The following annotated essay appeared in the following Newsgroups:
talk.politics.mideast, soc.culture.mideast, soc.culture.palestine, soc.culture.israel, soc.culture.usa
The essay below is one of the most thoughtful, highly condensed, critically honest looks at Israel's midwives, founders and present leaders as well as Israeli policies and society in general. Unfortunately, the author regurgitates the standard, one-dimensional Hollywood version of National Socialist (German) policies and aims, but this is not the place for an ABC on National Socialism, and the rest of the essay is ruthlessly frank. It bears careful study and deserves wide distribution.
The essay is titled: What is Zionism if not racism?
[START]
Israeli Democracy: A Promise As Yet Fulfilled
by Michael Lopez-Calderon
The Chinese, wonderful expositors of allegories, maxims, and proverbs, have an ancient saying that still resonates with truth: "The first step on the long road to wisdom is to call everything by its proper name."
Israels political system, often touted as the only democracy in the Middle East, invites the scrupulous wisdom of the Chinese sages. An intellectually honest appraisal of Israeli democracy, an appraisal motivated by a deep commitment to democratic pluralism and Enlightenment rationalism, leads one to judge Israels democracy as an unfulfilled promise for both Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, and of course, the Palestinians.
Defenders of Israel will challenge such an assertion by pointing out how all democracies are flawed. For example, an unconditional supporter of Israel, citing the Supreme Courts Brown v Board decision of 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Title Nine, will argue that American democracy only recently began to fulfill its promise to African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, women, and yes, even American Jews.(1)
He or she would be right, and recent evidence of disenfranchisement of the poor predominantly, though not exclusively, Black and Latino in the 2000 Presidential Election only lends support to critics of Americas flawed democracy. However, though America often failed and, occasionally, continues to fail its democratic promise, we can speak of a "promise" because it is both enshrined in our founding national documents and rooted in our cultural, political, and social structures.
Israels "promise" is far more tenuous and far less obvious; neither her founding documents nor ideological, cultural, and social roots give much impetuous to democratic pluralism. In fact, a number of structural factors work against the establishment of democratic pluralism in Israel.
Let us examine these structural factors:
* Zionism. A late-19^th century European ideology influenced by German Romantic nationalism that emerged as anti-Enlightenment, anti-Semitic reactionaries in France, Germany, and Austria grew more numerous and vociferous. Zionism also arose in reaction to the wave of murderous pogroms in Czarist Russia and Eastern Europe. However, Zionism did not escape the influence of retrogressive thinking then prevalent throughout Europe. Zionism absorbed much of the European colonial mindset, replete with racism towards non-European people, particularly Africans, Arabs, and "Orientals." The original Zionists, far from the enlightened socialists and anarchists of legend, arrived in Palestine with the cultural baggage of European racism and colonialism.
* Zionism emerged in a German nation that was still engaged in the debate over national identity. The German (Frankfurt) Liberals identified with the French Revolutionary Enlightenment liberal ideal - the belief that a nation consisted of abstract citizens, laws, and membership in "a rational and just social order constructed on shared political i.e. democratic values."(2)
Their opposites were the German Romantic Nationalists, who detested everything French, in part because of the manner in which French ideals had been introduced to the Germanic states, namely, under the boots of la Grand Armee during the Napoleonic conquest. Another reason the German Romantic Nationalists opposed the French ideal was their need to define an authentic, German alternative, one that was rooted in German culture and tradition, in other words, anything but French. This brand of German Romantic national and political identity evolved into late 19th century Pan-Germanism. Pan-Germanism stressed "blood and soil"; it "was based on the idea that all persons who were of the German race, blood, descent, wherever they lived or to whatever state they belonged, owed their primary loyalty to Germany and should become citizens of the German state, their true homeland."(3)
Worse, this belief in the organically bound membership of citizens was infused with an element of hostility to Enlightenment rationalism and especially, liberalism and democratic pluralism. Pan-Germans, like their Romantic predecessors, delved into the smorgasbord of Gothic mysticism, Teutonic "volk" legends, the intuitive, and two lethal, late 19th century additions: racism and Social Darwinism. This was the setting in which Theodor Herzl formulated his nationalist philosophy of Zionism.
* Herzls Zionism, however, was in a strange way an accommodation to, not resistance against, the ideological premise of modern anti-Semitism. "Throughout the Diaspora, its [Zionisms] adherents argued, Jews constituted an alien presence amidst states belonging to other, numerically preponderant, nationalities. Anti-Semitism was the natural impulse of an organic whole infected by a foreign body (or too obtrusive a foreign body)."(4)
Herzls Zionism solved the Jewish Question by accepting the underlying premise of Europes anti-Jewish, anti-Enlightenment, and ultimately, anti-democratic reactionaries: Jews were an inassimilable people who were in need of a State of their own. Two versions of Zionism gradually emerged: Labor and Cultural Zionism. The latter argued that the real threat to Jewish survival was "an increasingly secular civilization that rendered them [Jews] anachronisms. The real danger was not the Gentiles' icy reception but, rather, their seductive embrace."(5)
Cultural Zionism, now wedded to the only viable form of Zionism that remains in Israel, namely religious Zionism, is one of the greatest obstacles to genuine democratic pluralism in Israel.
* Israels founders had a choice: create an Israeli nation with secular, liberal-democratic pluralism as its centerpiece, or forge a "blood and soil" Jewish State with citizenship subordinated to an ethno-religious, racial identity of Jewish exclusivity. The so-called left-wing Labor Zionists chose exclusion over pluralism, ethno-religious and racial identity over abstract citizenship, and rabbinical religious authority instead of secular to manage the institutions of civil society. They chose a colonial style of rule rather than a shared pluralistic democracy that would have made citizenship equally available for all who lived in Israel-Palestine.(6)
A secular, liberal-democratic, pluralistic Israel would have provided all of her inhabitants with equal citizenship and full participation in every aspect of the nation. That was never even considered. Israel now reaps what it had sown fifty-three years ago. She reaps a bitter harvest.
* Israels policy of redeeming the land by placing ownership exclusively in Jewish hands ranks as one of the worlds most discriminatory. The very notion that land possessed by another is unredeemed smacks of the worst kind of national chauvinism since an Austrian paperhanger insisted that the Wehrmacht "liberate" the ethnic-German populated Sudetenland from the Czechs.
In his controversial book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Israel Shahak examined the religious ideology of Israels land policy. Shahak wrote about the ideology of "Redemption of Land," an exclusivist ideology that holds that "the land which has been redeemed is the land which has passed from non-Jewish to Jewish ownership. The ownership can be either private, or belong to either the [Jewish National Fund] JNF or the Jewish State. The land which belongs to non-Jews is, on the contrary, considered to be unredeemed."(7)
The unredeemed stigma applies even in cases where the non-Jewish owners are decent, moral human beings. A criminal or slothful Jewish atheist who "buys a piece of land from a virtuous non-Jew [will make] the unredeemed land redeemed by such a transaction."(8) Redemption of Land logically blends with another notorious exclusivist policy: the Law of Return.
[END]
Tomorrow: Conclusion
Thought for the Day:
"Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be."
(Alexis de Tocqueville)