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Uri Avnery
February 20,
2016
RIGHT AFTER the foundation of
Israel, God appeared to David Ben-Gurion and told him: "You have done good
by my people. Utter a wish and I shall grant it!"
"I wish that Israel shall be Jewish, democratic and encompass
all the country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan," Ben-Gurion replied.
"That is too much even
for me!" God exclaimed. "But I will grant you two of the three. You
can choose between a Jewish and democratic Israel
in a part of the country, a democratic state in all of the country that will
not be Jewish or a Jewish Israel
in all of the country that will not be democratic."
God has not changed his mind.
WHILE I am writing this,
Binyamin Netanyahu is totally absorbed in enacting a new law, a law that would
be a watershed in the history of Israel. The public looks on in a bemused
way, as if it were happening in Kamchatka.
This law would (I might say
"will") enable 90 of the 120 Knesset members to evict any or all the
other members from the Knesset altogether. The grounds for such a decision are
nebulous: supporting "terrorism" – by speech as well as by deed,
denying the Jewish character of the state, and such.
Who decides? The majority, of
course.
The immediate
impetus for proposing this bill was provided by the three Arab Knesset members
who visited the parents of Arab "terrorists" in annexed East Jerusalem. I have already mentioned this in my last
article. They had a good pretext – to help them to obtain the bodies of their
sons, who had been shot dead on the spot. But the obvious reason was to pay
their condolences.
Now, it may be argued that a
bereaved mother is a bereaved mother, irrespective of the cause of her son's
death, and that to offer condolences is a human virtue. But that may be too
humanistic for Likud members.
In the good old times, when we
were the "terrorists" and the British were the occupiers, I would
certainly have paid my condolences to a neighbor whose son had been shot during
an Irgun raid. I don't think the British would have arrested me for that.
By law, Knesset members are
immune from prosecution for any act committed in the line of their duties. For
Knesset members to visit their voters in such circumstances may be such an act.
Therefore, a new law is necessary.
And what a law!
"IMAGINE SUCH a thing
happening in England or the US," Netanyahu thundered, "an MP or
congressman supporting terrorists!"
"Imagine such a thing
happening in Britain or the US," I
would reply, "a law allowing three quarters of Parliament or Congress to
evict the others!"
Netanyahu was brought up in
the US.
He most surely has been taught there that democracy does not mean only the rule
of the majority. Adolf Hitler was probably supported by the majority. Democracy
means that the majority respects the rights of minorities. Including the right
of free speech.
The right of free speech does
not mean the right to express popular views. Popular views do not need any
protection. Free speech means the right to utter views that are detested by
almost everyone.
It certainly means the right
of minorities to express their views by peaceful means. And that is the crux of
the matter.
Everybody understands that the
right of 90 to evict 30 is a threat to evict the Arabs from the Knesset. The
"Arab" faction in the present Knesset comprises 13 members and will
probably get larger in the next few elections.
(It's a bit complicated. The
"Arab" faction includes a Jewish member, who is much respected. The
"Jewish" factions include some token Arab members, who dare not open
their mouth on serious matters.)
This is not a law against
"terrorist" sympathizers. This is a law against the Arab minority.
The Knesset will be Jewish, pure and simple.
Going back to God’s deal with
Ben-Gurion, It will be a Jewish state in all of the country, without being
democratic.
JEWS HAVE BEEN minorities
since the Babylonian exile, some 2500 years ago. All Jews have been minorities
for some thousands of years.
One would have believed that
80 generations are enough to learn how a state should behave towards
minorities. Indeed, one could have believed that all the states of the world
would be sending delegations to Israel
to learn how minorities should be treated. The founder of Zionism, Theodor
Herzl, certainly thought so, and described the idyllic relations between the Jewish state and its Arab
inhabitants in his futuristic novel "Altneuland"
("Old-New-Land").
Alas, this did not come to be.
