Israel Cannot Be Both Democracy and Jewish State if It Remains in Occupied Territories

By Allan C. Brownfeld

Slowly, many Israelis are coming to the realization that continued control of the West Bank and Gaza is brutalizing their own society as well as those Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Beyond this, it is becoming clear to all but the most ideolojgically driven extremists that Israel cannot be both a democracy and a Jewish state if it remains an occupier.

Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg declared in November 2001 that “whoever wants a full democracy with a Jewish majority cannot hold onto the entire land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, because it is a land that has people of another nation with different national aspirations. And whoever wants the whole land and a Jewish majority must give up on democracy, and instead have a dark and oppressive regime. And whoever wants democracy and the entire land must give up on his idea of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.”

By March 1, 300 Israeli army reservists had signed a statement saying they would refuse to continue serving in the West Bank and Gaza Strip because Israel’s policies there involved “dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people.”

The statement, by combat officers and soldiers, represented the largest refusal by reservists to serve in the West Bank and Gaza in the last 17 months of violence. Protests by army reservists after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon—which Ariel Sharon, as defense minister, took all the way to Beirut—are widely considered to have contributed to a subsequent military pullback to southern Lebanon, from which Israel withdrew two years ago.

The latest declaration by the dissenting reservists said: “The price of occupation is the loss of the Israel Defense Forces’ semblance of humanity and the corruption of all Israeli society. We will no longer fight beyond the Green Line with the aim of dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people.” The Green Line is the pre-1967 boundary between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In interviews with Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s most widely circulated newspaper, reservists who signed the statement reported incidents during their service in which they said that soldiers had fired at Palestinians who did not endanger them, including stone-throwing boys as far as 100 yards away.

Reservists reported incidents in which soldiers had fired at stone-throwing boys as far as 100 yards away.

The reservists say that during their service in the occupied territories, they had received orders “that have nothing to do with the security of the state, and their only purpose was perpetuating control over the Palestinian people.” Such orders, the statement added, “destroy all the values we have absorbed in this country.”

At the same time, the death on Feb. 4of five Palestinian militants in a car struck by an Israeli missile promoted increased criticism in Israel of the policy of “targeted killings.” Yaakov Peri, the former head of Israel’s domestic security agency, Shabak, said the assassinations keep Israelis and Palestinians mired in a cycle of violence and retribution. “So far the policy has not proven itself effective,” he said, citing Israel’s apparent assassination of Raed Karmi, a member of the Fatah group, as a hasty measure that probably did more harm than good to Israel’s security.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Sharon said that the reservists’ declaration “undermines the basic tenet of Israel’s democracy…You can’t have a government in which people can decide they’ll …bomb this target but not that target.”

Israeli opinion, however, seems increasingly weary of Ariel Sharon’s policies. In an opinion poll late in January, the newspaper Ma’ariv reported that Israelis, by a ratio of 2 to 1, said they think Sharon has no plan to end the violence. This has deepened the despair among many of them who sense that Sharon can neither protect them from suicide bombers nor lead them to a durable negotiated settlement. Avishai Margalit, an Israeli scholar and commentator, stated: “I don’t believe there is a rational plan here that leads anywhere…It’s a blood feud and it’s not future-oriented but always backward-oriented. To Sharon, you always settle scores from what happened yesterday, so it’s mostly tactics, whom to hit and when and how.”

Writing in The Jerusalem Report of Feb. 25 about the reserve officers’ statement of protest, Hirsh Goodman provided this assessment: “In a strange way, even though many Israelis are uncomfortable with the collective nature of the protest and do not agree with the officers’ refusal to carry out a legitimate order, a significant number have expressed deep sympathy for the message. It has become a rallying point for the many in this country who understand we have a war going on, but also feel that sometimes, and with increasing frequency, we lose our humanity and go too far in enforcing security measures beyond the call of duty.”

A Brutal Act

Recalling the January day when, following an attack by two Hamas gunmen on an Israeli military position, Israeli bulldozers moved in and reduced about 50 Palestinian homes in the Rafah refugee camp to rubble, Goodman wrote: “How awful it was to see children and women picking through the rubble looking for pots, pans, a blanket or a photograph taken in happier days. Many here were shocked by the brutality of the act. And now, as starkly, in their letter and in interviews…the officers and NCOs have placed before us a picture even more shocking, including shooting at innocent children and committing acts of horrendous and unnecessary violence against blameless civilians…It’s easy to descend to animal-like behavior and, at the end of the day, we should be thankful that we have kids like these officers who have the moral gumption to say what has to be said and make us take note. Instead of the country being worried that officers like these are a nail in the coffin of national unity, they should be seen as proud products of the humanistic values we supposedly consider the core of this country, toward which we work so hard to educate our children.”

In January, former Knesset member Michael Bar-Zohar spoke at Congregation Beth Torah in Dallas and deplored the Israeli army’s destruction of 21 or more homes of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. “We cannot afford to commit acts like these. It is Israel’s policy not to harm civilians,” he declared. He expressed the view that the number of homes actually destroyed was greater than 21 and that ways had to be found to compensate people who lost their homes. Ze’ev Schiff, the highly regarded military affairs analyst for Ha’aretz newspaper, called the demolition “a shameful chapter” and an “act of undisguised ruthlessness, a military act devoid of humanitarian and diplomatic logic.”

Sept. 11 Coattails

Ever since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Ariel Sharon has done his best to make Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and its treatment of the civilian Palestinian population, a part of the “war on terror.” He has compared the Palestinian Authority with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and expressed the view that he was sorry he had not succeeded in killing Yasser Arafat in the past. He has urged the Bush administration to cut its ties with Arafat and the Palestinian Authority.

