Can we get a program on this on Pacifica?
Jim D.
--------------------
Israel's Identity Crisis
By ADAM LeBOR
Published: June 29, 2008
What would Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, make
of today's Israel? He would find not one Jewish state but a
multiplicity, Bernard Avishai suggests. First, Israel the
international actor, a member of the United Nations, signatory to
peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. Then the Zionist
state-within- a-state. It predates Israel's independence in 1948, but
lives on in the Jewish Agency, which deals with Jewish immigration,
and in the Jewish National Fund, which owns substantial amounts of
land in the name of the Jewish people.
Amy Thompson
Bernard Avishai
THE HEBREW REPUBLIC
How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at
Last.
By Bernard Avishai.
290 pp. Harcourt. $26.
Related
Times Topics: Israel | Palestinians
Avishai also mentions the Haredi communities, an Orthodox quasi state
with its publicly financed education system and network of yeshivot
adult religious seminaries. Finally, there is the settler state of
hardliners who appropriate Palestinian land across the 1967 border and
build, with government funds and support, their separate networks of
roads, water and electricity supplies.
Can Israel be both a Jewish state and a democracy? At first glance the
answer is yes. Governments are chosen by universal franchise,
including perhaps one and a quarter million Israeli Arabs, who have
their own non- or anti-Zionist political parties. Israel has an
independent judiciary, an aggressive free press and a robust civil
society. But non-Jews do not enjoy equal civil rights, mainly because
of the Zionist, Haredi and settler states-within- a-state. As Avishai
writes, "the institutions designed to advance the heroic Zionist state
have become unworkable for the democratic one."
It is almost impossible for non-Jews to buy land owned by the state or
the Jewish National Fund. There is no secular marriage in Israel.
Orthodox rabbis control the process of conversion, deciding who is a
Jew and thus, often, who is a citizen. Mixed couples cannot be buried
together in a state-funded Jewish cemetery. Even more absurd, Israel
is probably the only country in the world that does not recognize its
own nationality. Israelis cannot be inscribed as Israelis in the state
population register, but must be recorded according to their religious
or ethnic origin. Every request by Israelis - Jewish and Arab - to be
listed simply as Israeli has so far been rejected. The government
argues that this would undermine the principle of Israel as a Jewish
state.
Meanwhile, "unrecognized" Arab villages languish for decades without
municipal services, while governments of both left and right have
spent $15 billion on settlements beyond the 1967 border. Here are the
makings of a social explosion waiting to happen, Avishai says.
Exclusion breeds an equal reaction. Arab citizens of Israel are using
its freedoms, not to become more Israeli, but to articulate a growing
Arab national consciousness. Recently, the Adalah advocacy center
proposed a new draft constitution for Israel. It would abolish the law
of return, which awards immediate citizenship to Jewish immigrants; it
would require coequal and separate education systems and new,
inclusive, national symbols.
The answer, Avishai says, in this brilliantly argued book, is not to
tinker with symbols but to develop a national consciousness and
identity based not on religion, but simply on being Israeli - to
remove all privileges accorded to Jews and make Israel a modern,
egalitarian democracy. If all Israeli citizens were simply Israelis,
rather than Jews, Muslims or Christians, there would be no
"demographic threat" to the state's continuation. At the same time,
this new Israel would demand a civic loyalty from its Arab population,
who, if they did not serve in the army, would at least perform some
kind of national service. This new identity would be predicated not on
religion, but on a shared Hebrew language; culture, economic and
business ties; and simply living on the same strip of land.
To some extent this is already happening. Sayed Kashua is a talented
Israeli-Arab journalist and novelist who writes in Hebrew. On the one
hand, Kashua says, Hebrew is "the language of the enemy, the
conqueror." But at the same time, "there are things I can write about
in Hebrew that I cannot write about in Arabic. ... I need Hebrew to
write about freedom."
In his enthusiasm for an Israeliness that is not predicated on being
Jewish, Avishai perhaps underestimates the importance of ethnic
identities, especially in an active war zone. When a Qassam rocket
kills civilians in Sderot, Gazans applaud and hand out sweets
celebrating the deaths of Jews. Even in the European Union, with its
open borders and free trade, simmering disputes still sour relations
between, for example, Germany and Poland, or Hungary and Slovakia. But
Avishai, a former professor of business and public policy at Duke
University, firmly believes in the potential role of business as a
catalyst for peace.
In the endless discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
trade is rarely mentioned. Avishai argues that a new elite of
globalized businessmen and -women is helping to remake the Israeli
economy. He notes, correctly, that "Israeli elites cannot hope to have
an economy like Singapore's and a nationalities war like Serbia's."
After a peace settlement, he hopes, Israel's knowledge economy and
high-tech start-ups would flourish across the Middle East, with
Palestinian entrepreneurs as go-betweens. It's an engaging, optimistic
vision. Perhaps too optimistic - but a century ago Herzl was also
dismissed as a fantasist. In this wise, humane and important book,
Avishai is taking on the role of a Herzl for the modern age.
Adam LeBor is the author of "City of Oranges: An Intimate History of
Arabs and Jews in Jaffa."