The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace At Last
304
The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace At Last
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Overview
Political economist Bernard Avishai has been writing and thinking about Israel since moving there to volunteer during the 1967 War. now he synthesizes his years of study and searching into a short, urgent polemic that posits that the country must become a more complete democracy if it has any chance for a peaceful future. He explores the connection between Israel’s democratic crisis and the problems besetting the nation—the expansion of settlements, the alienation of Israeli Arabs, and the exploding ultraorthodox population. He also makes an intriguing case for Israel’s new global enterprises to change the country’s future for the better.
With every year, peace in Israel seems to recede further into the distance, while Israeli arts and businesses advance. This contradiction cannot endure much longer. But in cutting through the inflammatory arguments of partisans on all sides, Avishai offers something even more enticing than pragmatic solutions—he offers hope.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547540207 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/05/2013 |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 525 KB |
About the Author
BERNARD AVISHAI is consulting editor at the Harvard Business Review. Formerly a professor of business at Duke University and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, he has written for the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Review of Books, and Slate, among others. He lives in Wilmot, New Hampshire, and in Jerusalem.
Read an Excerpt
The Hebrew Republic How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last
By Bernard Avishai
Harcourt, Inc. Copyright © 2008 Bernard Avishai
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-15-101452-1
Chapter One Basic Laws
What geniuses you are! What strategists! Don't you get it? Don't you see that our principle of "territorial compromise" means "as much land as possible, and as few Arabs as possible"?
-Yitzhak Navon, Labor leader, and former president of the State of Israel (from a speech before a jeering audience in Yoqneam, a Likud stronghold, during the 1984 election campaign)
Israel is an open society: Palestinians will be the first to tell you this, often with a hint of envy. Most Jewish Israelis, 81 percent according to reliable polls, also think "equality before the law" is essential, regardless of "political opinion." And the judiciary is pretty much with them. Under the tenure of its recently retired president, Aharon Barak, Israel's High Court of Justice (its Supreme Court) broadly applied the Basic Laws to protect a wide array of civil liberties. Barak's court, for example, overturned the military censor's effort to ban Mohammed Bakri's 2002 film, Jenin Jenin, which charged (on thin evidence) that Elite IDF combat units intentionally caused civilian casualties during Operation Defensive Shield. The court also rejected government efforts to ban Arab political parties.
Actually, when people speak of Israeli freedoms they usually mean speech. Hundreds of foreign reporters, including reporters from Al Jazeera, are permanently posted to Jerusalem. Government politicians are notorious for their efforts to manage the broadcast news at Channel One, which is state owned; but this did not stop veteran news anchor Haim Yavin from broadcasting (on the rival, and commercial, Channel Two) an independent documentary, filmed with his own video camera over a couple of years, exposing the extremist views of many West Bank settlers. In a country about the size and scale of Massachusetts, there are three fiercely independent Hebrew newspapers that together sell about a million papers a day (the more impressive when you realize that the mother tongue of a million citizens is Arabic, and the mother tongue of another million citizens is Russian).
John Stuart Mill wrote that the majority-but-one had no more right to silence the one than the one had the right to silence the majority. Israelis might have added that the one also had the right to jump into everybody else's sentences. Television talk shows are nicknamed tarshe lee-"allow me"-shows, as in "Allow me to finish." Former Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin used to call out warnings to disorderly members the way a basketball referee calls fouls: three get you expelled from a session. He had to ban cell phones from the chamber.
But then, cell phones are themselves an infrastructure of expression. Roughly 100 percent of Israeli households have one. Most of the Israeli high-tech business community has acquired the libertarian feistiness of Silicon Valley. Israelis are adopting high-speed Internet access at twice the rate of Americans. Over 180,000 students are enrolled in five major universities and nearly fifty colleges and institutes. More than 30 percent have over thirteen years of schooling. Israelis publish more scientific papers per capita than any other country. Typically, about twenty political parties organize for elections. Gays march proudly in Tel Aviv. If their society is not exactly civil, silencing Israelis, including Arab Israelis, seems almost unimaginable.
* * *
Yet Israel is a society where institutional discrimination against individuals for an accident of birth or a profession of faith has been so routine it is hardly noticed-not, at least, by Jews. The real contradiction in Israeli democracy is not between people who claim the right to dissent and people who would stop them, but in the conflicting impulses of officials, even in the judiciary, to realize democratic standards and yet protect the extraordinary mission of Israel as a state that ingathers, but cannot quite define, Jews. The most widely embraced Zionist principle is the justice of Jewish settlement. The most conspicuous inequality is, everywhere, preferential residency.
Start with population figures. There were about 180,000 Israeli Arabs in 1949, and they lived under military government until 1966. Now as then, Israeli Arabs constitute about a fifth of the country's population, roughly 1.2 million people. Of the 15 percent of Israelis who are Muslim, bedouins account for just under 3 percent. Druze and Circassians account for about 2 percent of Israelis, and Christians about 3 percent. (Incidentally, many now prefer to be called, not "Israeli Arabs," but "Palestinian citizens of Israel." The latter term is more fashionably defiant, but implies the very tribal concept of nation that Arab citizens normally try to break down. It is also more clumsy, creating a confusion with Palestinians across the Green Line, the internationally recognized border prior to 1967; will they be called "Palestinian citizens of Palestine"? In common Hebrew parlance, Arab citizens are called Arviyei Midinat Yisrael-"the Arabs of the State of Israel." I'll just continue saying Israeli Arabs.)
