When Theodor Herzl wrote his booklet, which set modern Zionism in
motion, he used the catchy German term "der Judenstaat", a
word difficult to translate into English. Literally, it means "the
Jews' state." The meaning becomes clearer in the context of the
booklet itself.
At the time, Herzl was far from convinced that the state should be
set up in Palestine. He was mainly thinking about Argentina. But
the first version of this blueprint for the future state - and that
is what the brochure amounted to - was not concerned with any
particular territory. It was an abstract plan for a yet-abstract
project.
Perhaps because of this, Herzl did not devote much thought to the
place of non-Jews in his Jew-state. In his personal journal he
noted that if the state would be set up in South America, it would
be necessary to remove any native population living there - but
only after they had killed all wild beasts. Later, when it was
already taken for granted that the "national home" must be created
in Palestine, Herzl wrote a rather naive utopian novel,
Altneuland (Old-New-Land). In this description of the future
ideal Zionist society, one sole native Arab makes an appearance, in
order to laud the wonderful treatment accorded to him in the Jewish
commonwealth. One gathers that he is a picturesque but quite
negligible part of the new reality.
Substitute for a Constitution
Some 50 years after the Zionist Congress, the Zionist state came
into being. Its founding document, the famous Declaration of
Independence (officially: "Declaration of the Establishment of the
State of Israel," May 14, 1948) has assumed historical dimensions.
But in reality it is but a hastily written collection of propaganda
clichés, designed to disprove hostile arguments and to assure
international recognition for the fait accompli. It says very
little about the reality prevailing in the State of Israel, then or
today, but it says very much about the state of mind of its
founders, when they decided, after some hesitation, to proclaim the
state in the middle of a desperate war.
As an instrument of propaganda, tailored according to the
requirements of the moment, the Declaration is neither better nor
worse than similar documents of other nations, such as the American
Declaration of Independence, which consists in great part of
polemical attacks on the British king. However, this historical
curiosity was soon superseded by the United States Constitution, a
far more serious document. Israel has never adopted a constitution,
and, by default, the Declaration has to serve as a kind of
substitute.
It is easy to make fun of the clichés taken from the arsenal
of Zionist stock phrases and assembled in the Declaration. The late
professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz used to point out that the phrase
"Eretz-Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their
spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped..." could
only be written by atheists. For religious Jews, the spiritual
identity of the Jewish people was shaped for all eternity at Mount
Sinai, far from Eretz-Israel. "After being forcibly exiled from
their land..." does not correspond with historical fact, as the
great majority of Jews were living happily in the Diaspora long
before the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans. "Jews strove
in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their
ancient homeland..." is a Zionist myth. For 1,827 years, from the
destruction of the temple to the First Zionist Congress, Jews made
not the slightest effort to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.
Indeed, the Jewish religion expressly forbade a mass immigration to
the Holy Land. Only individuals were allowed to come here, to pray
and die.
The document contains several untruths and half-truths. For
example, when it says that... "the Balfour Declaration... gave
international sanction to the historic connection between the
Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish
people to rebuild its national home," it bends the facts. The
Balfour Declaration says that "His Majesty's government view with
favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the
Jewish people...." "In Palestine" rather than turning all of
Palestine into a Jewish national home. Also, as we shall presently
see, the wording of the UN resolution was falsified in the
Declaration.
A 'Jewish State',
But the central phrase of the Declaration is the operational one:
"We... hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in
Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel."
The two words "Jewish state" have since become a bone of endless
contention. What do they mean? What is the difference between a
"Jewish state" and Herzl's "Jew-state" or "State of the Jews"? Not
to mention the term "State of the Jewish people," which crept
nearly imperceptibly into the Israeli codex when the Knesset
enacted a curious law saying that anyone "who denies that Israel is
the state of the Jewish people" is denied the right to take part in
Israeli elections.
