Keeping the Jewish State, Jewish

T. Belman. This is a terrific article.
How can Israel outlaw anti-zionists not only from the Knesset but also from the right to vote?
How can Israel outlaw Palestinian propaganda which seeks to challenge our narrative with their contrived narrative?
How can Israel ban the celebration of the Naqba?
How can Israel, enforce a different curriculum in the Arab schools, one which teaches the Israel narrative rather than the Arab narrative?

In short how can we defend ourselves? Many Israelis think that democracy prevents us legislating so as does the most of the world.

by Victor Rosenthal     June 17, 2021

For the first time in its history, Israel’s government includes an Arab party.

Arabs have sat in the Knesset since Israel’s founding, both as members of primarily Jewish parties and as representatives of various Arab parties. From time to time Arab MKs have kept a government in office by supporting it from outside the coalition, as happened in 1993 when the Oslo Declaration of Principles was approved. But no Arab party has ever been member of the governing coalition until now.

Some people think this is wonderful. The Arabs are 20% of our population, so why shouldn’t they have a commensurate role in government? Mansour Abbas is a pragmatist who just wants the best for his constituents, they say. Others think it is a disaster. The Arab parties are all anti-Zionist and in some cases disloyal. What will happen when there is an operation against Hamas? Mansour Abbas represents an Islamist party that is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent of Hamas!

My view is that I honestly have no idea how this will work out, even assuming that the new government lasts more than a few weeks. But one thing is absolutely clear: putting an Arab party in the coalition brings the question of the relationship of the Jewish state to its Muslim Arab citizens front and center in a way that it heretofore hasn’t been.

Indeed, it’s one of those elephants in the room that we have been carefully ignoring for years. But since the formation of the new government that elephant has been tromping around and bumping into things. It can’t be ignored any longer.

Although the law requires that any candidate for the Knesset not “negate” the Jewish and democratic character of the state, the Supreme Court has required a very high standard of proof in order to disqualify an Arab candidate, and has several times overturned the decision of the Knesset’s Elections Committee to do so (the law also bans “incitement to racism,” and this has been invoked several times against Jewish candidates, including of course Meir Kahane’s Kach party).

This is in keeping with the extremely weak interpretation of “Jewish state” that was propounded by the influential former President of the Court, Aharon Barak, in whose opinion a “Jewish” state is little more than one whose values are “universal values common to members of democratic society, which grew from Jewish tradition and history.” The absurdity of this view is evident (it makes the US, for example, a Jewish state), but it is popular among those, Arabs and Jews alike, who are made uncomfortable by either Judaism or Jewish nationalism.

In 2006, a group of Israeli Arab intellectuals (I use this term although some prefer “Palestinian citizens of Israel”), under the auspices of the Arab heads of local authorities, produced a document called “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel” in which they declare themselves “the indigenous peoples, the residents of the States of Israel, and an integral part of the Palestinian People and the Arab and Muslim and human Nation,” and call for Israel to relinquish its Jewish character and become a binational state. It accuses the “Zionist-Jewish elite in Europe” of settler-colonial oppression of the indigenous “Palestinian People.” It calls for equal representation of Jews and Arabs in the government, and the recognition of the Arabs as an “indigenous cultural national group” with international protection. “[A]ll forms of ethnic superiority, be that executive, structural, legal or symbolic” must be removed. There is a great deal more, including the placing of all “Islamic holy sites” (which naturally include all the Jewish ones) in Arab hands.

If anything “negates” the Jewish character of the state, this does. And yet, several of the participants in the development of that document, including Ayman Oudeh, the head of the Joint List of Israeli Arab parties in the Knesset, Aida Touma-Sliman, and Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi, currently serve in the Knesset.

One of the reasons that the Nation-State Law was passed was in response to this. It states that “the actualization of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” and even specifies the flag, the national anthem, and the symbol of the state. The Basic Law (part of what serves Israel for a constitution), which was passed by a majority of Knesset members, is nevertheless controversial. The Jewish Left subjects itself to cognitive dissonance, insisting that it still believes in Zionism while wanting a “state of its citizens” (see the self-contradictory Meretz platform here) and opposing the Nation-State Law.

Jewish Israelis need to face this issue head-on and stop pretending that it does not exist. Our state – our state – was created explicitly as a Jewish state because the founders were Zionists who believed that Jewish survival depended upon the existence of a sovereign state of the Jewish people. The evidence of the past 73 years of Israel’s existence, especially the burgeoning of Jew-hatred in the 21st century, has only strengthened my belief that they were entirely correct.

Some think that all that’s necessary for Israel to be a Jewish state is that it have a Jewish majority and a Law of Return for Jews. This ignores the real connection that most Israeli Jews have to the ancient homeland of their people, without which there is no reason for a Jewish majority, and no justification for a Law of Return. Possibly “religious” people find this easier to grasp, but it’s not necessary to be observant to see yourself as part of a historic people, a people with a land, a language, a religion, and a culture.

