warring communities? Will it be the hub of the Jewish world, or a place that most Jews abroad prefer not to think about? The answers depend on what Israel does now.

For Israel to establish itself again as a liberal democracy, it must make three changes. First, it must end the settlement enterprise, end the occupation, and find a peaceful way to partition the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Second, it must divorce state and synagogue—freeing the state from clericalism, and religion from the state. Third and most basically, it must graduate from being an ethnic movement to being a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equality.

Proposing these changes provokes several reflexive objections, inside Israel and beyond. First, many Israeli Jews translate any call for full equality of all citizens as a demand that Israel cease to be a Jewish state. The supposed choice is a false one. Israel can be a liberal democracy and still fulfill the justifiable desire of Jews, as an ethnic national group, for self-determination.

The liberal meaning of self-determination begins with the rights of
individuals
. As Israeli political thinker Chaim Gans argues, it expresses the justifiable desire of members of an ethnic group to maintain a basic aspect of their humanity and personal identity: their culture. To live in their culture and preserve it, they need a place where that culture shapes the public sphere. The natural and most justifiable place for that to happen is their homeland, or part of it.

But in the real world, in contrast to utopias, individual rights clash. The classic metaphor for this is the man crying fire in a crowded theater: dogmatically preserving his right of expression robs others of their right to stay alive. Nation-states can be liberal democracies, but each faces the constant challenge of balancing the right of self-determination and other rights.

Israel does not have to give up being a Jewish state. It does need to establish a very different balance of rights. In a country with a significant Jewish majority, it is reasonable for the usual language of the public sphere to be Hebrew. It is reasonable for offices to close on Jewish holidays, because most people would not show up for work on those days anyway. It is also reasonable for the kitchens in government institutions—such as the army—to be kosher, since this preserves the right of Jews who observe religious dietary laws to participate fully in society. It is not acceptable for the government to favor Jews in the allocation of jobs, land, or school buildings, or for it to prevent Muslim citizens from maintaining a mosque in a mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood. Nor is it acceptable for the government to condition the rights of non-Jewish citizens on their swearing fealty to this particular balance of rights.

A second objection is that creating and sustaining two states between the river and the sea is no longer possible. Settlements are too large, Israel and the occupied territories too entangled; the tipping point has been passed. All that is possible now is a one-state solution. Especially outside Israel, this practical argument often hides a psychological tendency: even progressives sometimes fight the last battle, especially if it was a heroic fight for which they were born too late. One person, one vote was the answer in South Africa, they say; therefore it is the solution for Israel.

In fact, a one-state arrangement would solve little and make many things worse. Imagine that tomorrow Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip are reconstituted as the Eastern Mediterranean Republic, and elections are held. With the current population, the parliament will be split almost evenly between Jews and Palestinians. One of the first issues that the parliament and judiciary will face is the settlements that Israel built on privately owned Palestinian property, whether it was requisitioned, stolen, or declared state land over Palestinian objections. Palestinian claimants will demand return of their property. The problem of evacuating settlers won’t vanish. Rather, it will divide the new state on communal lines.

Likewise for refugees. Palestinian legislators will demand that Israel’s Law of Return be extended to cover Palestinians returning to their homeland. Jewish politicians will oppose the move, which would reduce their community to a threatened minority. Palestinians will demand the return of property lost in 1948 and perhaps the rebuilding of destroyed villages. Except for the drawing of borders, virtually every question that bedevils Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations will become a domestic problem setting the new political entity aflame.

Issues not at the center of today’s diplomacy will also set the two communities at odds. Israel has a postindustrial Western economy; the West Bank and Gaza are underdeveloped. Financing development in majority-Palestinian areas and bringing Palestinians into Israel’s social welfare network would require Jews to pay higher taxes or receive fewer services. But the engine of the Israeli economy is high-tech, an entirely portable industry. Both individuals and companies will leave, crippling the new shared economy. Meanwhile, two nationalities who have desperately sought a political frame for cultural and social independence would wrestle over control of language, art, street names, and schools. Psychologically, it would be a country with two resentful minorities and no majority.

Even in the best case, the outcome would be the continued existence of separate Jewish and Palestinian political parties. And even the more liberal-leaning parties of each community would be hard-pressed to bridge the divide to form stable coalitions. Israel would become a second Belgium, perpetually incapable of forming a stable government. In the more likely case, the political tensions would ignite as violence. The transition to a single state would mark a new stage in the conflict. For a harsh example of the potential fluctuation between political stalemate and civil war, Palestinians and Jews need only look northward to Lebanon.

A single state would not be a solution—or even a workable arrangement, which is what politics normally offers in place of solutions. It would be a nightmare: another of the places marked on the globe as a country in which two or more communities do battle while the most educated or well-connected members of each look for refuge elsewhere.

A third objection to a two-state solution, from the Israeli right and its overseas supporters, is that it requires Israel to sacrifice too much for peace. This reflects an old habit of thought in which territory is the coin that Israel reluctantly pays for a peace agreement.

It’s true that peace is an essential end in itself. But Israel must also give up land to reestablish itself as a state and a democracy. It needs to put a border back on the map. Within that border, the government needs to rule by the consent of the governed. It needs to restore the rule of law and end the ethnic conflict.

Peace with the Palestinians is a
means
for achieving these goals. It provides the way for Israel to end its grip from outside on the Gaza Strip and leave the West Bank safely. “Hold too much, and you will hold nothing,” the Talmud says. If the state of Israel tries to continue holding the West Bank, there will be no state.