The Resurrection of Zionism is Racism
By Avi Davis
July 17, 2002
Among the smear tactics and efforts to discredit the Jewish state
by it enemies, there is one golden oldie that never seems to die.
Much like the blood libel that has attached to the Jewish people
since the Middle Ages, the Zionism is racism canard clings to
life, resuscitated by Israel's foes whenever an appropriate opportunity
presents itself.
The latest opportunity for use of the slur came this week when
the cabinet voted 15-2 to approve the establishment of exclusively
Jewish towns in the Galilee. Yet like most controversies involving
Israel, the truth has become so muddied with fiction that an accurate
chronology of the events leading to this would-be legislation
has been lost .
The background to the decision is as follows: In September 1999
Adel Ka'adan, an Arab citizen of Israel, appealed to the High
Court of Justice against the against the State of Israel and the
Jewish Agency, in which he claimed that the Homeowner's Association
of Katzir, a communal settlement in the Galilee, had refused to
accept his family in the settlement on the grounds of his family
being Arab. In March 2000 the High Court of Justice instructed
the State to consider allocating a plot of land to the Ka'adan
family. In the wake of this decision, the Ka'adan family was referred
to the Katzir Association for admission procedures. The Association
did not accept the Ka'adan family inasmuch the Association believed
that the Ka'adan family did not meet the admissions criteria.
The situation has remained unchanged during the past several months.
For many years the growing demographic ratio of Jews to Arabs
has been of concern to all Israeli governments - both right and
left, and in the wake of the High Court decision, Knesset member
Rabbi Chaim Druckman has proposed to introduce a bill that would
mandate the creation of all-Jewish towns in the Galilee.
The firestorm unleashed by the cabinet approval of the bill was
immediate. Within a day there were front page stories in the Los
Angeles Times and News York Times, vitriolic attacks from Shimon
Peres and Benyamin Ben-Eliezer and even a condemnation from a
long retired (and silent) Benny Begin, the son of the former prime-minister.
All lacerated the bill as undemocratic.
But it is only fair to present the other side of the story. A
Jewish resident of Katzir, Gil Ronen, told reporters that the
Arab family's motives in wanting to move to the Galilee town were
clearly of a provocative nature: "They played soccer during
the sounding of the siren on Memorial Day, they would walk around
with reporters and tell us that they plan to get rid of us in
democratic ways and said they would demand to build a mosque,
and the like..."
That Arab governments' wish to take advantage of Israel's weakening
demographic position in the Galilee has been made clear by numerous
statements from both Palestinian Authority representatives and
Arab leaders. In November 2001, Minister for Communications Imad
Faluji, speaking in Ramallah, urged Arabs to buy land in the Galilee
, "wherever and whenever we can so that in ten years we will
control the areas." The leader of Hizbullah in Lebanon, Shiekh
Hasssan Nasrallah was reported in April of this year urging Israeli
Arabs to " build on their land, even you don't own it, so
that the Zionists do not have access to it."
The decision comes in the wake of the October 2000 Arab uprising
in the Galilee in which 13 Arabs - all Israeli citizens, were
killed during a three day long riot. This spurred much soul searching
in Israel. The deaths had many on the left decrying the failure
of Zionism to fulfill its promise, as offered in Israel's own
Declaration of Independence, " to ensure complete equality
of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective
of religion, race or sex." The argument ran that discriminatory
practices of the Israeli government had transformed Israeli Arabs
into a fifth column and it characterized the riots as a natural
outcome of State-sponsored
prejudice.
One has to wonder how a more tainted point of view could be adduced.
Racism in the Middle East, is, after-all, a relative concept.
For compared to their brethren in surrounding countries, Israel's
Arabs literally swim in human and political rights. The freest
Arab press in the Middle East exists in Israel. Israeli Arabs
have equal voting rights with Israelis and it is one of the few
places in the Arab world where women have the right to vote. Arabs
currently hold 10 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. Israeli Arabs
have also held various government posts, including one who served
as Israel's Consul-General in Atlanta. Ariel Sharon's cabinet
includes the first Arab minister, Salah Tarif, a Druze who serves
as a minister without portfolio. Arabic, like Hebrew, is an official
language in Israel. More than 300,000 Arab children attend Israeli
schools. Today, there are also hundreds of Arab schools whereas
at the time of Israel's founding, there was only one Arab high
school in the entire country.
None of these rights seem to have made an impression on certain
members of the Israeli left or the international media. That is
because they refuse to view Israeli democracy as a unique historical
experiment but choose instead to compare it with the democratic
traditions of the far more developed political culture of the
United States. There the concepts of justice for all, and equality
before the law have become enshrined as cardinal principles of
democracy and it is tantamount to heresy to challenge them.
But it is questionable whether Israel fits or should be made to
fit into the category of an absolute democracy. Surrounded by
enemies whose political systems are demonstrably undemocratic,
forced to fight five major wars to defend its territory, the State
of Israel, should , in fact, be viewed as a qualified democracy,
a State in which the defense and protection of its majority population
and the need to preserve the Jewish character of the only country
to which Jews en -masse have recently been welcomed, supersede
the exigencies of full democracy. It cannot be forgotten that
it took the United States a catastrophic civil war and then an
anguished 100 year battle for civil rights to achieve its current
level of democratic pluralism. If democracy therefore obeys its
own rules of evolution, surely the Israelis should be cut some
slack in order to grow their own fledgling experiment in Jewish
democracy into maturity.
For that reason High Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak was wrong
to proclaim at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem in June,
that his decision to permit the Arab purchase of a home in Katzir
was " a Zionist ruling in the true sense of the term."
Zionism is clearly not racism but equally it does not conform
to the indicia of absolute democracy. Certainly Israel must protect
its minorities, but that does not mean that it should willfully
surrender for the sake of an idealized concept of democracy, the
founding and primary principle of Zionism itself - the establishment
of a Jewish home in the ancestral Jewish homeland.
