Last update - 00:00 07/12/2006
Real problem, unacceptable solution
Four documents dealing with the status of Arabs in Israel were published recently: an attempt by the Israel Democracy Institute to formulate a covenant between Jews and Arabs; a report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel on the humiliation Arab Israelis suffer at Ben-Gurion International Airport; a position paper by Mosawa, the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel; and "The Future of Arab Palestinians in Israel," put forth by the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee in Nazareth on Tuesday.
The experts and intellectuals who worked on preparing these documents have exhibited knowledge and understanding of law and society in Israel, and it is obvious that the subject is close to their hearts. It is hard for anyone who sees himself as a democrat and a liberal not to nod in agreement with much of what is in these texts. The descriptions of the discrimination make one feel outrage and despair ? starting with the division of resources, mainly land, to the blatant discrimination in matters of infrastructure, to blocking the advancement of educated professionals, and much, much more. All this, without even mentioning racism and incitement, points to exclusion, which is at least wicked, if not outright evil.
Exposing the exclusion, describing the areas which it affects, and holding a public discussion about it, are the main achievements of the four documents. The fundamental shortcoming of the documents is in the sole explanation they provide for this exclusion, and in the solution ? which is not merely civil but also political ? that all would like to achieve.
For example, the legal expert Dr. Yusuf Jabarin, who is a signatory to the Mosawa document, and of the legal chapter in the document entitled "The Future," scoured the law books and compiled rulings and legal opinions that expose the deeply seeded exclusion found in the law. When he quotes the 1985 amendment to article 7 in the Basic Law on the Knesset, according to which no person or party will be elected to the Knesset whose aim or actions "reject the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state" ? the instinct is to claim that a democracy must also allow freedom of action to a person who aspires to a binational state. The amendment to article 7 reflects a weakness of democracy in Israel. In healthy democracies the limits of debate are well understood, and do not require superficial definitions in the law.
But this weakness is being used by the authors of the documents all too lightly. "Israel," they write in the document on the "Future," "is the result of the colonial activities initiated by Jewish-Zionist elites in Europe and the West, was established under the auspices of colonial powers, and was strengthened under the shadow of the growing Jewish immigration to Palestine, in light of the results of World War II and the Holocaust." Even if we ignore the puzzling choice of language ("light" of Holocaust and "shadow" of immigration), this is a bad omen: The authors of the documents do not accept Israel as the state of the Jewish nation, and all their recommendations are based on the demand to transform it into a binational state. They argue that the root of evil can be found in the nation-state. Nothing short of its abolition will solve the problem.
This claim, which is appealing in its intellectual cleanliness, is exaggerated: Western democracies emerged as nation-states and continued to thrive. No one expects that Greece, for example, will remove the cross and the Greek-Orthodox rituals from its official ceremonies in order to avoid hurting the feelings of the Muslims living there, even though it has an obligation to protect them from deprivation and discrimination.
If, as the authors of the documents wish, the nation-state is abolished, the Zionist state, the refuge for the Jewish refugees, will be transformed into another minority community. The establishment of a Palestinian state will form the state of the Palestinian nation on the eastern part of the Land of Israel, and the binational state of Jews and Palestinians will form its western part.
According to the model of the documents' authors, those settlers, the ones who reject the right of the secular-democratic state to rule, are also entitled to demand the recognition of their existence as a separate collective. And thus, there will be four states for four peoples, like that found in the Bosnian model.
The authors of the documents knew they would stir up a ruckus. They want discourse, and discourse is indeed vital. Pessimists have been talking of this for years, that the hurt and oppressed Arab community will wake up and rise. In view of the difficulties described in the documents, we can be impressed by the fact that the uprising is expressed on the conceptual-verbal level and not on the physical.
Israel cannot accept the demand they pose because it would mean relinquishing our home. But it must discuss seriously the civil demand. Either way, there should be no extremist responses and these documents should not be transformed into an opportunity on which the Lieberman worldview can base its future strength.