The times when a young and fresh Israel attracted progressives from
all over the world to see the Kibbutzim and Moshavim (cooperative villages) are
long gone. (It now appears that Bernie Sanders, one of the US Democratic
candidates for president, once was a volunteer worker in a kibbutz). Even
before the proposed law is enacted, Israel
is one of the least democratic countries in the Western World, to which Israel wants to
belong.
In the West Bank, which is
governed by Israel,
there live about 2.5 million people who are devoid of any civil and human
rights. Just this week Amira Hass, the courageous Israeli chronicler of the
occupation, described how the comfortable home of a Palestinian bourgeois
family was invaded in the middle of the night by an army squad and they were
told to clear their living room, which became an army outpost. The soldiers
brought with them a portable chemical WC, but relieved themselves freely from
the balcony.
We believed for a time
that Israel could remain
"the only democracy in the Middle East"
while holding large occupied territories. Didn't the British hold hundreds of
millions of Indians in subjugation, while the home country remained the world's
shining example of democracy? Sure, but an Englishman needed several weeks to
sail from Liverpool to Bombay, time enough to change his personality, while one
needs only five minutes to cross from Israel into the West Bank.
THE ARAB citizens of Israel proper
constitute some 20% of the population. These were the remnants of a large
majority, most of whom had fled or were evicted.
This percentage has
remained so from the beginning of the state until now, a time in which the
population of Israel
has grown more than tenfold.
A miracle? Almost. The
huge natural increase of the Arab population has been balance by Jewish
immigration, first from the Islamic countries, then from Russia, and lately from Ethiopia. They
are still 20%, as God foresaw.
The first generation
of "Israeli Arabs" – as Jews called them, much to their dismay – were
meek and docile, still shocked by the immense catastrophe that had befallen
their people. For safety's sake, they were subjected to a "military
government", which restricted their movements. An Arab could not go from
his village to the next, much less buy a tractor or send a son to study,
without a written military permit. This system was abolished only after 17
years.
One may wonder why
they were granted voting rights at all. Well, since they were so docile,
Ben-Gurion, a party man through and through, decided that they would bolster
his party's majority at the polls. This
indeed did happen.
But
now there is a third generation of Arab citizens. There are Arab university
professors, chief physicians, entrepreneurs, even police commanders. There are
Palestinian nationalists, Islamists, Communists. They have feelings, demands,
even the chutzpah to demand full equality.
That
would be a large enough problem in a normal situation. But the situation here
is not normal. Israel's national minority is a part of the Palestinian people,
whose entire territory the present Israeli leadership wants to take away.
IN
THE back of my mind I have a script for a movie. I am ready to give it away for
free.
Two
Jewish boys, call then Abraham and David, escape Nazi Germany. David
goes to the US, Abraham goes to Palestine.
David,
of course, joins the movement of Martin Luther King, becomes a leading civil
rights activist and is now a fervent campaigner for the rights of minorities.
He also supports BDS, which calls for the boycott of Israel.
Abraham,
who calls himself Rami, is a colonel in the Israeli army, a fervent nationalist
and regular Likud voter, an admirer of Netanyahu. By sheer accident (this is a
movie, after all) he once was a member of the kibbutz in which Bernie Sanders
was a volunteer worker.
He
is in charge of a large part of the West Bank,
and happens to be responsible for the order under which Palestinians are thrown
out of their homes for security purposes.
David
heads an American human rights delegation that comes to investigate what’s
happening in the occupied territories, Rami has the task of preventing them
getting there. And so on.
COMING
BACK to God, He is shaking his head. These humans, He asks Himself, will they
never learn?
No
country has ever profited from throwing out its minorities. Nazi Germany threw
out its Jewish scientists, some of whom went to the US
and built the atomic bomb for America.
Long before that, the Catholic kings of France
threw out the Protestant Huguenots, who emigrated to Prussia
and turned a small garrison town named Berlin
into a world center of industry and culture. There are many more examples.
If
two thousand years have not taught us anything, when will we ever learn?
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