We do not have to account to anybody, we are not to sit for anybody’s examination and nobody is old enough to call on us to answer. We came before them and will leave after them. We are what we are, we are good for ourselves, we will not change, nor do we want to. – Ze’ev Jabotinsky
Tzipi Livni, who recently accepted the mantle of opposition leader, said that “the next election will be a referendum on the Declaration of Independence.”
Asked if she has come up with a campaign slogan yet, she pulls a scroll of the 1948 declaration from her desk and proceeds to unroll it. “This is the gist of it all,” she says. “Who is for the Declaration of Independence and who is against it? If you’re for it, you’re with us. And I believe that the vast majority of Israelis are for it.”
I hadn’t noticed Benjamin Netanyahu or Naftali Bennett, or even Moshe Feiglin, being opposed to the Declaration of Independence. But Livni asserts that the Nation-State Law which Netanyahu and those to his right supported, “jeopardizes Israel’s democratic character.” This is apparently because it does not contain a clauseguaranteeing “equality for all its citizens.”
The Right correctly points out that, at least in the view of the Supreme Court, equality and democracy are guaranteed by other Basic Laws, and there is nothing in this one that contradicts the Declaration of Independence. But the Right does agree with Livni that the Nation-State Law will be central to the next election. Writing in Israel Hayom, Haim Shine says,
…the next election (which will take place in 2019) will be about Israel’s image for the next 70 years, particularly the basic question of whether Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people or a state of all its citizens, or more precisely – all its ethnicities? Is Israel a Jewish state, the fulfillment of a 2,000-year-old vision, or just another country that lies on the Mediterranean?
The members of the Joint [Arab] List have made it clear that their objection to the Nation-State Law is that they do not want a state that is Jewish in any sense. They do not want a Jewish majority – they support a right of return for Arab “refugees” – and they object to the Jewish symbols of the state (the flag, the state emblem, and the national anthem). Livni makes it a point to distinguish her objection to the law from theirs, saying “I will stand with [the Arab MKs] on equality, but I can’t stand with them on the issue of national identity.”
Livni has carved out a path that is too narrow to stand on. On the left, there is the crevasse of the anti-Zionist position of the Arab members of the Knesset. On the right, her disagreement with Netanyahu becomes too small to make a difference. She objects to the role of the Haredi parties in government and its effect on Israeli life, but there is nothing in the Nation-State Law that affects their influence one way or the other. Indeed, in 2014, Livni was in part responsible for the dissolution of the only coalition government in Israel’s history that did not include a religious party, after she broke ranks with Netanyahu over an earlier version of the Nation-State Law!
The opponents of the Nation-State Law, like Livni, who wish to retain the label “Zionist” are stuck, because there is very little in it to rationally object to. This is why they tend to make a fuss about what is not in it. One example is the clause that asserts that “The state shall act within the Diaspora to strengthen the affinity between the state and members of the Jewish people.” The italicized phrase was added to a draft version of the law as a result of pressure from the Haredi parties, because they feared that otherwise the law could be used by a liberal Supreme Court to force the state to recognize non-Orthodox forms of Judaism in Israel. But this wording does not prevent such recognition; it simply does not require it.
Similarly, supporters of LGBT rights would like a clause that could be used to overturn the ruling that the state will not pay for surrogates for gay male couples that wish to have children. They will not find such a clause in this law, but it is almost certain that the surrogacy ruling will either be changed by the Knesset or be voided by the Supreme Court on the basis of other Basic Laws.
Some have noted that while the law has few practical consequences – although it negates the dream of a binational state that was proposed in recent years by various groups of Arab citizens of Israel – the liberal Jewish opposition to it has nevertheless been quite harsh, even among those, like Tzipi Livni, who are adamant about their Zionism. And here I want to propose a possible explanation for this phenomenon.
