Israel Must Face the Contradiction Between A “Jewish” and a “Democratic” State

By Allan C. Brownfeld

Israel frequently is depicted in the media and in Washington as the Middle East’s only “democracy” and as a country which shares American values.

The fact is, however, that Israel has yet to confront the inherent contradiction between its proclamation of itself as both a “Jewish” and a “democratic” state.

This contradiction goes back to the earliest days of Zionism, which was a nationalist movement far different from those to which it has often been compared.

As Israeli author Amos Elon points out, “Other nationalisms aimed at liberating subjugated peoples who spoke the same language and lived in the same territory. The Zionists, by contrast, called on Jews living in dozens of countries, speaking dozens of different languages, to settle far away in a supposedly remote, neglected province of the Ottoman Empire, where their ancestors had lived thousands of years before but which was now inhabited by another people with their own language and religion, a people—moreover—in the first throes of their own national revival and, for this reason, opposed to the Jewish project as a dangerous intrusion.”

When Israel declared independence in 1948, the kind of state which was being established was less than clear. The Israeli Declaration of Independence proclaimed the “natural right of the Jewish people to be the masters of their own fate.” It also decreed the Right of Return, resonating with the ideal of messianic redemption, in pledging a state “open for Jewish immigration and the Ingathering of the Exiles.” Then, it adopted the language of secular democracy in vowing “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” This echoed Theodor Herzl’s vision of “a nation like all nations.”

In his book What Shall I Do With This People?, author Milton Viorst declares that, “The vows were a complex of contradictions. How could Israel bestow preferences on Jews while offering equality to others? What would the relations of the Jews be with the Muslims within its borders? How could the state promise redemption to believers in the context of secular democracy? Since God told Moses Israel would be a ‘holy nation,’ could it then be ‘a nation like all nations’? These contradictions, to its grave discomforts, the Jewish state has yet to resolve.”

To deal with these contradictions, the authors of Israel’s Declaration of Independence inserted a provision that a constitution was to be written within five months. That constitution has never been written. “On the contrary,” Viorst notes, “the rift was too wide between the religious and secular communities for the two to endorse common governing principles. As for the Arab community, it was not involved at all. To this day, Israel, without a constitution, is ruled largely by improvisation, with relations between its two major cultures, as well as the place of its minority cultures, still far from settled.”

“In Israel there is full citizenship for Jews and ‘citizenship lite’ for Arabs.”

The Feb. 10, 2003 Jerusalem Report described the status of Israel’s Arab citizens: “Israel’s Arab citizens, now numbering 1.2 million souls and making up almost a fifth of the population, are at the bottom of Israel’s social and economic heap. In some Arab towns, the jobless rate now reaches 20 percent. Despite the last government’s adoption of a 4-billion shekel (over $800 million) interministerial development plan, intended to begin to close the Jewish-Arab gap and slated for implementation in the years 2000-2004, there are still large discrepancies in state funding for the Jewish and Arab sectors. In some cases, it’s actually getting worse. In 2002, 2.6 percent of the Housing Ministry’s development budget, which covers infrastructure for new residential areas, went to Arab communities, compared with 5 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Arab local governments are in serious debt.”

In its 2001-2002 report Sikkuy, the Israeli Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality in Israel, indicates that the 2002 housing development budget was 40 percent lower than in 2000 and that the amount of money budgeted for family health clinics in Arab communities declined from NIS 9.2 million in 1999, to NIS 8.6 million in 2000, and to only NIS 2.5 million per year from 2001-2005. Only 4 percent of 2002 funding for cultural programs is allocated to Arab communities, and only 6.2 percent of government sports funding went to Arab citizens in 2002.

Sikkuy concludes that “over the last decade, research into the situation of Arab citizens of Israel has grown tremendously. This research shows clearly that in Israel there is full citizenship for Jews and ‘citizenship lite’ for Arabs.”

Increasing Delegitimization

Israel’s Arab community is feeling increasingly delegitimized. Recent moves to ban Knesset members Azmi Bishara and Ahmed Tibi, and Bishara’s Balad party, from running in the election were overruled by the Supreme Court, but compounded Arab Israelis’ suspicion that their citizenship is conditional. “The damage has been contained by the courts, but the damage has been done,” noted Sikkuy co-director Shalom Dichter.