Making Yasser Arafat the issue avoids confronting the real dilemma in Israeli-Palestinian relations. While Arafat’s leadership is questionable at best, and that he has missed many opportunities to make his case and move the peace process forward is clear, placing responsibility upon him for the current impasse is not consistent with what is in fact taking place.

Robert Malley, director of the International Crisis Group’s Middle East program, who served as special assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs under President Bill Clinton, laments the fact that both Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush seem to place the onus for the current situation solely on Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. It is, Malley declares, “as if that belligerence were devoid of context. Of course, it is not.…Regardless of how the current intifada began, it has by now become a mutually reinforcing cycle of Palestinian violence and terror on the one hand and devastating Israeli military attacks on the other.…Of course, the U.S. is justified in pressuring Chairman Arafat to act against Palestinian terrorists. But so, too, must it admonish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to cease those policies that inflame the Palestinian public and paralyze its security services; the targeted assassinations, the home demolitions, suffocating closure and creeping reoccupation. By his actions, and not without considerable help from the Palestinians, Mr. Sharon has done all in his power to make it unfeasible for them to meet their obligations.”

There is, Malley points out, a broader political context as well: “The intifada is the latest chapter in a conflict that opposes two peoples living on the same land and struggling over it. Any end to the violence will depend on taking steps to end the conditions that helped produce it—the pervasive and persistent military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza…Arafat is the first Palestinian leader to recognize Israel, relinquish the objective of regaining all of historic Palestine and negotiate for a two-state solution…For him to be crushed by Mr. Sharon—whose unswerving goals have been, for the last 30 years, to vanquish Mr. Arafat and, more recently, to undo the foundations of the Oslo agreement…would send a distressing message to all Palestinians, guaranteeing a succession that is in the interest neither of peace nor Israel.”

Prime Minister Sharon always has opposed the Oslo Accords. Even those Israeli governments which have entered into the peace agreement and have expressed support for it, however, have continued to preside over the growth in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Despite the ban on new settlement construction, successive Israeli governments since 1996 have overseen, provided protection to, and often formally recognized the creation of new settlement outposts—despite the pledge not to establish new settlements. In other instances, settlements ordered “frozen” have nonetheless expanded. On Aug. 21, 2000, a month before the beginning of the al-Aqsa intifada, Knesset member Mossi Raz of the Meretz Party observed that settlers “continue to exert organized control over land in an illegal manner. Their clear intention is to cause an outbreak of violence in the territories that will harm the chance for an agreement. It is time that the army, the police and the government [then headed by Ehud Barak] stop their groveling surrender to the criminal settlers.”

What is sad about the current conflict, argues The Jerusalem Report’s Hirsh Goodman, is that, “Neither side has a true military option, yet both sides have opted to fight what they know is a war that can’t be won. The Palestinians, no matter how many suicide bombers they field, how many times they fire on Gilo or even if they use their newly developed rockets against Israeli population centers in the heart of the country, do not pose an existential threat to Israel. They can demoralize the country and cause it grievous economic harm, but they cannot conquer it. Conversely, Israel, with all its military might and its freedom to re-conquer virtually at will those areas of the West Bank and Gaza returned to Palestinian sovereignty, does not have the power to silence the Palestinians.”

Can Israel really be a “Jewish” state, embracing Jewish values, if it occupies and oppresses another people? This is a question which, increasingly, thoughtful Jewish observers in both Israel and the U.S. have been asking. Professor Shoshana Brown of the State University of New York at Old Westbury asks: “What can it mean for a people to be God’s ‘treasured possession’ in a secular democracy? If democracy means letting the majority decide, what happens if the majority is no longer Jewish? If it also means protecting the rights of minority populations, how should a ‘holy nation’ respond to a substantial non-Jewish minority? If the Jewishness of the state becomes more important than justice, have we not lost our way?…
Many Jews today find themselves trying to live in the world of ‘liberty, fraternity and equality,’ and simultaneously at the foot of Sinai, where the Torah asserts we were singled out for a unique role on earth. If one aspect of this role, however, is to spread the idea of justice and of the equality of all peoples, why fear the diminishment of our uniqueness?”

A Conspicuous Silence

Discussing the demolition of Palestinian homes, including the home of a Bedouin soldier in the Israeli army, Leonard Fein, writing in The Forward of Jan. 25, 2002, described the silence of American Jewish organizations in the face of such acts: “Does the brutal behavior of the Palestinians relieve Israel of responsibility for such acts? In the mind of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the apparent answer to that question is ‘yes.’ Each evil act of the Palestinians seems to be followed by an Israeli ruthlessness. How then shall I respond when my Israeli friend asks, plaintively, why American Jewry is silent, knows only to defend but not to rebuke? Plainly, we have not lost our voice, since we continue to proclaim Israel’s virtues. Our heart, our mind? Our self-respect?”

In the end, Israelis and their friends in the United States must face the fact that Israel cannot, at the same time, be a democracy, a Jewish state, and an occupier of Palestinian land. Once this is understood, the need to withdraw from these territories and establish a Palestinian state in that area becomes clear. Even then, the question of what a “Jewish” state really is—or whether there can ever be a genuinely “Jewish” state—must be confronted. Can it be a state in which non-Jewish citizens are treated as less than equal, and in which non-Orthodox forms of Judaism are banned? If so, its advocates must redefine the term “Jewish,” because as they seem to define it, few others find it either recognizable, familiar, or worthy of the humane Jewish tradition which has thrived in adversity but may be unable to weather a connection with the political dynamic of a sovereign state.

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.