Dennis Fox’s Weblog

Here are three interrelated questions I’ve touched on at different points. They still need more-organized and more-detailed discussion. Maybe someday I’ll do that. In the meantime, some short answers in progress:

1. To help end Israel’s occupation and “mov[e] skeptics and hostile individuals closer to a progressive view of the I-P conflict”, should we, like Jimmy Carter, avoid criticizing Israel’s internal democracy?

This is my re-phrasing of a comment today by blogger Richard Silverstein, who frames the issue as one of effective strategy.

Since I think the two issues are intertwined, as I touched on briefly in yesterday’s posting, avoiding Israel’s inner workings makes its occupation policy harder to get a handle on. Mainstream Americans who believe Israel is a democracy find it hard to believe the occupation could be as harsh or as unjustified as critics claim. That’s why, it seems to me, it should be easier to demonstrate Israel’s democratic failure inside its borders, where its actions against its own citizens violate American mainstream notions of what democracy means, than to attack only its apartheid-like policies in Gaza and the West Bank, which Americans will continue to support if they believe they are necessary to defend against terrorism (Question 3). Once outsiders understand the practical tension between being a Jewish state and being a democratic state (Question 2), they should become better able to see through Israeli justifications for its policy across the Green Line.

This issue of whether and how to criticize Israel’s internal workings comes up repeatedly in many different contexts among organizations opposing Israeli policy. Sometimes the focus, as Richard’s, is on strategy: What will work best? This is where some organizations, to avoid being labeled anti-Semitic, make a point of supporting Israel more generally and focusing only on the occupation. That’s what Carter is doing, and as Richard says there’s a certain logic to it.

Sometimes, though, the effectiveness argument seems a convenient out for those reluctant to follow the logical trail toward criticizing the whole Zionist enterprise. Can a democracy categorize a fifth of its population as people the state would be better off without? Should Palestinian refugees be allowed to return in numbers that threaten Israel’s Jewish character? Should a one-state outcome be within the spectrum of possibilities? These are touchy questions. Addressing them gets messy, but avoiding them means never getting to fundamentals.

2. Is there any way Israel can remain a Jewish state and give full equality to non-Jewish citizens?

This question is emailed from another reader, who adds that most of the injustices I noted in yesterday’s posting “don’t seem to be inherent in the Zionist vision vision for Israel — even if that’s the way things are now.”

Like the questioner, I too can “imagine East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, while the rest of Jerusalem was the capital of Israel. Similarly, one could imagine Israel adhering to its own laws about settlements; running bus service to Rahat; and the like.”

Beyond some of these basics, however, full equality seems to me impossible so long as the term “Jewish state” means anything beyond the symbolic and historic. Other countries have official religions. My impression is that those that are arguably democratic either don’t give much substance to the official recognition or don’t have a large proportion of non-favored citizens. When a national religion really takes on substance, democracy falls behind.

Maybe Israel will someday write a constitution guaranteeing full legal equality, and maybe it will even enforce anti-discrimination laws. That might work so long as Jews remained the large majority. But Jews will not remain the large majority for long. Even today, in the north, Arabs slightly outnumber Jews, and that’s the direction the country as a whole is moving. As long as this demographic change is perceived as a national crisis demanding government action, as long as the state’s fundamental connection is to Jews abroad rather than to Arabs who live there, I don’t think equality is possible. If it does come about, then someday Israel will not be a Jewish state.

I’ve written before about my own early Zionist vision. That was 40 years ago, even before the occupation began, when at least some segments of Zionism were still humanitarian, utopian, socialist, even critical of Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens. Those days are over, though. That Zionist segment is barely recognizable, its adherents either dead or bitter, their ideological heirs as likely to emigrate as to try to change Israel’s direction. They can tinker, but they can’t really change their country’s course.

Behind this question lies a different set of questions: Was Zionism wrong from the beginning? Were those humanitarian Zionists of old really any different from the right-wingers who demanded Both Sides of the Jordan, or were they only fooling themselves? Did a Jewish State ever make sense? What’s the right way to answer these questions — What’s best for the Jews? What’s just? What’s possible?

3. In evaluating checkpoints, roadblocks, and similar Israeli mechanisms, which is more important, stopping inconvenience (and even the unnecessary humiliation) for non-violent citizens, or stopping the unnecessary murder of many non-violent citizens?

This question, from a relative back in December in response to a posting on checkpoint difficulties, is an obvious one, routinely asked by those who defend Israeli policy. Several quick points for now.

First, although the checkpoints and separation wall and all the rest might be justified if they were built on Israel’s side of the border, their placement inside the West Bank makes the defensive justification less convincing. Instead of defending Israel, many of these barriers defend Jewish settlers living on stolen land in the West Bank in violation of international and even Israeli law and make it impossible for ordinary Palestinians to travel from one part of the West Bank to another, from one village to the next. So the inconvenience and humiliation of Palestinians often seem in practice to be less defensive than offensive, part of the structure of control.

Second, as I’ve noted before, many barriers can be gotten around by anyone willing to take a detour. Car thieves do it all the time. So do taxi drivers with East Jerusalem license plates. So do hikers. Given the degree to which a determined Palestinian can get across the border if they do a little planning, a system that makes life miserable for millions of Palestinians who just want to get to work is overkill and is easier to explain as intentionally disruptive than as necessary for defense.

And third, the essence of the hard question, ignoring what I’ve said so far: Is it justified to use a security measure that effectively saves innocent lives if it also makes ordinary life impossible for other innocents? I don’t think this is the situation that actually exists, but it is the situation Israel’s supporters perceive, so it’s worth thinking about.

One response is that most of Israel’s supporters don’t really understand how miserable life under occupation really is. It goes far beyond inconvenience and humiliation, though humiliation breeds enough resentment to feed hostility for generations to come.

If it’s a balancing test, then how many lives can be made miserable on one side to prevent one death on the other? A hundred? A thousand? A million? How do we count those who die at checkpoints because they’re not allowed to pass through to a hospital? Those unable to farm their land? Those who have to quit school or who are fired from jobs they can no longer get to?

Supporters of Israel see little of this, or claim that these Palestinian costs are self-inflicted, or that saving even one life justifies everything. It’s easier to think this, I suppose. Israelis fear for their children’s lives, worry about suicide bombings. All these things are terrible. Anything that promises to stop it must be done.

Anything? Given the disparity in death rates, the disparity in power, Palestinians have even more to worry about when their children go out the door. This is something Israel’s supporters don’t balance into the equation. They don’t see Israel’s own soldiers as oppressors and killers. Palestinians know better.

Israel’s supporters also don’t wonder much, beyond stereotypes and superficialities, why Palestinians see Israel as their enemy. Murder is murder. Innocents are innocent. That’s easy to say, and understandable, but if that’s the only response it leads nowhere. It assumes one side is all Good, the other side all Evil. It assumes one side counts, the other doesn’t. It assumes harsher and harsher measures are always justified.

An end to violence requires an end to the conditions that spawn it. That’s an issue for another day.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 4:17 am and is filed under Israel/Palestine, Law/Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.