EDITOR: Israeli social protest spreads, but what can it lead to?
As the tent cities grow in Israel, so it seems does the confusion.After all, isn’t Israel an economic miracle, with a growth rate of 4.5% at the time many countries are facing frozen economies? So, if all is so well, why is it is bad, as the protest movement clearly proves?
Israel, one of the smallest countries on earth (though we have no idea how small, as its boundaries have never been agreed, and they keep changing…) is also the world’s FOURTH arms dealer. Are you a fan of arms dealing? I hope not. Israel is making its wealth from death and destruction, not just in the middle east.
Many observers of Israel’s economics also seem to overlook the many decades of US support for Israel – both the highest per capita, and also the highest over the last four decades. Why is the US supporting one of the world’s richest countries, when it faces problems itself? Ask yourself that.
Bearing mind it is such a rich country, the current unrest proves clearly that this wealth is going only to the 18 richest families in Israel, and that the rest of the population is getting poorer. Do you also support this?
Last but not least – Israel is controlling some six million Palestinians, all living under its military control, but more importantly, its economic control. This occupied population is forced to be the captive market of Israeli goods, and is the basis of its economic growth. Is this NOT a war economy?
The many hundreds of thousands in Israel who are in the streets and tent cities, have not, to date, combined their protest with a deeper protest – against the occupation and its iniquities. This may well be because they are benefiting, or think they may be benefiting, from the occupation and the war economy producing the mass of armaments on sale. Read Abir Kopti below to fully realise what this protest means for Palestinians.
As long as this is their outlook, they will remain insignificant, and their protest will not be really universal, and will not turn into political change.
stars and bombs: In Gaza
Aug 5 2011
We are watching the sky, sleeping on the roof to escape the heat. I flatter the clouds’ beauty and am watching sporadic shooting stars when the first F-16 appeared from the direction of the sea. No sound, just a blinking red light quite high up. Three more follow. Their roar slowly becomes audible and they drop a couple of flares.
We trace their path, above us, chilling. The roar is normal, F-16s are normal, and reading in the news the next day that some part of Gaza was bombed is normal. They continue eastward and a bombing seems imminent. It is. A thick cloud of black smoke blots the dim lights of houses in eastern Deir al Balah where the F-16s have struck.
Their roar doesn’t disappear yet.
They’re bombing Khan Younis, Emad says matter of factly. Not a hard guess, what else are they doing up there are nearly 2 am.
He keeps working on his laptop and I keep sleepily tracing the sky, watching this time for their re-appearance not for shooting stars.
After a few minutes of re-contemplating the sky, we know precisely where they’ve gone.
Two massive blasts, the house shakes. They’ve bombed somewhere near the sea, which is only a few hundred metres away. I remember the shakes of the Ezbet Abed Rabbo house Leila and I were in when F-16s were flattening the area during the Israeli war on Gaza in 2008-2009. One directly behind that house, the walls ready to cave in; one across the lane some 30 metres away, leaving a massive crater.
The night sky is orange again, gone are the stars and romance.
He is hugging me, pushing my head down to the ground, protecting from any flying debris. Pointlessly he tries to protect me, but when the blasts are on you no amount of hugging and ducking will do.
A bit of confusion… to stay rooftop or run down to the ground. I remember when the Sharouk building with various media outlets was repeatedly hit by smaller missiles, not the one-ton F-16 crater-makers. The building danced and it felt like the stairs had turned into one long slide, to take us from the 9th or 10th floor down light speed.
The drive to see what happens next is strong, leaving us not wanting to abandon the roof. We stay, and soon his brothers appear to see where the blasts have hit. We go down to check on his parents, thankfully asleep, hard of hearingness a relief this time. We go back up and the orange has gone, its grey and starless now.
“It’s raining” says Emad. I’m confused, think he means the bombing triggered some weather reaction. Concrete dust flutters down upon us, the dry kind of rain. The ambulance sirens wail, the Red Crescent or Ministry of Health ambulances will be racing for the site. If they are late, the dead and injured will be piled into any car near the explosion that still moves. There is a sustained honking in Gaza that everyone recognizes as make way, we’ve got another victim here.
Now 3 of his brothers are rooftop with us and going over the blasts. For a Strip that has seen so many Israeli terror bombings over the years, this latest –comparatively far away at a few hundred metres –has hit a nerve even with these men putting on bravado. They are brave, of course, and endure psychological war in addition to actual blasts. Every time one of those fucking F-16s flies over us, it’s a reminder of the last war, or of previous attacks, or of random bombings, or of friends and family martyred in their sleep, cars, homes…
Everytime those F-16s intentionally break the sound barrier to create a bomb-like sonic boom, everyone within range instinctively remembers their own personal horror at whichever Israeli war or attacks.