If the Jews of Israel give up the idea of the connection of the people to the land, if they decide to emphasize democracy at the expense of Jewishness, if they stop believing that there is great value in having their capital in Jerusalem instead of Tel Aviv, if they give up their control of Jewish holy places (because, in the words of Moshe Dayan, “who needs all that Vatican?”), they will soon find that there is no longer a Jewish majority in the Land of Israel, and indeed that the Jewish people are again wanderers in foreign lands.

The Muslim Arabs understand this quite well, and the imperatives of their religion drive them to struggle relentlessly to get control back over the entire Land of Israel, which they consider a Muslim waqf, land that permanently and irrevocably must be under Muslim control. This is why they struggle to conquer not only the physical land and temporal assets in the hands of the Jews, but to obtain symbolic and spiritual control. This is why Jerusalem and the Temple Mount are often the focus of their violence. This is why they will never give up.

Mansour Abbas may be a pragmatist in the short term, but he is also an Islamist, which implies the longest of terms. If the Jews are to prevail in the struggle for this land, they too need to understand the limits of pragmatism. They need to learn how to draw lines and stick to them, to understand the importance of symbolism, everywhere in the country, from the Galilee to the Negev. But especially now, they need to wrest control of the Temple Mount and the Old City back from the Arabs, who have systematically undercut Jewish sovereignty there since June of 1967.

We have the power and the resources to do this. Do we also have the spiritual strength, the perseverance, and the ability to sacrifice that will be required?

June 18, 2021 | 5 Comments »

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5 Comments / 5 Comments

  1. Why do Knesset members, Jewish and Arab need to swear allegiance to the Jewish State of Israel? And if they do, and deny or aim to subvert or overthrow the Jewish character of the State, why are they not expelled from the Knesset and imprisoned or better–lose their citizenshiip and subject to immediate expulsion from Israel with their families?

  2. “There is no possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians whatsoever—forever.”

    The Arab-Israeli conflict: “The root of the problem between us [Israelis] and the Arab world is Islam. Islam is not only a religion. It is a culture, politics…a state; Islam is everything. It has been like this, and it will be like this, for the foreseeable future.” From the Muslim perspective,

    Islamic territory was taken away from Islam by Jews. You know by now that this can never be accepted, not even one meter. So everyone who thinks Tel Aviv is safe is making a grave mistake. Territory which at one time was dominated by Islamic rule, now has become non-Muslim. Non-Muslims are independent of Islamic rule, and Jews have created their own independent state. It is anathema. Worse, Israel, a non-Muslim state, is ruling over Muslims. It is unthinkable that non-Muslims should rule over Muslims.

    Moshe Sharon

    https://en.mida.org.il/2017/05/02/expert-islam-muslim-leaders-say-english-means-absolutely-nothing/

  3. But no Arab party has ever been member of the governing coalition until now.

    Some people think this is wonderful. The Arabs are 20% of our population, so why shouldn’t they have a commensurate role in government?

    The problem with this kind of philosophy is that it doesn’t stand up to basic inspection. As a “citizen”, you have rights (as long as they are not denied by Covid 19), but also obligations. Where an Jewish Israeli citizen has the obligation to serve his country, for example by serving in the IDF, Arab Israeli citizens have the right to medical services. Jews would flock to Ben Gurion to get on the next flight if they thought their safety would be left in the hands of the Arab minority. Like Biden is oft quoted, “Come on, guys!”

  4. The Bar-Lev line
    New Public Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev effectively supports dividing Jerusalem, even if he doesn’t define it that way. But first, he has to restore order to the city, where Hamas is digging in.
    By Nadav Shragai
    Published on 06-18-2021 08:04

    During the First Intifada, then-Israel Police Commissioner David Krauss felt that Jerusalem – the city that had been brought together – was slipping away from him. Krauss, an Auschwitz survivor, didn’t know what to do. He swore that Jerusalem “would not fall” on his watch, and with great emotional devotion ordered his forces to “re-liberate Jerusalem.” Yes, in those words, which were considered completely politically correct at the time.

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    Current Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai, who during the latest round of rioting talked about “terrorists on both sides,” apparently won’t be caught making similar remarks, but Jerusalem certainly “slipped away” on his and former Public Security Minister Amir Ohana’s watch.

    Hamas, which in recent months has been upping both its presence and its influence in the city and on the Temple Mount, is repeatedly shaping Israel’s conduct in its own capital, in the most historic areas. The flag march story is just a symptom. It was preceded by the “stairs” in front of Damascus Gate, the closure of the Temple Mount to Jewish visitors for 19 days, and particularly long days of insecurity in the areas near the city’s seam line and in Jewish population clusters adjacent to Arab population centers. Jews and Arabs were exposed to harm, attacks, and sometimes even attempted lynches at each other’s hands, and like in Lod and Acre and in the Negev, the long arm of the law was too short in Jerusalem.