So the Israeli Arab population has grown by a factor of six since the founding of the state, pretty much the same rate as the Jewish population. Arabs are disproportionately engaged in farming. Remarkably, however, land available to Arab municipalities has meanwhile declined by 50 percent, to just under 3 percent of land within the Green Line. When you include privately held land outside their towns and villages, Israeli Arabs oxen just under 4 percent of their country.
This segregated pattern of settlement is not the result of normal market forces. It results from the fact that some 92 percent of Israeli territory is public land, in effect, closed to Arab residency since 1949. The Knesset, not the municipalities, controlled public land from the start: in 1960 it handed over custodianship to the Israel Lands Administration (ILA), a state agency it created through a Basic Law. There were three kinds of land to administer, moreover. First and foremost was the land of the Jewish National Fund, the JNF or Keren Kayemet, including all properties originally purchased by Diaspora Jews during the time of the British Mandate. Today, JNF land is about a sixth of public holdings. The second parcel belonged to Israel's Development Authority, perhaps another sixth of the total. The remainder was said to be "state land," eventually to also include Jordanian publicly administered lands captured in 1967.
All of this would seem innocent enough if one could think of the ILA as an impartial state agency, considering development projects on their merits. Now and then, the ILA has behaved in just this way, allowing Arab towns to expand. But on the whole, the ILA has acted like the continuation of the JNF by other means. Official government brochures still justify the foundation of the ILA by adverting to "the special relationship between the People of Israel and the Land of Israel and its redemption." This language, and mission, were borrowed directly from the JNF. The ILA did not formally adopt pre-state JNF regulations, which had stipulated that land could not be alienated to non-Jews. But until very recently, when it was challenged in the courts, the ILA strictly enforced JNF regulations on lands it had inherited from that old Zionist body.
Just to be clear, the JNF owned about half the territory assigned to Jews at the time of the UN's partition proposals-disproportionately arable land, on which most of the veteran settlements had been built. A majority of Jews still live on what does, or did, belong to the JNF. Nor did the JNF remain a mere land bank, funded by Western Jews for pioneering settlement. After 1948, once the War of Independence was won, the Knesset swelled JNF holdings with land no Jew had ever paid for. The Knesset passed a series of laws to confiscate "abandoned" Arab property, that is, the homes of Arabs who had either fled or were driven from war zones. While the UN pressed Israel to allow the refugees to return-or at least to compensate them-the Israeli government simply assigned their land to the JNF, tripling its holdings. Of the 370 settlements established in Israel between 1948 and 1953, 350 were established on formerly Arab property. All of this land, too, was closed to Arabs.
There were desperate Jewish refugees as well, of course, as Israel emptied out displaced-persons camps in Germany, Cyprus, etc. The new Jewish state soon offered homes to refugees from Iraq, which dispossessed its Jews in 1950-51. As the historian Howard Sachar wrote of the 1949 turmoil, "Two hundred thousand Jewish immigrants preempted 80,000 Arab rooms." But nothing can change the fact that Israel simply extended JNF regulations to vast stretches of land forcibly confiscated from Arabs, and the ILA pretty much took over from there. JNF regulations wound up being applied even to "internal refugees," Arabs who never actually left the country at all, but may have fled short distances to escape the fighting, for example, the several hundred yards from the new city of Acre to the walled Old City. Some 40 percent of lands belonging to legal Arab residents of Israel found their way into JNF ownership. (These residents were ultimately compensated for only a small portion of the value of their lands.)
"The moment one Of the people took one of the truths to himself," Sherwood Anderson writes in Winesburg, Ohio, "[the moment he] called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque, and the truth he embraced became a falsehood." This might have been written about Israelis who swore by the JNF, or took the work of the ILA for granted. Today, few outside observers are able to penetrate the ILA's convoluted leasing arrangements, for instance, with the Jewish Agency's mortgage companies, or preferred contractors, or the large and secretive JNF holding company, Himanuta, which has had particular responsibility for extending the reach of Jewish settlers into occupied territory. Government planning commissions may include one or two Arab mayors, but many representatives of old Zionist agencies, including the JNF. The JNF itself remains a quasigovernmental institution, presiding over a $150 million budget, and raising funds among Jewish communities of the Diaspora.