His brothers are talking about their children, how one child clinched up into a ball in his sleep, how hard is for all the children. But their rapid banter betrays them: its hard for them as well.
In true Palestinian style they mask any fear they might be feeling—as any human should be feeling in these circumstances –with jokes and teasing.
Were you scared? they tease me. Yes and no. Once again numb from the fear, as I was during the 23 days of Israeli bombing Gaza in winter 2008-2009, but that horror of what comes next always exists. How many martyrs will there be? Inshallah none. Is this the start of the next Israeli slaughter of locked-in Palestinians or will that come tomorrow? What the hell will I do when I am not here… not like I can stop any of this, not like I can protect them any more than Emad’s loving attempt. How can I possibly ever leave here, when that next massacre is always looming from those Israeli war machines above and around us?
The Zionist news tomorrow will blather on about a strategic strike against terror. But rearrange their scripted words and you get the truth: it is a strategic terror against Palestinians, as always, and involved living, breathing, dreaming, working human beings below those terrorizing F-16s, breathing the dust of another bombed building.
2:30 am
Emad and I are sleeping, not sleeping but lying down, inside this time, not that that makes any difference. I’m thinking shit,shit,shit, how can I ever leave him and his family and my friends and everyone here? We’re both lost in our own heads, thinking about the blast.
Blast. Another one. It’s louder inside, because of the echo. Thankfully the windows are open; blasts like that shatter windows; we’d have a glass shard rain upon us this time.
His younger brother is coming back from work at his grocery shop, laden with yogurt and hummus for “suhoor”, the morning meal before fasting begins anew. His ears are ringing from the nearness of the bomb but he hides whatever anxiety he surely haswith grins and chatter.
They re-play the same jokes made on the roof earlier. It’s for Ramadan, they’re giving us fire-works, they’re making a party. They’re helping us wake up (we slept through suhoor yesterday, not even hearing the mild beating of the street drummers who circle waking people up for a meal and prayer).
Emad’s father is unplussed. He doesn’t feign bravado or joke, just sits a little sleepily and looks at his paper with the prayer times written down. He goes to the nearest mosque five times a day, including the early morning prayer. He’s lived a long, hard life, expelled from his farm land and village which is now buried under some Israeli name, reared a family in one of Palestine’s many, many, impossibly overcrowded refugee camps where families slept in tents for years until they improved to stifling concrete block homes with entire families in one single, dank room. He’s worked to educate his many, many sons and daughters. He’s lived through all the Zionist hell Israel dishes out, from his expulsion to the occupation and horrors that go with that to the sporadic bombings to the full-out invasions. He’s lost a son to cancer that couldn’t be treated properly because he couldn’t access the needed medical care outside of Gaza.
So when all of us are gibbering or teasing or mulling the last bomb blast, he is off somewhere in his head but his expression doesn’t betray it. And I think he’s only really concerned about being on time for the next prayer. A life of repeated drama is enough to render bomb blasts somewhat insignificant.
It’s the same target as half hour ago, but this time surely there are casualties, people who waited some minutes before going to see the damage. Israel, of course, knows this. During the last war on Gaza, first Israeli bombings would be followed just one or two minutes later, sometimes 5 minutes, by another bomb in the same place. Family and friends who’d come to help rescue bomb victims would themselves be torn apart by the second and third blasts. A technique guaranteed to get the bystander civilians who come to rescue, if not the medics.
We return to sleep, wary.
Jewish sharia: Haaretz
‘The National Home of the Jewish People’ bill presumes to represent Diaspora Jews; they will have to decide whether they want to continue living abroad in a democratic country that lets them practice their faith as they wish, or in a Jewish state that robs the foundations of democracy from them.
By Zvi Bar’el
The superfluous mask has finally been torn off. A Jewish state and a democratic state cannot exist under the same roof. One contradicts the other. In his explanations for the bill that he initiated with Kadima’s Avi Dichter and Yisrael Beiteinu’s David Rotem – this marvelous combination should be etched well in our memories – Likud’s Zeev Elkin said that “the law is designed to give the courts reasoning that supports the state as the Jewish nation-state when ruling in situations in which the state’s Jewish character clashes with the principles of democracy.”
