the Jewish State - Avnery's view

I always read what Uri Avnery writes. This remarkable Israeli was around when the British were still in Palestine. He was raised on a kibbutz and served in the Knesset. He is well qualified to speak with knowledge of Israel and does so in regular "letters" that he writes.

In the letter that I reproduce below is historical information necessary for an understanding of the meaning of the phrase "the Jewish state". I learned several things I did not know and I hope you will too.

Uri Avnery
June 18, 2011
   Deny! Deny!

I AM fed up with all this nonsense about recognizing Israel as the
“Jewish State”.

It is based on a collection of hollow phrases and vague definitions,
devoid of any real content. It serves many different purposes, almost
all of them malign.

Binyamin Netanyahu uses it as a trick to obstruct the establishment of
the Palestinian state. This week he declared that the conflict just has
no solution. Why? Because the Palestinians do not agree to recognize
etc. etc.

Four rightist Members of the Knesset have just submitted a bill
empowering the government to refuse to register new NGOs and to dissolve
existing ones if they “deny the Jewish character of the state”.

This new bill is only one of a series designed to curtail the civil
rights of Arab citizens, as well as those of leftists.

If the late Dr. Samuel Johnson were living in present-day Israel, he
would phrase his famous dictum about patriotism differently:
“Recognition of the Jewish Character of the state is the last refuge of
a scoundrel.”


IN ISRAELI parlance, denying the “Jewish Character” of the state is
tantamount to the worst of all political felonies: to claim that Israel
is a “State of all its Citizens”.

To a foreigner, this may sound a bit weird. In a democracy, the state
clearly belongs to all its citizens. Mention this in the United States,
and you are stating the obvious. Mention this in Israel, and you are
treading dangerously close to treason. (So much for our much-vaunted
“common” values”.)

As a matter of fact, Israel is indeed a state of all its citizens. All
adult Israeli citizens – and only they – have the right to vote for the
Knesset. The Knesset appoints the government and determines the laws. It
has enacted many laws declaring that Israel is a “Jewish and democratic
state”. In ten or in a hundred years, the Knesset could hoist the flag
of Catholicism, Buddhism or Islam. In a democracy, it is the citizens
who are sovereign, not a verbal formula.


WHAT FORMULA? - one may well ask.

The courts favor the words “Jewish and democratic state”. But that is
far from being the only definition around.

The most widely used is just “Jewish State”. But that is not enough for
Netanyahu and Co., who speak about “the nation-state of the Jewish
people”, which has a nice 19th century ring. The “state of the Jewish
people” is also quite popular.

The one thing that all these brand-names have in common is that they are
perfectly imprecise. What does “Jewish” mean? A nationality, a religion,
a tribe? Who are the “Jewish people”? Or, even more vague, the “Jewish
nation”? Does this include the Congressmen who enact the laws of the
United States? Or the cohorts of Jews who are in charge of US Middle
East policy? Which country does the Jewish ambassador of the UK in Tel
Aviv represent?

The courts have been wrestling with the question: where is the border
between “Jewish” and “democratic”? What does “democratic” mean in this
context? Can a “Jewish” state really be “democratic”, or, for that
matter, can a “democratic” state really be “Jewish”? All the answers
given by learned judges and renowned professors are contrived, or, as we
say in Hebrew, they “stand on chickens’ legs”.


LETS GO back to the beginning: the book written in German by Theodor
Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, and published in 1896.  He called
it “Der Judenstaat”.

Unfortunately, this is a typical German word that is untranslatable. It
is generally rendered in English as “The Jewish State” or “The State of
the Jews”. Both are quite false. The nearest approximation would be “The
Jewstate”.

If this sounds slightly anti-Semitic, this is not by accident. It may
come as a shock to many, but the word was not invented by Herzl.  It was
first used by a Prussian nobleman with an impressive name - Friedrich
August Ludwig von der Marwitz, - who died 23 years before Herzl was even
born. He was a dedicated anti-Semite long before another German invented
the term “anti-Semitism” as an expression of the healthy German spirit.

Marwitz, an ultra-conservative general, objected to the liberal reforms
proposed at the time. In 1811 he warned that these reforms would turn
Prussia into a “Judenstaat”, a Jewstate. He did not mean that Jews were
about to become a majority in Prussia, God forbid, but that moneylenders
and other shady Jewish dealers would corrupt the character of the
country and wipe out the good old Prussian virtues.