The result of these arrangements is serious material discrimination in favor of Jewish citizens, or planning policies in which the Arab presence in the land is simply effaced. Recently, the JNF, Ministry of Tourism, and Mount Hebron Regional Council published a brochure inviting visitors to the region of the Hebron Hills-partly in Israel, partly in the West Bank-in which the Green Line was not even acknowledged. But ignore, for now, settlements in occupied territory. Israeli politicians still speak urgently of yehud hagalil, literally, the "Judaization of the Galilee." Just after the evacuation of Gaza, the then vice premier Shimon Peres announced a plan to put ten thousand housing units in the Galilee for Jewish families from the center of the country. The housing ministry, the Israel Lands Administration, and the Jewish Agency also announced a plan to bring 250,000 Jewish residents to the Negev. "The ILA has obviously followed a 'Zionist' policy since its founding," David Kretzmer, a Hebrew University legal expert on land policy, told me; "it has aimed for Jewish control of the land, through settlements, hilltop outposts, and so forth, and governments never considered any of this secret or embarrassing."
In 2000, before the recession caused by the Al-Aqsa Intifada, about 100 million shekels were slated for Arab communities, about 5 percent of the development budget. In 2002, this was cut to under 70 million shekels, or 3 percent. That same year, the ministry budgeted over 11,000 shekels per resident in the booming Jewish border town of Modi'in. Arab localities, in contrast, were budgeted about 100 shekels per resident. An investigation launched by Haaretz revealed that of the 104 northern communities offered various incentives to grow, only four of them were Arab or Druze towns. Recently, the Arab town of Sakhnin-which has a population of 25,000 and provides services to a large rural area in the eastern Lower Galilee-petitioned the interior ministry to extend its own municipal boundaries to include some 8,400 dunams, to account for natural growth. The government approved 1,700. The Jewish Misgav Regional Council opposed expansion. The amount of municipal land per Jewish inhabitant in Misgav will come to thirty-six times the amount of land per Arab inhabitant in Sakhnin.
Finally, some of the most important forms of discrimination are indirect. The government traditionally, provides subsidized mortgages to young men and women who've completed their army service. Only Jews and Druze are conscripted-and Arab youth are not provided a comparable national service option-so the subsidy has greatly favored Jews. For their part, Jewish immigrants still get preferred mortgages from the Jewish Agency.
Serious people will tell you that Israel is a young democracy, as if more time and heat will, by some political alchemy, burn things down to a democratic residue. But if democracies can be said to age gracefully, Israel's has not. Its essentially segregated nature has only gotten more extreme over the last sixty years, as Israeli Jews moved array from agriculture and into large cities. Arab farmers and Jewish collectives once lived side by side, albeit distrustfully, and more or less at the same standard of living. But today well over a million Israeli Arabs live in townships in the Galilee or in strings of towns to the east of-and removed from-the Jewish urban mainstream on the coastal plain. In towns like Lod and Ramle, drug gangs control the streets. Towns like Tira, Taibe, and Umm el-Fahm are prosperous in the way 1950s Jewish towns were prosperous.
No wonder that even as Hezbollah missiles fell on their towns, more than a third of Israeli Arabs refused to back either side during the 2006 Lebanon war, while a small number, about 18 percent, actually backed Hezbollah over Israel. (Instructively, more than 65 percent of Jewish Israelis assumed that a majority of Israeli Arabs backed Hezbollah.) Another recent poll revealed that 68 percent of Israeli Jews would refuse to live in the same apartment building as an Israeli Arab, 46 percent would refuse to allow an Arab to visit their home, and 63 percent agree with the statement that Arabs are "a demographic and security threat."
The segregation does not go unchallenged. Israel's High Court of Justice has, almost single-handedly, tried to reverse it, addressing Arab inequality much the same way the Warren Court began to change the face of the South with Brown v. Board of Education. The court unanimously struck down one government development plan for towns in the Galilee as "racially biased." In 2002, in a landmark decision, the court used the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty to rule that JNF ownership regulations could not be used to keep an Arab citizen-in this case, Adel Ka'adan, a surgical nurse from Baqa al-Garbiva-from building a new home for his family in the neighboring village of Katzir. ("All I want is to give my family better living conditions, my daughters a better education. That's all I'm interested in," he said.) In 2007, Israel's attorney general, Manny Mazuz, extended the Katzir decision, advising the ILA that the JNF's restrictive regulations could not be used to deny Arabs from participating in its land auctions around Carmiel. Civil rights experts like Kretzmer have been heartened by such decisions. "No way could they uphold a policy of not leasing public land to Arabs," he told me.
Yet as American civil rights workers learned during the 1960s, court decisions have little tooth in the absence of an executive authority willing to enforce them. As of this writing, Ka'adan has still not moved into Katzir. The land auction around Carmiel has been delayed pending appeal. In Israeli cities, most landlords will simply not rent or sell to Arabs. The justice ministry ignores such cases. In towns that have grown from farming collectives (like Katzir), residents get around the High Court's decision by forming "acceptance committees" whose criteria are vague.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Prologue
The Situation 1
Jewish and Democratic 15
Basic Laws 23
West Bank Settler 59
"A Spade to Dig With" 85
The Decline-and Rise-of the Hebrew Republic 119
The Center's Liberal Demography 128
The Business of Integration 169
Hebrew Revolution 212
Conclusion: Closing the Circle 244
Acknowledgments 269
A Note on Transliteration 273
Endnotes 275
Index 281