Opposition to the law is yet another example of the inability of some Jewish Israelis to get past the “galut mentality.” In other words, it is correlated with the degree to which a Jew worries about what the goyim will think.
Today in Western Europe and liberal/progressive circles in the US, nationalism and ethnic particularism are anathema. Nationalist movements are often labeled racist or fascist. National borders are considered unfair limitations on the human spirit. The natural desire of ethnic and religious groups to live together is suppressed in favor of diversity, even if this results in more interpersonal conflict. Actions to increase ethnic homogeneity are labeled “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid.” Israel’s concern to maintain its Jewish majority and culture, which are expressed by limitations on family reunification for residents of the PA areas and Arab citizens of Israel, or by attempts to deport illegal African migrants, are condemned outside of the country as racist.
Most Israelis, however, understand that the continued existence of the Jewish state depends on maintaining a Jewish majority. And they further understand why a Jewish state is a necessity for the survival of the Jewish people in a frankly antisemitic world. This is Zionism 101.
The problem for some is that though they pay lip service to the idea of Israel as a Jewish state, it upsets them when they encounter the condemnation of the anti-Zionist world. So they come up with reasons to oppose the Nation-State Law and other overt expressions of Zionism. But their real motivation is embarrassment.
They want to be liked in Western Europe and America. They want to be modern, progressive, secular, humanistic, and so on. They don’t want to be the wrong kind of Jews, the ghetto Jews. But ironically, their obsequious choice to not stand up for their people marks them as precisely that.
Jabotinsky didn’t say this, but I think he would have agreed: you can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but you can’t (easily) take the ghetto out of the Jew.
@ Edgar G.:
You seem not to know that … “The pot calling the kettle black” means That ONE is the SAME as the other. Which would mean, that those apartheid countries accusing Israel would be just as bad as Israel….which is totally false as false can be.
A rotten comparison, and not a scintilla near the truth, which is the exact opposite of your pot and kettle example. You can throw them both out into the garbage.
@ dreuveni:
I don’t know who you wanted to point this out to. If you wanted to point it out to our Arab neighbours or others the only way would have been to write to one of THEIR newspapers. You didn’t need to get OUR reaction, what good did it do you, except maybe to instruct you a little.
Posting here, was a wasted effort for your purported intention. if it was.
I was not and am not amused by your sudden reverse turn..
Thanks, guys. I just wanted to point out that when our neighbors and others call Israel an apartheid state, it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. This is especially true of South Africa where they actually know what apartheid is all about, although they should know better than to say that.
Appears some people do not know what Apartheid actually is. Apartheid is the separation of races.
In Israel all peoples share public facilities such as hospitals, government offices, shopping centers, beaches etc. All individuals are free to practice their religion, have freedom of speech and human rights. All minorities can run for office and vote. This is guaranteed by the 1992 Basic Law on Human Rights and Dignity.
I suppose a more or less unofficial form of apartheid was in place in much of the USA for a long time. But my childhood experiences were just the opposite of that.
Along with my father and mother, I lived in an apartment in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chiago’s south side, where most of the black population lived in the late 1930s and early 1940s. There was a black kid I played with, whom everybody, including him and me, called “Junior”. As a matter of fact, Junior may well have saved my then-6-year-old life from rabies.
The two of us were playing in a pile of abandoned junk in an otherwise empty lot on 63rd Street. Our toy that day was a small portable electric oven. But when I opened it, something jumped out and bit me, on my leg, if memory serves me after 78 years.
Junior, a quick-thinking kid, grabbed my arm and took me back to our apartment a few blocks away. When we got to my parents’ apartment, I told my mother that “a birdie bit me”. But Junior then told her “it wasn’t a birdie. It was a rat that bit him.”
That piece of information set into motion some 13 trips to a public contagious disease facility on Chicago’s West side, for anti-rabies inoculations with the largest needles I have ever encountered, administered to me at a spot less than one inch above my navel.