Herzl himself did not dream of a state that belongs to all the Jews in
the world. Quite the contrary - his vision was that all real Jews would
go to the Judenstaat (whether in Argentina or Palestine, he had not yet
decided). They – and only they - would thenceforth remain “Jews”. All
the others would become assimilated in their host nations and cease
altogether to be Jews.

Far, far indeed from the notion of a “nation-state of the Jewish people”
as envisioned by many of today’s Zionists, including those millions who
do not dream of immigrating to Israel.


WHEN I was a boy, I took part in dozens of demonstrations against the
British government of Palestine. In all of them, we chanted in unison
“Free immigration! Hebrew State!” I don’t remember a single
demonstration with the slogan “Jewish State”.

That was quite natural. Without anyone decreeing it, we made a clear
distinction between us Hebrew-speaking people in Palestine and the Jews
in the Diaspora. Some of us turned this into an ideology, but for most
people it was just a natural expression of reality: Hebrew agriculture
and Jewish tradition, Hebrew underground and Jewish Religion, Hebrew
kibbutz and Jewish Shtetl. Hebrew Yishuv (the new community in the
country) and Jewish Diaspora. To be called a “Diaspora Jew” was the
ultimate insult.

For us this was not anti-Zionist by any means. Quite the contrary:
Zionism wanted to create an old-new nation in Eretz Israel (as Palestine
is called in Hebrew), and this nation was of course quite distinct from
the Jews elsewhere. It was only the Holocaust, with its huge emotional
impact, which changed the verbal rules.

So how did the formula “Jewish State” creep in? In 1917, in the middle
of World War I, the British government issued the so-called Balfour
Declaration, which proclaimed that “His Majesty’s Government views with
favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish
people…”

Every word was carefully chosen, after months of negotiations with
Zionist leaders. One of the main British objects was to win American and
Russian Jews for the Allied cause. Revolutionary Russia was about to get
out of the war, and the entry of isolationist America was essential.

(By the way, the British rejected the words “the turning of Palestine
into a national home for the Jewish people”, insisting on “in Palestine”
– thus foreshadowing the partition of the country.)


IN 1947 the UN did decide to partition Palestine between its Arab and
Jewish populations. This said nothing about the character of the two
future states – it just used the current definitions of the two warring
parties. About 40% of the population in the territory allocated to the
“Jewish” state was Arab.

The advocates of the “Jewish state” make much of the sentence in the
“Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel” (generally
called the “Declaration of Independence”) which indeed includes the
words “Jewish State”. After quoting the UN resolution which called for a
Jewish and an Arab state, the declaration continues: “Accordingly we …
on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General
Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz
Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”

This sentence says nothing at all about the character of the new state,
and the context is purely formal.

One of the paragraphs of the declaration (in its original Hebrew
version) speaks about the “Hebrew people”: “We extend our hands to all
neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good
neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and
mutual help with the independent Hebrew people in its land.” This
sentence is blatantly falsified in the official English translation,
which changed the last words into “the sovereign Jewish people settled
in its own land.”

As a matter of fact, it would have been quite impossible to reach
agreement on any ideological formula, since the declaration was signed
by the leaders of all factions, from the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox to
the Moscow-oriented Communist Party.


ANY TALK about the Jewish State leads inevitably to the question: What
are the Jews – a nation or a religion?

Official Israeli doctrine says that “Jewish” is both a national and a
religious definition. The Jewish collective, unlike any other, is both
national and religious. With us, nation and religion are one and the same.

The only door of entry to this collective is religious. There is no
national door.

Hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Russian immigrants have come to
Israel under the Law of Return with their Jewish relatives. This law is
very broad. In order to attract the Jews, it allows even distant
non-Jewish relatives to come with them, including the spouse of the
grandchild of a Jew. Many of these non-Jews want to be Jews in order to
be considered full Israelis, but have tried in vain to be accepted.
Under Israeli law, a Jew is a person “born to a Jewish mother or
converted, who has not adopted another religion”. This is a purely
religious definition. Jewish religious law says that for this purpose,
only the mother, not the father, counts.

It is extremely difficult to be converted in Israel. The rabbis demand
that the convert fulfill all 613 commandments of the Jewish religion –
which only very few recognized Israelis do. But one cannot become an
official member of the stipulated Jewish “nation” by any other door. One
becomes a part of the American nation by accepting US citizenship.
Nothing like that exists here.

