Return of the rejectionists

A quick history lesson.

1937: The British government recommends partitioning Palestine into an Arab state on roughly 80 percent of the land and a Jewish state on the rest.  The Zionist leadership accept this offer of a mini-state on 20 percent of the territory.  The Arabs refuse.

1947: The UN votes in favour of Resolution 181 – the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, this time roughly 50:50. The Jews accept, the Arabs refuse and, for good measure, declare that they will strangle the new Jewish state at birth.

Beware the prophets of certainty

“There is something very un-Jewish about certainty…” So said the writer and thinker Rabbi Daniel Gordis during an event launching his new book Saving Israel.

I was reminded of his comment as I spent Shabbat a few days later with my friend’s family in Kfar Adumim, a settlement in the West Bank; potentially one of those evacuated as part of a final two-state solution with the Palestinians. Gordis was positing that, whether left-wing or right-wing, it is un-Jewish to be certain that our position is the correct one; we should always question.

The traditional left-wing position is that Kfar Adumim is one of many settlements built on land which Israel itself has not formally made part of the state and which prevent Palestinians from having a state of their own. The traditional right-wing view is that Kfar Adumim was built on territory that the Jewish people have a historical and religious connection to and which was not the sovereign territory of any other people when Israel took control of it in 1967.

Both of these statements are correct. But the certainty with which both sides proclaim their positions masks the more complex reality.

Enemies of the state

Hanin Zouabi is the first female Member of Knesset for an Arab party. Despite this milestone, interviews she has given indicate that Arab women’s issues will not be her main focus. A protégé of the former leader of her Balad Party, Azmi Bishara, it appears that she shares his agenda – to campaign for the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state.

(Bishara is currently living in Jordan to escape his arrest by Israeli security services on charges of espionage and aiding enemies of the state, specifically Hizballah.)

Some 20 percent of the population of Israel is Arab, almost 1.5 million people. The vast majority of them are law-abiding and, though they frequently voice opposition to Israeli policies in the territories, the number of Israeli Arabs that have been involved in supporting or perpetrating acts of terrorism is tiny. Nevertheless, when prominent figures in the Arab community, like MKs, use their public platform as a pulpit from which to support antisemitic terror organisations and to call for Israel’s demise, it creates understandable fear of an Arab “fifth column” and strengthens extremists on the Jewish side.

4 comments on the election...

1. Yisrael Beiteinu and ‘loyalty to the state’

Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu claim that their policy of demanding that all Israeli citizens sign a pledge of “loyalty to the state” is not racist because while they have Israelis Arabs in mind with this proposal, it is not based on their ethnicity but their behavior – their suspected disloyalty. In this case, I wonder whether certain Jewish Israelis would also have a problem pledging their loyalty to the state. I am thinking in particular of those extremist West Bank settlers who insist that the democratically elected government of Israel has no authority over them because they answer only to God and His interpreters, their Rabbis. Would those residents of Hebron who attacked Israeli soldiers and their Rabbis who called Olmert and Barak enemies of Judaism be regarded as loyal to the State under Lieberman’s definition? And would those Charedim who regard Yom Haatzmaut and Yom Hazikaron as irrelevant to them be able to sign a loyalty pledge in good conscience?

And so it is war...

The Israeli public has rarely been a dutiful amen chorus for its political leaders, to say the least. Israel’s hyper-active democracy involves frequent demonstrations attacking the government of the day from the left and the right. Public opinion led to commissions of inquiry into the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and more recently, the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Twenty-five years ago massive public protests against government policy during the First Lebanon War led to the removal of Defence Minister Ariel Sharon.

All of this makes the overwhelming public support for this campaign against Hamas in Gaza all the more notable. A few days before the attack began, the left-wing Meretz Party – unwaveringly committed to a negotiated two-state deal with the Palestinians – called for military action against Hamas.

Israel has had enough.

Swapping coffins for murderers

Today was Israel’s blackest day since I arrived some seven months ago. The ‘prisoner swap’, painstakingly thrashed out between Israel and the Lebanese terrorist group Hizballah reached its macabre conclusion. The two soldiers abducted by Hizballah almost exactly two years ago were returned to Israel, and Israel returned to the Lebanese convicted murderer Samir Kuntar and four Hizballah gunmen captured during the 2006 war sparked by the abduction.

Except, of course, the two Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, returned to their homeland in coffins.

It has been quite extraordinary witnessing the debate generated by this saga. Should Israel release the murderers of its citizens in return for dead soldiers? Indeed, should Israel release murderers at all - whether the soldiers are alive or dead? Should the entire principle, which the State of Israel has adhered to throughout its 60 years of existence, of placing the return of its soldiers over almost all other moral concerns, be abandoned?