As’ad Ghanem, Dichter’s partner in Sikkuy and a Haifa University political scientist, stated: “Explain to me why the head of the education authority in the north is a Jew, when 70 percent of the pupils in his district are Arab? They tell us his deputy is an Arab, but he is not involved in the real decisions.”

Within the Knesset, writes attorney Ali Haider, who heads Sikkuy’s Affirmative Action project, “Some Jewish MKs delegitimize Arab MKs as a way of devaluing them, excluding them from positions of influence, preventing them from speaking, from voicing their opinions and from pressing the claims of the Arab public. Getting work done in Knesset committees depends on the structure of the coalition in the Knesset as a reflection of the government. Real achievements in Knesset committees, which are where the budgetary pie is served, are an outcome of parliamentary deals between the various parties. The stock in trade is the coalition’s ability to bring influence to bear, if not during the current term, then in the subsequent one. The complete exclusion of Arab MKs from the coalition prevents them from attaining any real achievements for the public that voted them into office; they have nothing to trade, no substantive means of persuasion, in their dealings with MKs from other parties…In January 2001, MK Eliezer Cohen (National Union-Yisrael Beitenu) suggested that all Jewish MKs leave the Knesset chamber whenever an Arab MK mounts the podium to speak. Cohen distributed a letter among all MKs entitled ‘The State of War With The Palestinians.’ In it, MK Cohen asked: ‘Does anyone believe that during the Second World War, a German, not an officer in an SS uniform, not a Nazi, just an ordinary German, could have stood at the podium of the British Parliament in London and made a speech in favor of Nazi Germany?’”

Some Israelis call for the “transfer”—i.e., ethnic cleansing—of Israel’s Arab citizens. In December 2001, on Israel TV 2’s “Meet the Press,” then cabinet minister Avigdor Lieberman called for affecting transfer of some Israeli Arabs. “I don’t negate the option of transfer,” Lieberman said. “We needn’t run away from reality. If you ask me what the number one problem of Israel is—it’s not the Palestinian problem. It’s first of all the Arabs who are citizens of the State of Israel. Those who identify as Palestinians will have to move to Palestine…We aren’t playing games here…They will have to find a place for themselves where they feel comfortable.”

Minister Brigadier-Gen. (Reserve) Ephraim Eitam contends that Arab communities in the Galilee are cancerous cells on the body of the nation, that Arabs in Israel are destroying the country and that they are a strategic threat to the Jewish state. He has spoken of Arabs as “like a cancer…they are mainly a ticking bomb under the entire democratic and Israeli system within the Green Line. It’s an existential threat and it’s notable because it’s elusive. Elusive threats by their very nature resemble cancer.”

On Jan. 18, 2001, Ha’aretz published an article under the headline, “Novosty Article Calls for Castration of Israeli Arabs”: “An article calling for the castration of the Israeli Arabs and offering a financial prize to young men who agree to be castrated voluntarily was published last week in the Russian-language paper Novosty. Headlined ‘How can we force them to leave,’ an article by one of the papers’ prominent writers advocates ‘castration of Arab prisoners and people arrested for anti-Israel activity.’ The reporter thinks that ‘Given the special Arab mentality, castrating Arabs who are caught could be a strong psychological tool for use by Jewish underground figures to sow panic among the Arab population and encourage the emigration of Arabs from Israel.’ To curb the birthrate among Arabs in Israel, the author proposes to implement the Chinese solution of punishing parents who have more than one child with loss of benefits, losing one’s job, sending the children to boarding school and exiling the parents to remote locations. Along with such punishments, the author proposes to encourage curbing the birthrate by handing out free or reduced-price birth control to Arabs, and setting up systems for adoption of Arab children with the purposes of transferring them to Arab countries.”