We have an ongoing battle about this in Israel. Some of us want Israel
to be an Israeli state, belonging to the Israeli people, indeed a “State
of all its Citizens”. Some want to impose on us the religious law
supposedly fixed by God for all times on Mount Sinai some 3200 years
ago, and abolish all contrary laws of the democratically elected
Knesset. Many don’t want any change at all.

But how, in God’s name (sorry), does this concern the Palestinians? Or
the Icelanders, for that matter?


THE DEMAND that the Palestinians recognize Israel as “the Jewish State”
or as “the Nation-State of the Jewish people” is preposterous.

As the British would put it, it’s none of their bloody business. It
would be tantamount to an intervention in the internal affairs of
another country.

But a friend of mine has suggested a simple way out: the Knesset can
simply resolve to change the name of the state into something like “The
Jewish Republic of Israel”, so that any peace agreement between Israel
and the Arab State of Palestine will automatically include the demanded
recognition.

This would also bring Israel into line with the state it most resembles:
“The Islamic Republic of Pakistan”, which came into being almost at the
same time, after the partition of India, after a gruesome mutual
massacre, after the creation of a huge refugee problem and with a
perpetual border war in Kashmir. And the nuclear bomb, of course.

Many Israelis would be shocked by the comparison. What, us? Similar to a
theocratic state?  Are we getting closer to the Pakistani model and
further from the American one?

What the hell, let’s simply deny it!

the capture of Israel by the national-religious

The founders of Israel were not religious, in fact looked down upon religious Jews and thought that religion was on the way out.

So how did it come to pass that today the settlers in the occupied territories are for the most part fanatically religious and the talk is of holy places and a God-given right to the land?

To find out, read the excerpt below from an article, Who is Annexing Whom? by Israeli Uri Avnery, an always reliable source of solid information on Israel, a careful writer who is at pains to define the terms he uses and someone who's been there since the beginning.

Read on to learn about the fanaticism that the U.S. Congress falls all over itself to please.

Avnery writes...

Some weeks ago, I wrote that the problem may not be the annexation of the West Bank by Israel, but the annexation of Israel by the West Bank settlers.

Some readers reacted with a chuckle. It looked like a humorous aside.

It was not.

The time has come to examine this process seriously: Is Israel falling victim to a hostile takeover by the settlers?

---

First of all, the term “settlers” itself must be examined.

Formally, there is no question. The settlers are Israelis living beyond the 1967 border, the Green Line. (“Green” in this case has no ideological connotation. This just happened to be the color chosen to distinguish the line on the maps.)

Numbers are inflated or deflated according to propaganda needs. But it can be assumed that there are about 300,000 settlers in the West Bank and an additional 200,000 or so in East Jerusalem. Israelis usually don’t call the Jerusalemites “settlers,” putting them into a different category. But, of course, settlers they are.

But when we speak of Settlers in the political context, we speak of a much bigger community.

True, not all settlers are Settlers. Many people in the West Bank settlements went there without any ideological motive, just because they could build their dream villas for practically nothing, with a picturesque view of Arab minarets to boot. It is these the Settler Council chairman, Danny Dayan, meant, when, in a (recently leaked) secret conversation with a U.S. diplomat, he conceded that they could easily be persuaded to return to Israel if the money were right.

However, all these people have an interest in the status quo, and therefore will support the real Settlers in the political fight. As the Jewish proverb goes, if you start fulfilling a commandment for the wrong reasons, you will end up fulfilling it for the right ones.

---

But the camp of the “settlers” is much, much bigger.

The entire so-called “national religious” movement is in total support of the settlers, their ideology, and their aims. And no wonder—the settlement enterprise sprung from its loins.

This must be explained. The “national religious” were originally a tiny splinter of religious Jewry. The big Orthodox camp saw in Zionism an aberration and heinous sin. Since God had exiled the Jews from His land because of their sins, only He—through His Messiah—had the right to bring them back. The Zionists thus position themselves above God and prevent the coming of the Messiah. For the Orthodox, the Zionist idea of a secular Jewish “nation” still is an abomination.

However, a few religious Jews did join the nascent Zionist movement. They remained a curiosity. The Zionists held the Jewish religion in contempt, like everything else belonging to the Jewish Diaspora (galut—exile, a derogatory term in Zionist parlance). Children who (like myself) were brought up in Zionist schools in Palestine before the Holocaust were taught to look down with pity on people who were “still” religious.

