First published on eTalkinghead.com
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Jimmy Carter will finally speak at Brandeis University on Tuesday about his critique of Israel’s occupation policy. If his incensed critics don’t keep interrupting, the former president will easily justify his title: Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He’ll have more trouble countering criticism from a less obvious source: those who appreciate his stance on the occupation but object to his laudatory description of Israel’s own internal democracy.
Carter’s claim that Israel is democratic at home but oppressive across the Green Line makes sense only to those who have internalized the widespread cliché that Israel is the Middle East’s sole democracy. Yet refusing to distinguish between legal technicality and institutionalized discrimination makes it harder for those new to the issue to figure out what’s going on. How could a real democracy, after all, impose so much suffering on innocents just a few miles away? Israel’s hard-nosed approach toward Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank becomes more understandable once one understands democracy’s weak institutionalization inside its own borders.
I followed the initial furor over Carter’s book during a ten-week visit to Israel and the West Bank. The students in my seminar on Psychology, Law, and Justice at Be’er Sheva’s Ben Gurion University were well aware of their country’s fundamental legal and existential dilemma: whether Israel should be a Jewish state or a democratic state. They easily recounted examples of just how far and how often rhetoric departs from reality. Indeed, some Israelis I met were as critical of Israel’s democratic pretensions at home as were the Palestinians I worked with at Birzeit and Al Quds Universities on the West Bank.
Some Israelis, of course, hope discrimination will someday lessen, helped along by well-meaning activists, public interest lawyers, and others working to defend individual rights. Even the Israeli Supreme Court sometimes enforces individual rights, though it too has trouble wishing away the disjunction between Jewish statehood and democratic fundamentals.
Nothing clarifies this dilemma better than Israel’s “demographic problem,” the fear that someday Jews will be a minority in a state no longer defined as Jewish. Proposals to prevent this disaster include reducing the Arab birthrate, encouraging Jewish immigration, and “transferring” hundreds of thousands of Arab citizens out of their own country whether they want to leave or not. Making their lives miserable is one way to encourage Arabs to depart. Many Israelis take it for granted that this is their state’s undisclosed but necessary policy, not just in occupied territory but inside Israel as well.
Our own democracy is far from perfect, but after centuries of legal slavery, official segregation, and genocidal wars against indigenous nations, the majority of Americans finally accept, or at least say, that government should treat all citizens equally. The state can no longer officially declare some citizens more valuable than others. Among Israelis, though, the suggestion that Israel should become a “state for all its citizens” rather than the state of the global Jewish people is widely considered not just anti-Zionist but anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. In a very real sense, Israel’s dominant culture does not envision equality for all.
That’s why Israel imposes on a fifth of its population a national anthem extolling the Jewish return to Zion and a national flag emblazoned with the Jewish Star of David.
That’s why more significant impositions are so routine they’re better explained as consistent with public policy than as departures from it: demolishing Arab-owned homes in East Jerusalem and refusing to recognize Bedouin villages but allowing construction of West Bank Jewish settlements illegal even under Israeli law; failing to enforce housing and labor anti-discrimination laws; failing even to provide bus service to Be’er Sheva for the 40,000 residents of nearby Rahat, a legal Bedouin city in the Negev. For many Israelis, it turns out, democracy means the majority can do whatever it wants.
I was glad to meet many Israelis appalled by this situation. Too many, though, look away because a direct gaze would demand reforms that could someday end Israel’s Jewish dominance. Maybe that’s why Jimmy Carter, too, looks away. If he looks again, he could more easily demonstrate how Israel’s refusal to give its own citizens meaningful equality helps explain its refusal to allow a functional and equal Palestinian state just across the border.
The problem I have with the pure leftist perspective on Carter and his book is that it doesn’t take into account the broader question of how those who oppose the Occupation can really change hearts & minds both here in the U.S. & Israel. So let’s say Carter takes the next step & declares there is democracy neither under Occupation nor in Israel itself.
What he’s just done is to create a 2 front war he has to fight against his enemies. First, he has to defend his critique of the Occupation. Next, he has to defend an even more explosive accusation regarding the nature of Israeli society. He’s already having enough trouble defending the first hypothesis; and you’d have him take on an even more difficult task to boot.
While I don’t have any problem w. yr description of Israel as seriously deficient regarding the rights of its Arab minority, expecting Jimmy Carter to make this cause his own is unrealistic. Carter is a politician not a moral philosopher or ideologue. He’s less interested in being purely objectively & analytically correct in how he analyzes Israel than in moving skeptics and hostile individuals closer to a progressive view of the I-P conflict.
He’s got a best selling book that lots of people are reading who’ve prob. never thought much about this conflict. Had he written the book you want him to have written, his book would already be in the remainder bin for $1.75 & the ADL, AIPAC, Dershowitz & the Israeli gov’t would’ve had him for lunch.
As it is, he’s giving them a damn good fight & I say “good on ‘im” for it.
Richard, thanks for the comment. I’ve responded to it in the next blog entry.
Dennis
How can you take the guy who says this?
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2007/01/jimmy-carter-speaks-on-wwii-so-called.html
[...] The Brandeis University website has a transcript of Jimmy Carter’s Tuesday speech with the ten pre-screened questions he was asked, along with his answers. Also a video. As I expected, none of the pre-selected questions pressed him on his repeated admiration for Israeli democracy, a topic I discussed last week. [...]
It seems to me that Dennis’ comment is quite unfair. The assumption here is that complete equality can exist under siege, where many of the 20% minority would, if they could, destroy Israel. That fact needs to be reconciled with Israel’s imperfections. And that fact is not all Israel’s doing.
Quite a lot of the fault – really most of the fault – lies in the unwillingness of the Muslim group to admit that Jews might have full sovereignty in what they believe must be forever part of the House of Islam. The very same issue is at work in Lebanon. And, the same issue prevents Sunni and Shi’a from burying the hatchet in Iraq and more generally.
Given the reality in which Israel exists, in examining events in fairness and in context, one can only say that, imperfections and all, Israel does pretty well. It provides, altogether, a package of greater rights, more freedom, better education, better health care and a longer lifespan to its Arab population than does any Arab country – and this is by far the case.
Rome was not built in day. If and when Israel’s independence is fully realized so that the country’s enemies are no longer determined to destroy the country, then what Dennis says might mean something. Such is not the case and to pretend otherwise is to be dishonest.
So, taken in context, Dennis’ comment is unfair to the point of being a radical distortion of the facts.