As American Jews become aware of such excesses, more and more voices are being raised in opposition. Pointing to the religious excesses of some Orthodox leaders in Israel, Rabbi Gershon Barnard of Cincinnati’s Northern Hills Synagogue notes that, “A disturbing current phenomenon in Israel is the disruption of the Arab olive harvest by (a few) Jewish settlers. These settlers harass the Arabs, who are trying to pick their olives, steal the olives, burn down trees, and, in at least one case, have killed someone. A former chief rabbi of Israel has said publicly that what those extremists are doing is all right because everything in the land of Israel really belongs to Jews.”

Israel, of course, not only is not a genuine democracy for its Arab citizens, and is something quite different for those who live under Israeli occupation, but is hardly a Western-style democracy for its Jewish citizens either. Reform and Conservative rabbis are not able to perform weddings and funerals, which are an Orthodox monopoly. Non-Orthodox Israelis serve in the army and pay university tuition. The Orthodox are exempt and receive free yeshiva studies. Public transport is banned for all Israelis on the Sabbath.

Israel is hardly a Western-style democracy for its Jewish citizens either.

Rabbi Barnard, who urges support for the Masorti Movement for Conservative Judaism in Israel, which would provide “a clear alternative to that kind of ‘Judaism,’” reports that “another chief rabbi, the mentor of the third largest political party in Israel, has compared Arabs to snakes and vermin, and has stated that a man should not pass between two dogs or two women. Certainly not all Orthodox Jews in Israel hold such extreme opinions, but the rabbis in question are quite prominent and there has been virtually no public dissent from them from Orthodox circles.”

Even if by democracy we mean simply that the majority selects the government—and put aside concerns about equal treatment, religious freedom and a belief in separation of church and state—Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza make even such a democracy difficult to discern.

Gadi Taub, author of A Dispirited Rebellion: Essays on Contemporary Israeli Culture and a member of the Hebrew University faculty, declares: “The problem is demographics. A Jewish democratic state can survive only with a Jewish majority. Without the territories, Jews are about 80 percent of Israel’s population. With the territories, Jews are just barely a majority. With Palestinian birthrates in the territories among the highest in the world, an Arab majority in a Jewish state that includes the territories is all but inevitable. So if Israel does not give up the territories, it will face a choice: relinquish either democracy or the ideal of a Jewish state. Granting Palestinians in the territories the right to vote would turn Israel into an Arab state with a Jewish minority. Not allowing them to vote would result in a form of permanent apartheid. Either way, Zionism will perish.”

Michael Ben Yari, Israel’s attorney general in the Rabin government, recently wrote in Ha’aretz: “The Six-Day War was forced on us; but the war’s Seventh day, which began on June 12, 1967—continues to this day and is the product of our choice. We enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justifications for all this.” While most historians will disagree with Ben Yari’s claim that the war was forced on Israel, none will deny that Israel has become a colonizer.

Although former Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1982 admitted, “In June 1967 we again had a choice.…We decided to attack [Egypt],” Ben Yari’s characterization of postwar Israel is an accurate one.

Laments Amos Elon, “Today there are 200,000 settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—their number has been allowed to almost double since the Oslo agreement of 1993. With 200,000 more settlers on former Jordanian territory in East Jerusalem, the total number has now reached 400,000. The settlement project continues to grow even now. Imagine the effect on the peace process in Northern Ireland if the British government continued moving thousands of Protestants from Scotland into Ulster and settling them, at government expense, on land confiscated from Irish Catholics…The vast settlement project after 1967, aside from being grossly unjust, has been self-defeating and politically ruinous. ‘We’ve fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal on the fare,’ as William Butler Yeats put it almost a century ago in a similar dead-end situation in Ireland. The settlement project has not provided more security but less. It may yet, I tremble at the thought, lead to results far more terrible than those we are now witnessing.”

Beyond all of this, can a state be “Jewish” if it is not committed to genuine Jewish values? Can American Jews, committed to religious freedom, separation of church and state, diversity in a multi-cultural society, really feel comfortable embracing a theocracy that rejects precisely such values?

Thus far, Israel has refused to face the inherent contradictions between being a “Jewish” and a “democratic” state. If genuine peace is ever to come to the Middle East, that confrontation will have to take place.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.