There was no need to wait for Elkin’s explanations or to be angry about the support of the 20 MKs from that strange party, Kadima, which behaves like a car in which not only the headlights don’t work, neither do the hazards. The Jewish sharia bill, which the MKs introduced furtively before fleeing for their long recess, will only make the existing situation official. It will make clear to any Jew in the world that a blend of democracy and Judaism is only possible in the Diaspora.
To “be a Jew in your tent and a man in the street,” as in the poem by Yehuda Leib Gordon – which became the slogan of the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment – is possible only for an American, French or British Jew. In Jewish Israel, a Jew can be a Jew only – democracy will officially be defined as a luxury. It will be possible only in cases where religion permits it. And religion will permit it only when it does not contradict the word of God. Sovereignty is transferred from the citizen to the Holy One, blessed be He, and his interpreters on earth.
On the other hand, it’s hard to oppose a bill that puts the State of Israel so near the other countries in the region and creates a foundation of understanding among the nations based on granting religion a higher priority than the state and government. For example, the Egyptian constitution states that “the Islamic principles of law are the main source for legislation.” According to the Syrian constitution, “Muslim law is the source for legislation.”
Actually, it seems the Iranian constitution could serve as an excellent inspiration for the country’s commitment to promoting God as a main source of legislation. This constitution requires the country to create “the proper environment for the growth of ethical values based on faith, piety and a battle against corruption.” This “proper environment” imposes the will of religion on art, science, the media and of course education.
The Israeli bill is not as far-reaching. It does not demand that “Jewish art” be an exclusive subject for study and does not prohibit the teaching of science that contradicts faith. Although it revokes Arabic’s status as an official language, it still permits Arab citizens “the right to linguistic access to government services, as will be determined by law,” unlike Turkey’s approach to the Kurdish language. But there is no prohibition against passing a law that will prohibit this right as well.
The bill does not yet rule that Jewish law is the main source of authority for legislation, and for now makes do with the fact that Jewish law “will serve as a source of inspiration for the legislator.” And when there is no solution in legislation, case law or “a clear analogy,” the court will be required to decide according to the principles of “freedom, justice, integrity and peace in the Jewish heritage.”
What exactly are those principles? “An eye for an eye”? Or “a stranger shalt thou not wrong”? And what are the principles of peace in the Jewish heritage? Those of Rotem, Aryeh Eldad (National Union ) and Yulia Shamalov Berkovich (Kadima), or those of Nachman Shai (Kadima ), Benjamin Ben-Eliezer (Labor) and Meir Sheetrit (Kadima) – who are all signatories to the bill? Do “the principles of peace” permit territorial compromise or does the Promised Land, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, constitute the borders of the Jewish nation-state?
The bill, which is called “The National Home of the Jewish People,” presumes to represent Diaspora Jews as well. But from now on they will have to decide whether they want to continue living abroad in a democratic country that lets them practice their faith as they wish, or in a Jewish state that robs the foundations of democracy from them. This is usually a silent Jewish community that is tolerant of its country of refuge, a refuge that is gradually becoming crammed with garbage that is liable to keep away any liberal Jew.
Occupation profiteer Ahava soaks up EU science grants: The Electronic Intifada
Submitted by david on Fri, 08/05/2011 – 06:14
Not for the first time, the European Union is in denial about how it is subsidizing Israel’s crimes.
Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU’s commissioner for scientific research, recently acknowledged that the cosmetics-maker Ahava was allocated more than €1 million worth of innovation grants from the Union over a period stretching from 1998 to 2013. Giving even one cent to Ahava involves facilitating breaches of international law because of the firm’s unlawful activities in the West Bank.
As Geoghegan-Quinn doesn’t appear to recognize this problem, she would be well-advised to read a report, issued in May, by the human rights organization B’Tselem. It highlights how Ahava is partly owned by two Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land: Mitzpe Shalem and Qalya. Both of those settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to the territory it occupies.
Responding to a parliamentary question, Geoghegan-Quinn effectively conceded that some of Ahava’s EU-funded research may have been undertaken in the West Bank. While Ahava is “formally established within the borders of the internationally recognized state of Israel”, she said, beneficiaries of EU grants are not required to carry out the related research in the place of establishment.
I would alert Geoghegan-Quinn to two salient facts:
The rules covering EU science grants stipulate that projects which violate “fundamental ethical principles” are ineligible for funding. Carrying out research in one or more illegal settlements must surely violate such principles.
