Sixty-six years after the establishment of the State of Israel, even the most ubiquitous term employed to describe the political nature of Israel — namely, as a “Jewish democratic state” — is becoming obsolete. The Netanyahu government and its right-wing coalition partners are preparing a law that will define Israel as a “Jewish State” for the benefit of what they term the “Jewish people.” For independent observers who do not wear Zionist propaganda glasses, Israel was never a democracy in the classic Western sense of the term, but always a Jewish democracy or a democracy sui generis — i.e., full democratic rights for Jews only. “Jewish” and “democratic” just does not fit. It's an oxymoron.
Nonetheless, the Zionist propaganda (hasbara) has left no stone unturned in order to hammer this conceptual contradiction into the minds of the Western public. Israeli Palestinians have always been treated as second-class citizens. The Israeli political class regards them as a “fifth column” that cannot be trusted.
The proposed Basic Law shows that Israel, after 66 years of existence, is in the dark about its identity. It is proof of Israel's shortcomings. From Israel's very foundation there was a built-in contradiction: on the one hand, Israel was declared at its establishment as a “Jewish State in Eretz Yisrael” (Eretz Yisrael in Hebrew is equivalent to historic Palestine).
On the other hand, the same declaration promised to “ensure complete equality of … political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion.” It has turned out that Israel cannot be both.
According to the “Law of Return” every bona fide Jew in the world can immigrate to Israel and automatically obtain Israeli citizenship. Other laws were enacted in parallel to prevent the return of expelled Palestinians and their right to their land. The contradiction was re-established by the “Nationality Law” of 1952, which reads: “A person who, immediately before the establishment of the State, was a Palestinian citizen … shall become an Israel national.”
Under the presidency of former Chief Justice Aharon Barak, the Basic Law “Human Dignity and Freedom” was passed, which led to the coining of the phrase “Jewish and democratic state” for Israel. The right-wing parties are now up in arms about this construction and consider the High Court of Israel (HCI) in general as far too liberal. Some extremists even want to abolish this institution and replace it with a religious court.
Due to the significant Palestinian population within Israel, former Israeli governments downplayed the Jewish component in that formula. But since right-wing parties now dominate Israel's political landscape and parliament, the public was led to accept and even approve of racism and open discrimination against Israel's Palestinian minority.
As a consequence of popular racism, the Netanyahu cabinet has discussed several versions of a new Basic Law that will finally establish Israel as what has been termed a racist pariah state. The cabinet version was approved by a strong margin, with 14 votes in favour and six against. Should this bill become law, Israel will be an overt ethnocracy.
The question that would then arise for Israel's friends in the US and Europe is how to reconcile Israel's self- definition as a Jewish State with democratic values. The West will probably also manage to explain this anachronism, as it has previously justified Israel's human rights violations, colonialism and violations of international law, and closed its eyes to war crimes and atrocities by the Israeli army against Palestinians. Western political elites will find ways to justify or at least explain away this institutional racism.
In Israel, the draft presented by the government caused an outcry from the liberal spectrum. Even President Reuven Rivlin spoke out against Netanyahu's “Jewish state bill.” He called for a referendum and said, “Democracy and Judaism must remain equal.” At a conference in Eilat, he asked: “Does promoting this law, not in fact, question the success of the Zionist enterprise in which we are fortunate to live?”
Rivlin is a former Knesset member of Netanyahu's Likud Party with political scores to settle with the Israeli prime minister. Rivlin decried the elevation of Israel's Jewish dimension over its democratic one, proposed in some versions of the intended new law.
The tainted atmosphere that led to this proposed law will neither vanish in the Knesset nor in the minds of the Israeli public. If the “Jewishness” of the State of Israel prevails over the democratic one, the “Nation-State of the Jewish people” is going to admit that it is a theocracy guided by racist ideology.
In future, the political discussion will have to revolve around the racial aspect of Jewishness and Jewish culture in Israel and less around colonial Zionism, which has hitherto served as a vehicle for Israeli Jewish expansionism. Israel has always been a Jewish state. It finally appears to be admitting that it has no interest in democracy.
How will the US Empire and Israel's European friends react to this new definition of the State of Israel
At the end of the day, Israel has to choose between being a Jewish state with some democratic embedded particles, and a democratic state with a Jewish preponderance. It cannot have its cake and eat it too. Critics of the term “Jewish democratic state” asked for a “Jewish state.”
For some, a “Jewish state” might be the solution to the Israeli dilemma, but for others this might be the nail in the coffin of the Zionist enterprise. The writer is a journalist and editor in Bonn, Germany.