Herzl's Judenstaat meant simply that the state, which will
be set up by those Jews who want it, will be peopled by Jews. It
did not concern the religious character of the state. Herzl, as
indeed nearly all the founding fathers of Zionism, was a complete
atheist. He stressed that the rabbis must be restricted to the
synagogues. Moreover, he was an "assimilated" Jew, meaning a Jew
who had embraced European culture and lost contact with Jewish
religion and tradition. The state he had in mind was clearly a
secular, democratic state as conceived by Central European liberals
at the end of the 19th century.
The term "Jewish state," as distinct from "State of the Jews," can
mean quite different things. The nationalist-religious, as well as
other religious elements in Israel today use it to demand a state
governed by religious laws. "Jewish," they insist, has but one
meaning, a religious one. A "Jewish state" cannot be "like other
states," because it must serve the fulfillment of Jewish religious
aspirations.
Exclusivist Tendencies
Nothing could be further removed from the intentions of the
Declaration itself. For this we have the testimony of the person
who wrote the original draft, and who put those two crucial words
"Jewish state" into it: former Supreme Court Judge Zvi Berenson, at
the time the legal adviser of the socialist Histadrut (the powerful
trade union confederation). As he tells it, the phrase must be
understood in a quite different context.
Among other justifications, the Declaration cited the landmark
United Nations resolution. This was especially important, because
it gave the new state a cloak of legality, which it would have
otherwise lacked.
The Declaration quotes the resolution in its typical propagandist
way: "On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General
Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a
Jewish state in Eretz-Israel...." This is half (or rather a third)
of the truth. As a matter of fact, the UN resolution [181] reads:
"Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special international
Regime of the City of Jerusalem... shall come into existence in
Palestine...." It is highly significant (and generally overlooked)
that the Israeli Declaration of Independence, even at this early
stage of the 1948 war, intentionally omitted to mention that the
creation of the Jewish state was bound up with the establishment of
the Arab state in Palestine, as well as with the creation of a
separate regime for Jerusalem. Clearly, by that time, David
Ben-Gurion had already decided to prevent both.
Be that as it may, the relevant phrase in the Declaration assumes a
different meaning when the preceding words are added: "On the
strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly,
[we] hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in
Eretz-Israel, namely the State of Israel." The words "Jewish state"
clearly appear here only in relation to the UN resolution. What is
meant is: The UN has decided to partition the land between an Arab
and a Jewish state, and we hereby set up the Jewish state
mentioned, which will be called Israel. Nothing more. The testimony
of Mr. Berenson clearly indicates this. He stresses in his
testimony that there is absolutely no ideological significance as
regards the Jewish state.
If read this way, the seeming contradiction built into the
Declaration - between the Jewishness of the state and its
democratic character - would seem to disappear.
But words have their own life in the annals of nations. Once the
term "Jewish state" was put into the Declaration, it exerted a
powerful influence on the development of Israel. It reinforces all
the exclusivist tendencies - religious and/or nationalist -
existing in Israeli society, providing a ready-made justification
for discriminating against non-Jews, specifically Arabs, and even
secular Jews.
The Supreme Court, a self-proclaimed guardian of Israeli democracy,
has compensated for the lack of a written constitution by basing
its "judicial activism" on the "principles of the Declaration of
Independence" (which has never been enacted into law). It has
valiantly tried to square the circle by insisting that Israel is "a
Jewish and a democratic state."
Built-In Discrimination
But what is a "Jewish" state? Early Zionists insisted that the Jews
all over the world are a "people" (volk, in German and
Yiddish), and that modern, secular nationhood has superseded
religion as its unifying factor. Orthodox Jews, whose "Sages of the
Tora" cursed the Zionists in the most venomous way, denied this
strenuously. It has now been conceded that there can be only a
religious definition of this term "Jew." It is now a principle of
Israeli law that a Jew is a person who (a) has been born to a
Jewish mother (and, therefore, to a Jewish maternal grandmother),
or (b) has converted to Judaism in a religious act, and (c) has not
adopted any other religion. Thus the secular definition of a Jew
has been rejected. (This definition, by the way, goes well beyond
religious law, according to which a Jew remains a Jew even when he
gets himself baptized. "Israel, even when he sins, remains
Israel.")