Ahava may be able to give its offices in Holon or Airport City, industrial zones near Tel Aviv, as an address for its headquarters when applying for Euro-lolly. Yet its core manufacturing activities are conducted in Mitzpe Shalem. If Geoghegan-Quinn doesn’t believe me on this, I urge her to take a trip to the settlement, where she will no doubt be given a warm welcome to Ahava’s official visitors’ centre.
There are other questions about why any of my tax euros should be going to a private cosmetics firm. A glance at Cordis, the EU’s database on its science grants, shows that in one of the projects concerned, Ahava has teamed up with the US Department of the Interior. The objective of this scheme is to assess what impact tiny toxins (nanoparticles, as boffins call them) can have on the environment.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I never had the impression that the Department of the Interior spent too much time worrying about trees and dolphins. So what is the real agenda here?
Tent 1948: Mondoweiss
by ABIR KOPTY on AUGUST 6, 2011
If you are Palestinian, it will be difficult to find anything to identify with in Tel Aviv’s tents’ city on Rothschild Boulevard, until you reach Tent 1948. My first tour there was a few days ago, when I decided to join Tent 1948. Tent 1948’s main message is that social justice should be for all. It brings together Jewish and Palestinian citizens who believe in shared sovereignty in the state of all its citizens.
For me, as a Palestinian, I don’t feel part of the July 14 movement, and I’m not there because I feel part. Almost every corner of this encampment reminds me that this place does not want me. My first tour there was pretty depressing, I found lots of Israeli flags, a man giving a lecture to youth about his memories from ’48 war’ from a Zionist perspective, another group marching with signs calling for the release of Gilad Shalit, another singing Zionist songs. This is certainly not a place that the 20% of the population would feel they belong to. The second day I found Ronen Shuval, from Im Tirtzu, the extreme right wing organization, giving a talk full of incitement and hatred to the left and human rights organizations. Settlers already set a tent and were dancing with joy.
The existence of Tent 1948 in the encampment constitutes a challenge to people taking part in the July 14 movement. In the first few days, the tent was attacked by group of rightwing activists, who beat activists in the tent and broke down the Palestinian flag of the tent. Some of the leaders of the July 14 movement have said clearly that raising core issues related to Palestinian community in Israel or the occupation will make the struggle “lose momentum”. They often said the struggle is social, not political, as if there was a difference. They are afraid of losing supporters if they make Palestinian issues bold.
The truth is that this is the truth.
The truth is, this is exactly what might help Netanyahu, if he presses the button of fear, recreates the ‘enemy’ and reproduce the ‘security threat’, he might be able to silence this movement. The problem is not with Netanyahu, he is not the first Israeli leader to rely on this. The main problem is that Israelis are not ready yet to see beyond the walls surrounding them.
Yet, one has to admit, something is happening, Israelis are awakening. There is a process; people are coming together, discussing issues. The General Assembly of the encampment decided on Friday that it will not accept any racist messages among its participants. Even to Tent 1948 many Israelis arrived, read the flyers, listened to what Tent 1948 represent and discussed calmly. Perhaps if I was a Jewish Israeli I will be proud of the July 14 movement. But, I am not a Jew, I am not Zionist, I am Palestinian.
I don’t want to beatify the reality, or hide anything for the sake of ‘tactics’ and I will not accept crumbs. I want to speak about historical justice, I want to speak about occupation, I want to speak about discrimination and racism, I want to put everything on the table, and I want to speak about them in the heart of Tel Aviv.
Social justice can’t be divided or categorized. If it is not justice to all including all Palestinians, then it is a fake justice, elite justice or “Justice for Jews only” exactly as the Israeli democracy functions “for Jews only”. July 14 is a great opportunity for Israelis to refuse to allow their state to continue to drown into an apartheid regime.
Abir Kopty blogs here. Follow her twitter feed @abirkopty. A media analyst and consultant and political activist, she is a former city council member in Nazareth & former spokeswoman for Mossawa, the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel.
Academic claims Israeli school textbooks contain bias: The Observer
Nurit Peled-Elhanan of Hebrew University says textbooks depict Palestinians as ‘terrorists, refugees and primitive farmers’
Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
Sunday 7 August 2011
Children of African migrants play inside the Bialik-Rogozin school in Tel Aviv, Israel, in February 2011. Pupils at the school have survived genocide, war and famine. But they were all smiles after learning that a documentary about their plight then eventual safety and asylum in Israel, Strangers No More, had won an Oscar. An Israeli academic is claiming that Israeli schools are racist. Photograph: Ariel Schalit/AP
Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli academic, mother and political radical, summons up an image of rows of Jewish schoolchildren, bent over their books, learning about their neighbours, the Palestinians. But, she says, they are never referred to as Palestinians unless the context is terrorism.
