Israëlische bloed en bodem?

Is Joods nationalisme (= Zionisme) racistisch?

Op de blog Judeosphere wordt het antwoord goed verwoord, bij monde van professor Gadi Taub.

 

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Monday, August 06, 2007

 

Blood and Soil?

 

Among the most provocative statements in Walt and Mearsheimer's paper "The Israel Lobby" is the argument that Israel does not deserve special treatment from the United States as a fellow democracy because it was "explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship."

Writing in the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Gadi Taub of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem surveys the latest trend of anti-Zionist academic literature and highlights the duplicity of those denounce Jewish nationalism:

It is still true...that Zionism preserved many ties to Judaism as a religion, and often made concessions to the Orthodox. The result is no clear separation between church and state. Is that what singles Israel out as nondemocratic? Probably not. England has a state church, as do Denmark and Norway, and that doesn't seem to constitute evidence of a nondemocratic character...Moreover, a strict separation of church and stateas, for example, in France is not necessarily more egalitarian. France is extremely aggressive toward minorities whose religion has a public dimension (like Muslim women who cover their heads in school). Israel's Muslim minority is, in that respect, better off: Israel has a publicly financed Arab-language school system, for example, and a state-sponsored system of Muslim courts for marriage and family status. Arabic is one of the official languages of the state.

But then there is the Law of Return. The law grants automatic citizenship to immigrating Jews. Is that what makes Israel nondemocratic? Hardly. Many other countries with diasporas have such laws: Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, and Poland, to name a few.

Or is the core of the problem...that Zionism is an "ethnic" national identity? The term "ethnic democracy" [insinuates] what Israeli law clearly forbids: confining full civil rights to Jews only.

Despite repeated usage, it is still not clear why the term "ethnic" is useful for describing Israel, which is far less ethnically homogeneous than, say, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Poland, or Sweden. In what sense does "ethnic" describe the common identity of Israeli Jews from Argentina, England, Ethiopia, Germany, Morocco, Russia, and Yemen? And how does one classify the ultra-Orthodox, a large group that does not share Israel's national identity but is nevertheless Jewish? Are they part of the ethnos but not of the nation? The real dividing lines in Israel are national — between those who do and those who don't share the national Jewish identity.

Nor does the existence of national minorities within Israel's boundaries present any unique problem to its democracy. Other nation-states also have national minorities that want to preserve their separate identities: the Basques in Spain and the Germans in Poland, say. Few observers, however, make that grounds for denying the rights of the majority in Poland or Spain to national self-determination. Granted, Israel's situation is peculiarly complicated by the fact that the state is in conflict with the Palestinian nation, to which a minority in Israel belongs. But that, too, is not the root of the intuitive feeling that the Israeli state is inherently malignant.

The alleged contradiction between "democratic" and "Jewish" is thus, at bottom, a reading of the occupation back into Zionism. Increasingly, Israel's most vehement critics tend to see things this way: Zionism is a blood-and-soil ideology that postulates that the land belongs exclusively to Jews. Therefore the occupation is its natural extension. And so an end to the occupation may alleviate some of the symptoms but not cure the disease. That is why [many] believe that the only way to make Israel fully democratic is to make it non-Zionist — that is, not a nation-state.

It is ironic that such a reading comes at a time when the most important change Israel has undergone is best described as the triumph of Zionism over the occupation....Hence, in Israeli public opinion, the "two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has won over the ideology of a Greater Israel.

Imposing America's model of one liberal state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea would mean suppressing the aspirations of both Jews and Palestinians to self-determination. It may be noble of such writers to shoulder what was once called the White Man's Burden, and take it upon themselves to teach the natives the right form of self-determination. But from the point of view of the natives, that does not seem like a way to promote democracy. It seems more like an assault on self-determination with a liberal accent.

[Tony] Judt on Israel is closer to Bush on Iraq than [he] would like to believe: American notions of democracy are what count, not what Iraqis, or Palestinians, or Israeli Jews want. And, as in Iraq, such a solution would mean civil war. If anyone needed a demonstration of that, Hamas's military takeover of Gaza has supplied it. If Hamas and Fatah cannot reconcile their differences without resorting to force, then throwing a Jewish minority into the mix is unlikely to produce a peaceful liberal democracy.