Jos
Rookie
- Feb 6, 2010
- 7,412
- 757
- 0
- Banned
- #1
The Jewish State in Question : The New YorkerJodi Rudoren writes in todays Times that the great sticking point for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations is Benjamin Netanyahus demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, or as the nation-state of the Jewish peoplesomething along these lines. Rudoren asks, Can Israel preserve its identity as a Jewish democratic state while also providing equal rights and opportunities to citizens of other faiths and backgrounds? With a largely secular population, who interprets Jewish law and custom for public institutions and public spaces? Is Judaism a religion, an ethnicity or both?
Israel is obviously the state of the Jewish people, in the sense that vanguard Jewish groups in Eastern Europe dreamed of a Hebrew revolution, which launched the Zionist colonial project, which engendered a Jewish national home in Mandate Palestine, which earned international backing to organize a state after the Holocausta state that became a place of refuge for Jews from Europe and Arab countriesthat is, a state with a large Jewish majority whose binding tie (to bring things back to Zionisms DNA) is the spoken Hebrew language.
Unfortunately, however, Netanyahu cannot, or will not, simply leave things there. For the phrase Jewish state also has a third meaning, with legal ramifications dear to the heart of Israeli rightists (including old Labor Zionists in love with the saga of the settler state); laws that derive from the historical application (some would say misapplication) of neo-Zionist ideas and Ben Gurions rash compromises with rabbinical forces over two generations ago; laws that have left Israel a seriously compromised democracy.
This is not the place to go into all of them. Suffice it to say that this Jewish state allocates public land (over ninety per cent of it) almost exclusively to certified Jews, creates immigration laws to bestow citizenship on certified Jews, empowers the Jewish Agency to advance the well-being of certified Jews, lacks civil marriage and appoints rabbis to marry certified Jews only to one another, founded an Orthodox educational system to produce certified Jews (more than half of Jewish first-graders in Jerusalem attend these), assumes custodianship of a sacred capital for the worlds certified Jewsindeed, this Jewish state presumes to certify Jews in the first place. We are not now talking about a state that recognizes the Passover holiday or provides refuge for victims of anti-Semitic persecution (as the U.S. and many other Western democracies do, by the way). In Israel, having J-positive blood is a serious material advantage.
Such a state must be anathema to Palestinian leaders, who cannot but notice that a fifth (soon, a quarter) of Israeli citizens are Palestinian in origin, and thus are materially, legally disadvantaged by birth: they can recognize Israel but cannot possibly accept this state. But then, it is anathema also to Israeli Jews with ordinary democratic instincts, irrespective of how Palestinians feel about it.
Likud politicians warn that Israelis must fight to preserve a Jewish state in the face of claims that Israel should be a state of its citizens. But a democratic state, by definition, is a state of its citizens. It can only be a state of its citizens. Which is not to say that a state of its citizens cannot have a Jewish character. It can be a distinctive republica Hebrew republic, as Ive called itwhose citizens speak a dominant language inflected by Jewish nuances, poetic allusions to classical Jewish texts and liturgy, and the like. This is quite different from a state that purports to represent, or embody privileges in law for, members of a notional world people.
Which brings us to the last matter Rudoren deals with, the Israeli Supreme Courts recent, weird decision to reject a petition by various distinguished Israelis to recognize Israeli as a nationality. Israels Registry of Populations recognizes over a hundred nationalities, from Druze to Circassian, and recognizes Jews. But Israeli is not among Israels official nationalities. (Israelis from Palestinian families are Arabs.) In effect, the court is telling Israeli citizens that naturalization to a distinctly Israeli nation, if not impossible, is beside the point. It underlines how warped by theocracy the state has become in the absence of a democratic constitution, and in the presence of an occupation justified by messianic notions of peoplehood.
Netanyahu wants Israel recognized as a Jewish state. Strangely, Israel is perhaps the only country in the world that doesnt recognize itself.
Israeli is not among Israels official nationalities = no such thing as an Israeli?