They are called Arabs. “The Arab with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress. They describe them as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop,” she says. “The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer.”
Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has studied the content of Israeli school books for the past five years, and her account, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, is to be published in the UK this month. She describes what she found as racism– but, more than that, a racism that prepares young Israelis for their compulsory military service.
“People don’t really know what their children are reading in textbooks,” she said. “One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. People ask how can these nice Jewish boys and girls become monsters once they put on a uniform. I think the major reason for that is education. So I wanted to see how school books represent Palestinians.”
In “hundreds and hundreds” of books, she claims she did not find one photograph that depicted an Arab as a “normal person”. The most important finding in the books she studied – all authorised by the ministry of education – concerned the historical narrative of events in 1948, the year in which Israel fought a war to establish itself as an independent state, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the ensuing conflict.
The killing of Palestinians is depicted as something that was necessary for the survival of the nascent Jewish state, she claims. “It’s not that the massacres are denied, they are represented in Israeli school books as something that in the long run was good for the Jewish state. For example, Deir Yassin [a pre-1948 Palestinian village close to Jerusalem] was a terrible slaughter by Israeli soldiers. In school books they tell you that this massacre initiated the massive flight of Arabs from Israel and enabled the establishment of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. So it was for the best. Maybe it was unfortunate, but in the long run the consequences for us were good.”
Children, she says, grow up to serve in the army and internalise the message that Palestinians are “people whose life is dispensable with impunity. And not only that, but people whose number has to be diminished.”
Peled-Elhanan approaches her subject from a radical political background. She is the daughter of a famous general, Matti Peled, who became convinced that Israel’s future lay in a dignified peace with the Palestinians. After leaving the army, he became active in the peace movement.
The family produced a poster, calling for a peaceful settlement to the conflict, featuring Peled-Elhanan’s only daughter, Smadar. It’s message was that all children deserve a better future.
Then, in 1997, Smadar was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber while shopping in Jerusalem. She was 13. Peled-Elhanan declines to talk about her daughter’s death apart from once or twice referring to “the tragedy”.
At the time, she said that it would strengthen her belief that, without a settlement to the conflict and peaceful coexistence with Palestinians, more children would die. “Terrorist attacks like this are the direct consequence of the oppression, slavery, humiliation and state of siege imposed on the Palestinians,” she told TV reporters in the aftermath of Smadar’s death.
Her radical views have exacted a professional cost. “University professors stopped inviting me to conferences. And when I do speak, the most common reaction is, ‘you are anti-Zionist’.” Anybody who challenges the dominant narrative in today’s Israel, she says, is similarly accused.
She hopes her book will be published in Hebrew, but is resigned to it being dismissed by many in the political mainstream.
Asked if Palestinian school books also reflect a certain dogma, Peled-Elhanan claims that they distinguish between Zionists and Jews. “They make this distinction all the time. They are against Zionists, not against Jews.”
But she concedes that teaching about the Holocaust in Palestinian schools is “a problem, an issue”. “Some [Palestinian] teachers refuse to teach the Holocaust as long as Israelis don’t teach the Nakba [the Palestinian “catastrophe” of 1948].”
Perhaps not surprisingly for someone of such radical views, Peled-Elhanan is deeply pessimistic about her country’s future. Change, she says, will only come “when the Americans stop providing us with $1m a day to maintain this regime of occupation and racism and supremacy”.
She said that within Israel, “I only see the path to fascism. You have 5.5 million Palestinians controlled by Israel who live in a horrible apartheid with no civil and no human rights. And you have the other half who are Jews who are also losing their rights by the minute,” she says, in reference to a series of attempts to restrict Israelis’ right to protest and criticise their government.
She dismisses the Israeli left as always small and timid, but especially now. “There has never been a real left in this country.” She believes that the education system helps to perpetuate an unjust, undemocratic and unsustainable state.
“Everything they do, from kindergarten to 12th grade, they are fed in all kinds of ways, through literature and songs and holidays and recreation, with these chauvinistic patriotic notions.”
• This article was amended on 7 August 2011. The original credited Matti Peled as the designer of a poster featuring Nurit Peled-Alhanan’s daughter, Smadar. It was in fact Rami Alhanon, Smadar’s father, who designed the poster.
