Extensive poll finds Jews, Arabs proud to be Israeli

3 Comments / 3 Comments

1. Obviously IDI cannot be an organization sponsored by the left!

2. normanberd Said:

   In Israel, this realization has been long delayed but is slowly emerging as memories of the Holocaust and Jewish , see my recent book -Modern Hebrew, The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language (McFarland, 2014) .

   Is this a commercial? I do not understand the sentence(in bold)
   normanberd Said:

   The first is the inability of a modern nation-state such as Israel to continue to rely….

   the first what?

   I dont see your point unless you are saying that Israeli nationhood should emphasize modern hebrew and the common land of residence??????? Does your tract relate to the subject of the forum?

3. Language has played a central role in the nationalist movements of many peoples who realized that it, together with a common territory is the basis for a nation. In Israel, this realization has been long delayed but is slowly emerging as memories of the Holocaust and Jewish , see my recent book -Modern Hebrew, The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language (McFarland, 2014) .
   The first is the inability of a modern nation-state such as Israel to continue to rely on an outmoded religious definition of “Who is a Jew”, an intractable religious controversy and one that has already produced enormous frustrations among the hundreds of thousands of new Israeli citizens from Russia and the former USSR who are “not Jewish” according to halacha (Jewish rabbinic law). The second is a growing realization among many “Arabs” in Israel that like the Druze and Circassians, there is no realistic alternative to full integration and equal rights as well as responsibilities.
   Israel has long been defined and simply regarded as a “Jewish state”. Its national anthem ha-Tikvah (The Hope) sings of the “Jewish soul” (Nefesh yehudi) yearning to return to “Zion”. Israel’s Arab citizens are between a rock and a hard place and “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.” Another dozen such aphorisms accurately describe the dilemma of non-Jewish citizens, among who are many vociferous critics, some who are nothing less than a disloyal “Fifth Column” and others who cannot express their loyalties and sentiments openly for fear of being targeted by extremists and sympathizers of the two recent uprisings (“intifadas”). Many observers sympathetic to Israel (let alone those who are hostile) commonly despair that any meaningful formula can be found to integrate the Arab minority.
   There is also a growing realization that those who have cast stones at Israel live in an even more fragile glass house in which there was never an authentic “Syrian”, or “Iraqi”, “Libyan” “Afghan”, “Palestinian” or even Egyptian nation but only a mosaic of sectarian, religious, tribal communities at each other’s throats and subject to the whim of shifting mafia-like coalitions of families.
   Maronites, Druze, Greek Catholics in Lebanon and Syria, Coptic Christians in Egypt, Chaldo-Assyrian Christians and Kurds in Iraq, Armenians, Turcomans, Marsh Arabs, Berbers throughout North Africa, the minority communities of Shi’ites in Saudi Arabia and Sunnis in Iran all currently have less chance of being treated as fully equal members of their homelands than the Israeli Arabs.
   Would a Hebrew Republic Necessarily Be “Less Jewish?”
   Opposing any separation of the religious character and official state supported Rabbinate in Israel is the frequent and emotional use of the straw man argument made by many politicians who argue that the Palestinians must recognize the “Jewish character” of the State of Israel as a pre-condition of peace negotiations.
   Even if a Hebrew Republic were established along the lines of the United States with a clear separation of “church and state” formally expressed in a constitution, it would not sever the deep emotional connection still felt by those in Israel and abroad who would continue to view it as a historic continuation of three thousand years of Jewish history. No other state would continue to view its heroes as those who fought in the Warsaw Uprising, at Masada and the Bar-Kochba Revolt nor emblazon the symbols of the Star of David and Menorah (the seven branched candelabrum) on its institutions and flag. No other state would seek to glorify the armed uprising and heroism of the Haganah , Irgun and Le?i ( a.k.a. The Stern Gang ) against the British mandate that put an end to colonialism.
   A nation, said the French philosopher Ernest Renan is two things, “a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors; It is a daily referendum.” Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Sudan, Lebanon and Pakistan all failed as nations that broke apart into their original ethnic and confessional fragments. They never could call on a common sense of nationhood. Elsewhere in Europe in countries like England and France, diverse peoples of different tribal origins and speaking mutually unintelligible dialects eventually achieved a higher sense of community by generations of rule under a royal authority that imposed national standards – weights, measures, currency, educational systems, devotion to a flag and the cultivation of a myth that they shared a primordial link with a common past and aspirations for the future.