Over the long decades of my life, I never have forgotten Junior, my kid-hood friend from the streets of Southside Chicago in 1940. Because his sharp and clear thinking may well have saved my life.
@ dreuveni:
Are you “joking” or just plain whatever-you-are…..I don’t want to put it in words. Israel is NO apartheid State, If you think this you should talk to a few older black Sth Africans, or “mixed race” …. THEY’LL tel you what apartheid is and you’ll learn something at the same time, one of which will be, that you’ll never refer to Israel as an apartheid State again.
And they may hinder Jews from following their faith but they are still practicing Jews and believe in what Jews believe in. …what’ll the Arabs do about it…..uncircumcise them or something……Pah….!! Jordan is the only State where Jews are forbidden to live.
Even in Egypt, there are still a few Jews ..about a dozen left, but all old and passing away. There are even in Syri about 20, and a few hundred in Lebanon. About 18-20,000 in Turkey, and several hundreds in all the Arab nations along the southern Mediterranean coast right up to exit at Gibralter.
Let’s get both feet back on the carpet: Israel is actually an apartheid state no less that any of its neighbors. None of the Arab states in the ME allow Jews to follow their faith and the limitations on Christians, Hindus or any other religions is overwhelming. So Israel wants to be the state of the Jews? OK! Go for it!!
This here Jew, Arnold Harris, never was part of anybody’s ghetto. And at an early age, I learned to fight back whenever anybody made the mistake of cornering me.
The single most significant day of my 84-year life to that date was an afternoon in October 1948, when I was a 14-year-old enrolled in a woodworking shop class populated by tough-guys, led apparently by a hard-case Jew-baiter, Bob, whose last name by now has fallen out of my memory, but whom I clearly remember being two or three years older than me. He was backed up by a couple of Greek-Americans, Solon (Sol) and his older brother Al.
I was walking through the aisles of machinery and student desks carrying in one hand a piece of woodwork I had been assigned to finish, and in my other hand, a sarpenter’s hammer with a 12-inch long handle. Waiting for me was Bob, who was blocking the aisle and smiling down at me. I tried dodging him around his right-hand side, from which he blocked me. Then his left side from which he also blocked me. We made three or four body shifts, all the time with this bastard sneering down at me.
What happened next, was reported to me by a couple of neutral-type fellow students, who told me that I had slugged smiling Bob with the claw hammer, on the his cheekbone on the left side of his face, and that I had drawn blood. Bob was no longer smiling, even though he had knocked me out after I whacked him with my hammer. Sol and Al were threatening me with this or that kind of violence.
The upshot of all of the above was interesting. I never again encountered smirking Bob in any of the hallways of that high school. My mom and dad had to pay to have a local medical clinic put some stitches in his face. My mom counseled me to stay away from that kind of trouble. My father, who had been a US Army soldier in the combat zones of Northern France in 1917-1918, never ever told me to avoid defending myself.
Sol and Al joined the Chicago Police department, where they ingloriously joined a squad of crooked cops where were providing on the spot cover for a particular Chicago burglar, Richie Morrison, who spilled the beans to to a new Chicago police chief, leading to the arrest of Sol and Al, and all the other burglars in blue. I don’t recall that they served any jail time, if at all, but it was the permanent lifelong scars on their careers. All of you can check this out online, under reference to the Chicago Summerdale Police Station scandal.
The most notable aspect of my life in that Chicago North Side high school thereafter was just this: Whenever and wherever I walked in thos long halls, nobody approaching me would come closer to me than about 48 inches. It didn’t take me long to figure out that 48 inches was more or less than the length of a 14-year-old boy’s arm with a carpenter’s hammer extending out from that arm.
I think I related the true story cited above to the late Rav Meir Kahane, for whose Kach movement I did considerable work a number of years ago. He was pleased almost as much as I have been every time I think about that incident of violence 70 years ago, the memory of which ai will carry to the end of my life, as the Day of the Hammer.