EDITOR: Preparing the next Intifada
Lieberman, the flag=bearer of the Israel right wing, and the measure of the move towards fascism, is before preparing Israel’s attck on the Palestinians, make no mistake about it.
Lieberman: Israel should cut all ties with Palestinian Authority: Haaretz
Foreign minister says Palestinians planning ‘unprecedented bloodshed’ against Israel after United Nations vote on statehood in September.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Sunday that he intended to ask the senior ministers comprising the “forum of eight” to cut all ties with the Palestinian Authority. Lieberman added that the Palestinians are getting ready for “unprecedented bloodshed” after the United Nations vote in September.
“The Palestinian Authority is stepping up its efforts to try Israeli officers and senior officials at the International Tribunal in the Hague,” he said. “I will demand breaking off all ties with it – no treasury officials, not the water authority and no Foreign Ministry officials (will maintain ties with the PA). You can’t get security coordination (with Israel) and also try IDF soldiers at the Hague.”
Liberman claimed that contrary statements made by senior Palestinian officials, who spoke of non-violent actions in September, there are in fact preparations for bloodshed. “The Palestinian Authority is getting ready for bloodshed on a scale we haven’t seen,” he said. “The more they speak about non-violent action the more they are preparing for bloodshed.” Lieberman talked about a scenario in which tens of thousands of Palestinians try to force their way through a checkpoint.
Contrary to Liebermans’s statements, Haaretz reported Friday that the Palestinian Authority has ordered security forces to prevent violence against Israel in September.
Lieberman also spoke about the mass protests that took place on Saturday. He said his critical statement in recent weeks were taken out of context. “Everyone is right,” he said, “the doctors, the mothers, the teachers and the policemen.” Yet he added that “Israel’s greatest asset is its economic stability, and we mustn’t harm it with hasty decisions.”
Lieberman cited his unsuccessful attempts to book a table in a Tel Aviv restaurant as an example of the stable economy. “I was walking in Neve Tzedek and all of the restaurants and pubs were full,” he said. “There wasn’t even one free spot.”
EDITOR: Danger to what democracy?
Haaretz Editorials tell us week after week that this or that measure isa danger to Israeli ‘democracy’. Surely there is no danger whatsoever to something which is no there?
New Knesset bill is a danger to Israeli democracy: Haaretz Editorial
The things endangering the support of the nations of the world for Israel – and among marginal elements also the recognition of Israel as the national home for the Jewish people – are the occupation and the many blows to Israeli democracy.
The bill introduced by 40 MKs headed by Kadima’s Avi Dichter for a new Basic Law establishing Israel as the “national home of the Jewish people” effectively shatters Israel’s fragile definition as a Jewish, democratic state. The bill replaces it with a definition that is nationalist and religious; the term “national home” stands in opposition to rationalist Zionism. Theodor Herzl said in Basel that the Zionists sought to create a “home for the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael, secured by public law.” The “home for the Jewish people,” according to Dichter and company, is the opposite of this aim. It is all withdrawal in the name of extreme, nationalist “Judaism.”
The bill defines in great detail the Jewish essence of the state. The definition of democracy, however, is reduced to one short clause and leaves much room for interpretation as a dictatorship of the majority rather than a regime committed to civil rights and the protection of minorities. The goal of rescinding the Arabic language’s official status, also included in the bill, is to erase the Arab citizens’ language, culture and heritage from the Israeli identity.
The bill’s preamble states that many people are trying “to eliminate recognition of the State of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people.” But the things endangering the support of the nations of the world for Israel – and among marginal elements also the recognition of Israel as the national home for the Jewish people – are the occupation and the many blows to Israeli democracy.
This bill, which violates the promise of equality contained in the Declaration of Independence and tells Arabs they are unwanted, second-class citizens whose taxes will be used to preserve Jewish heritage, coincides with high-flown talk about the importance of integrating the country’s Arab citizens into the state and its economy. The bill also specifies the superiority of the principles of Judaism over the principles of freedom. Legislating a preference for Jewish law opens the door to the destruction of the judicial system and its subordination to religious political power.
A few MKs have already withdrawn their support for the bill, while others are hesitating. We can only hope that before the bill is submitted to a vote, everyone will realize that the entire proposal is dangerous to democracy and would turn Israel into a place that is difficult to live in, not only for its Arab citizens but also for free, enlightened Jews.