This also colored our attitude toward the religious Zionists. The real work of building our future “Hebrew State” (we never spoke about a “Jewish State”) was done by socialist atheists. The kibbutzim and moshavim, communal and cooperative villages, as well as the “pioneer” youth movements, which were the foundation of the whole enterprise, were mostly Tolstoyan socialist, some of them even Marxist. The few that were religious were considered marginal.

At that time, in the ’30s and ’40s, few young people wore a kippah in public. I don’t remember a single member of the Irgun, the clandestine military (“terrorist”) organization to which I belonged, wearing a kippah—though there were quite a number of religious members. They preferred a less conspicuous cap or beret.

The national-religious party (originally called Mizrahi—Eastern) played a minor role in Zionist politics. It was decidedly moderate in national affairs. In the historic confrontations between the “activist” David Ben-Gurion and the “moderate” Moshe Sharett in the ’50s, they almost always sided with Sharett, driving Ben-Gurion up the wall.

Nobody paid much attention, however, to what was happening under the surface—in the national-religious youth movement, Bnei Akiva, and their Yeshivot. There, out of sight of the general public, a dangerous cocktail of ultra-nationalist Zionism and an aggressive tribal “messianic” religion was being brewed.

---

The astounding victory of the Israeli army in the 1967 Six-Day War, after three weeks of extreme anxiety, marked a turning point for this movement.

Here was everything they had dreamed of: a God-given miracle, the heartland of historical Eretz Israel (alias the West Bank) occupied, “The Temple Mount is in our hands!” as one general breathlessly reported.

As if somebody had drawn a cork, the national-religious youth movement escaped its bottle and became a national force. They created Gush Emunim (“Bloc of the Faithful”), the center of the dynamic settlement enterprise in the newly “liberated territories.”

This must be well understood: for the national-religious camp, 1967 was also a moment of liberation within the Zionist camp. As the Bible (Psalm 117) prophesied: “The stone the builders despised has become the cornerstone.” The despised national-religious youth movement and kibbutzim suddenly jumped to center stage.

While the old socialist kibbutz movement was dying of ideological exhaustion, its members becoming rich by selling agricultural land to real-estate sharks, the national religious sprang up in full ideological vigor, imbued with spiritual and national fervor, preaching a pagan Jewish creed of holy places, holy stones, and holy tombs, mixed with the conviction that the whole country belongs to the Jews and that “foreigners” (meaning the Palestinians, who have lived here for at least 1,300, if not 5,000 years) should be kicked out.

---

Most of today’s Israelis were born or immigrated after 1967. The occupation state is the only reality they know. The settlers’ creed looks to them like self-evident truth. Polls show a growing number of young Israelis for whom democracy and human rights are empty phrases. A Jewish state means a state that belongs to the Jews and to the Jews only; nobody else has any business to be here.

This climate has created a political scene dominated by a set of right-wing parties, from Avigdor Lieberman’s racists to the outright fascist followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane—all of them totally subservient to the settlers.

If it is true that the U.S. Congress is controlled by the Israel lobby, then this lobby is controlled by the Israeli government, which is controlled by the settlers. (Like the joke about the dictator who said: The world is afraid of our country; the country is afraid of me; I am afraid of my wife; my wife is afraid of a mouse. So who rules the world?)

So the settlers can do whatever they want: build new settlements and enlarge existing ones, ignore the Supreme Court, give orders to the Knesset and the government, attack their “neighbors” whenever they like, kill Arab children who throw stones, uproot olive groves, burn mosques. And their power is growing by leaps and bounds.

---

The takeover of a civilized country by hardier border fighters is by no means extraordinary. On the contrary, it is a frequent historical phenomenon. The historian Arnold Toynbee provided a long list.

Germany was for a long time dominated by the Ostmark (“Eastern marches”), which became Austria. The culturally advanced German heartland fell under the sway of the more primitive but hardier Prussians, whose homeland was not a part of Germany at all. The Russian Empire was formed by Moscow, originally a primitive town on the fringes.

The rule seems to be that when the people of a civilized country become spoiled by culture and riches, a hardier, less pampered, and more primitive race on the fringes takes over, as Greece was taken over by the Romans, and Rome by the barbarians.

This can happen to us. But it need not. Israeli secular democracy still has a lot of strength in it. The settlements can still be removed. (In a future article, I shall try to show how.) The religious Right can still be repulsed. The occupation, which is the mother of all evil, can still be terminated.

But for that we have to recognize the danger—and do something about it.