    Now, at this time of ungovernability, a new guy has shown up in the neighborhood. Omer Bar-Lev, the son of former IDF Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev, and himself a former commander of the elite Sayeret Matkal Unit. Bar-Lev Jr. has been appointed Public Security Minister, a post his father also held, and he has a completely different agenda for Jerusalem than the one to which we’ve been accustomed for so many years. It’s no longer “unified Jerusalem” or “forever.” The opposite. For years, Bar-Lev has been expressing in posts and articles he has published a totally different view about Jerusalem. As far away from former Prime Minister Netanyahu’s as could be. Much closer to those of former Prime Minister Olmert.

    The new public security minister effectively supports dividing Jerusalem, even if he doesn’t define it that way. “Don’t let them confuse you,” Bar-Lev wrote in a forgotten post from 2014. “It wasn’t Beit Hanina or Silwan that we dreamt about for 2,000 years of exile. If the Palestinians want to build their capital there – there isn’t and we shouldn’t have a problem with it.”

    The way he sees it, the insistence on including some 350,000 Palestinians within the municipal borders of Jerusalem is “a major mistake.” A mistake, he says, “whose base lies in a mistaken technical decision by a few generals who drew the borders of the city over 50 years ago and did not see what the future would bring.”

    Bar-Lev thinks that “the artificial link of these neighborhoods [the Shuefat refugee camp and Kafr Aqab] to Jerusalem should be disconnected … and we should separate from 300,000 Palestinians who hold Israeli residency cards and could become Israeli citizens tomorrow. We, and apparently they, have no interest in that.”

    If you want to know what Bar-Lev’s approach to the capital of Israel will be, go back to October 2014, when Israel was in the midst of a wave of violence and Palestinian-Hamas bloodshed very similar to the one that exists in Jerusalem today. Bar-Lev sketched out a two-stage plan: First, “the most elementary,” he called it, “aggressive and uncompromising handling of rioters and terrorists;” “an official declaration that Israel has no intentions to make changes to the status quo on the Temple Mount” (which Netanyahu indeed did); and “an immediate stop to right-wing groups taking over homes in Arab neighborhoods and living in them.” The effects of this policy are far-reaching, even today: government intervention and effective freeze on Jewish settlement in places like the City of David/Silwan, the Muslim Quarter, or Shimon HaTzadik.

    For the second stage, Bar-Lev recommended (and repeated the recommendation two years later) bidding farewell to most residents of east Jerusalem, “updating the city’s municipal borders, and moving neighborhoods like Shuefat and Kafr Aqab to the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority in Area A or B, and later on as part of a Palestinian state, if and when one is established alongside Israel…”

    This view of Bar-Lev’s, at least when it comes to the northern neighborhoods of Jerusalem that lie beyond the security barrier – which are home to about 150,000 people – is in line with similar views expressed in recent years by new-old Jerusalem Affairs Minister Zeev Elkin, Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar, and for a time, even Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. These three talked about removing these neighborhoods from the municipal borders of Jerusalem — albeit by establishing a separate Israeli municipal authority, rather than the PA, that would be responsible for them — but they too thought there was no justification to hold that section of Jerusalem beyond the security fence that had long since become a neglected no-man’s land, replete with crime and lawlessness.

    Last April, immediately after the extremist group Lehava held a march across Jerusalem, Bar-Lev spoke in more “Shabtai-esque” language, calling them a terrorist group, and “the military arm of [MK Itamar] Ben-Gvir” and said they were “not very different from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, because terrorism is terrorism.” Bar-Lev demanded that they be treated “just like we treat Arab rioters,” and even demanded that the government be “more stringent toward Jewish rioters who are Israeli citizens than toward Arabs in east Jerusalem.”
    This line of Bar-Lev’s meets the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Jerusalem at one of its most challenging points. Bar-Lev, who for years has opposed any change to the status quo on the Temple Mount, will discover that the reality there is not the one he aspired to: on one hand, there have been a series of major changes that have increased the Muslim side on the Mount, while on the other many more Jews are visiting and even holding “non-provocative” prayers, with the agreement of the police. Will Bar-Lev change that?

    Recent events have cut off a process of Israelization that had been taking place among many east Jerusalem residents: government investment and huge sums of money poured into the east of the city to reduce discrepancies and improve infrastructure and services (government resolution 3790); the COVID crisis, which created close cooperation with the Israeli authorities; many more schools adopting Israeli school curricula, both for elementary students and higher grades; a somewhat eased process of applying for Israeli citizenship, which many east Jerusalem residents are officially eligible for, and more.

    Bar-Lev will ask that all these processes be reexamined, but his first test will be what is expected of any police force – restoring law and order to the “Wild East” of Jerusalem, where Hamas is a key player.

    https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-bar-lev-line/

  5. This is a terrific article. I hope he follows up with an article on what Israel must to protect protect Israel as the state of the Jews.
    How can Israel outlaw antizionist not only from the Knesset but also from the right to vote.
    How can Israel outlaw Palestinian propaganda which seeks to challenge our narrative with their contrived narrative?
    How can Israel ban the celebration of the Naqba?
    How can Israel, enforce a different curriculum in the Arab schools which teaches the Israel narrative rather than the Arab narrative?

    In short how can we defend ourselves?

    Israelis think that democracy prevents us legislating so.