The official doctrine that Israel is a "Jewish and democratic"
state rests on the assumption that "Jews" have only one privilege
in Israel - namely, the automatic right to immigrate to Israel,
under the 1950 Law of Return, and to become citizens immediately
upon arrival. This is based on the words of the Declaration: "The
State of Israel will be open to Jewish immigration and for the
ingathering of the Exiles," immediately followed by the words: "it
will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all
its inhabitants... it will ensure complete equality of social and
political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion,
race, and sex...."
In fact, of course, this is far from reality. All public life in
Israel is based on a built-in discrimination against non-Jews, and
especially the citizens who are Palestinian Arabs (at present about
19 percent of all citizens). The term "Jew," indeed, does not
appear in any law except the Law of Return, but in many regulations
there is a provision saying that certain rights, mainly financial
and social, accrue only to people "to whom the Law of Return would
be applicable," a roundabout way of saying "Jews." There is no
pretense in Israel that Arab towns and villages are receiving
government handouts anywhere near the ones granted to their Jewish
counterparts, or that development plans apply to Arabs. Many rights
and privileges are quite openly restricted to Jews by the simple
device of turning their administration over to the Jewish Agency, a
Zionist body which has official functions in Israel and which
excludes, of course, Arabs (often called in polite official
language "sons of minorities"). The statutes of the government-run
Land Authority officially forbid the sale or lease of "national
land" to non-Jews, and this is incorporated into its
regulations.
All such clear violations of the Declaration's promise of equality
"irrespective of..." are routinely justified by citing the
"Jewishness" of the state, also based on the Declaration.
In spite of all the good intentions of the Supreme Court, there
exists in reality a clear contradiction between the "Jewish state"
and the "democratic state." You can have both day and night, but
you can't have them at the same time.
Two Alternative Models
On the other hand, two important decisions made at the very outset
do limit the Jewishness of the Jewish state. David Ben-Gurion, an
extreme Zionist who believed that no Jew should remain outside
Israel, decided that Jews who do not immigrate to Israel will
neither receive citizenship, nor take part in elections. This was
not self-understood. Nor was it self-understood that Arabs could
take part in elections. Only after long (and secret) deliberations
was it so decided. (Some cynics believe that the decision was taken
for purely partisan reasons. Ben-Gurion's Mapai party held absolute
power over the Arabs in Israel, through the machinery of "military
government," and Arabs could be easily coerced to vote for the
right party. For a long time, their votes were crucial for the
hegemony of Mapai.)
How can Israel overcome the basic contradiction built into its
founding act? It could, of course, set aside all pretense of
equality, as demanded by ultra-nationalists as well as by the
ultra-Orthodox. The former want to deprive the Arabs of their right
to vote, or to strip them of full citizenship, or even to evict
them from the state altogether. The latter want to abolish the laws
enacted by the Knesset and to impose Halacha, or religious
law, which would automatically deny the equality of "Goyim."
However, if the democratic character of Israel is to be upheld,
there exist two possible models: One is to turn Israel into a
modern, civil state, like the United States, with total separation
between state and religion, as well as between state and nation.
Citizens would derive their rights solely from citizenship (which
the Americans call nationality), irrespective of ethnic origin,
religion, language, race or gender. Indeed, it should be forbidden
even to mention these in official documents. The state as such will
be neither Jewish nor un-Jewish, but a civil community belonging to
all its citizens.
A second model is to acknowledge the fact that citizens belong to
different nations and to give these official status, allowing the
Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel (as distinct from the
Palestinians in territories at present occupied and in the future
State of Palestine) to form national institutions, which would
enjoy autonomy in the fields of education, language, culture,
etc.
Until such a revolutionary change in the character of the state and
its citizens, the contradictions of the Declaration will continue
to plague us all.