While the American Jewish Left was busy losing the debate over Gaza, Israeli parliamentarians tried to kick the major Arab parties out of the Knesset. American Jews must focus on supporting the democratic rights of all Israelis, before it’s too late.
As Israeli soldiers attacked Gaza last month, advocacy groups tussled over the right to define the American Jewish response. It was the first major Israeli military action since the spring launch of J Street, the left-wing pro-Israel lobbying group, and the hawkish institutions that have traditionally represented the American Jewish community were eager to reassert themselves. J Street struck first, with a statement arguing that “real friends of Israel recognize that escalating the conflict will prove counterproductive” and that “neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a monopoly on right or wrong.” The Reform movement hit back with an op-ed in the Forward by movement head Rabbi Eric Yoffie calling J Street “profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment.” The Anti-Defamation League backed Yoffie up with a survey suggesting that American Jews were nearly unanimous in their support of the war.
While the ADL survey was bogus (conclusions were based on leading questions like, “Thinking specifically of the current conflict…are your sympathies more with Israel or Hamas?) the results don’t seem so far off base. From the synagogue steps to the JCC basketball courts to the phone lines with our parents, it’s clear that J Street didn’t win this round. The bombing and ground invasion of Gaza fit smoothly into the narrative that American Jews have traditionally used to justify Israeli state violence: Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, was acting in self-defense against a dangerous and authoritarian enemy. J Street seeks to introduce a critical perspective into the Jewish debate over Israel, but the Gaza conflict played out in ideological terrain firmly controlled by the Jewish right.
The security of Israel is the particular obsession of the generation of American Jews that came of age between the triumph of the Six Day War and the near-tragedy of the Yom Kippur War. The boomers’ inability to grasp the strategic importance of Israeli military restraint is the dual product of their parents’ experience in Eastern Europe and their undiminished thrill at the novelty of Jewish power. Until they hand over the reigns to a more sensible generation, initiatives like J Street may not be able to muster enough support to force the United States government to play a constructive role in reforming Israeli security policy.
That doesn’t mean that we should sit on our hands while we wait for our parents to retire. Incidents in the Israeli Central Elections Committee during the Gaza war brought to light a crisis of democracy in Israel that deserves attention from American Jews. While all eyes were on the southern border, Knesset members from every major Jewish party voted to bar two of the three Israeli Arab parties from running in the February elections, even though it was apparent that the evidence presented fell far short of the standards for disqualification set by the High Court. The decision was quickly overturned, but the message was clear: respect among Israeli politicians for the democratic rights of the Arab minority is quickly fading. In a state that constantly fights comparisons to apartheid South Africa, the vote should raise serious questions about the limits of American support for Israel. While our generation may have to wait to have a say in the American debate over Israel’s security policy, there’s an immediate need for our support of the democratic rights of the Israeli Arabs. Otherwise, we risk losing Israel altogether.
While the exclusion of political parties is undemocratic in principle, Israel is not the only democratic state with provisions to keep parties off the ballot in extreme circumstances. There are certainly times when such exclusions are justified; for instance, Israel’s 1988 disqualification of Kach, Rabbi Meir Kahane‘s radical anti-Arab party, or Spain’s disqualification of Herri Batasuna, the political wing of the Basque terrorist group ETA. But cavalier use of the disqualification law amounts to a grave threat to the democratic right to representation.
The Knesset’s Central Elections Committee can ban a party that is found to incite racism, support armed violence against Israel, or oppose the “existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” Balad and United Arab List-Ta’al, the two Arab lists in question, were accused of supporting violence against Israel and opposing the Jewish nature of the state. From the start of the proceedings, it was clear that the ban would be overturned by the High Court. In overruling a similar attempt against Balad in 2003, the Court set high standards for disqualification, ruling that a party must be proven to have taken serious, repeated action towards the realization of its extremist goals. There was never any chance that such a standard would be met in this case. Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz called the evidence supporting the disqualification “flimsy.” At the hearing, Balad members were accused of having maintained relationships with the party’s founder, Azmi Bishara, who fled Israel in 2007 while under investigation for aiding Hezbollah during the 2006 war. Members of Balad and UAL-Ta’al were accused of making statements in support of a Palestinian right to armed resistance, and in some cases calling on Israeli Arabs themselves to take up arms. Troubling? Perhaps. But nothing approaching the active violence against the state that would satisfy the Court’s requirements.
The argument for excluding the parties on the basis of their opposition to the Jewish nature of the state is particularly pernicious. The clause allowing exclusion on such grounds is itself controversial. A 2005 policy paper by the Israel Democracy Institute called it undemocratic, arguing that it limited debate over identity of the state and lacked parallels in other young democracies. Given that the clause exists, the interpretation implied by excluding an Arab party based simply on the platform that Israel should not be a Jewish state does nothing but silence legitimate dissent. At the Central Elections Committee meeting, UAL-Ta’al MK Ahmed Tibi said, “We never said that we don’t recognize the State of Israel. We are part of it, but we will never accept Zionism, which is an ideology that aspires to banish us from our homes.” We might disagree, but it’s far from an opinion that falls outside the spectrum of legitimate political perspectives.
That the High Court overturned the ban against UAL-Ta’al and Balad is irrelevant. The vote was a wartime gesture of intimidation against the Arab minority, a warning from Likud, Kadima, and Labor; all of whose representatives supported the bans of one or both of the parties; that the Israeli Arab’s democratic rights are provisional.
As the American Israeli writer Bernard Avishai shows in his recent book The Hebrew Republic (Harcourt, 2008), the Arab minority in Israel has long held the short end of the democratic stick. While Israel’s Declaration of Independence guaranteed equality regardless of race or religion, no such explicit guarantees were included in Israel’s Basic Laws, and Avishai writes that the legal protections against ethnic and racial discrimination are weak. As a result, it’s extremely difficult for Arabs to purchase land, disproportionately few fill civil service jobs, and Arab towns suffer from a lack of infrastructural funding.
That said, Israeli Arabs have been represented in the Knesset since 1949. The importance of the Israeli Arab MKs was brought into stark relief in the days after the ban was passed, when representatives of Balad threatened to establish a separate Palestinian parliament within Israel. Such a split is in tune with the positions of the most extreme elements in the Israeli Arab political sphere. The effect would be to drive a deeper wedge between the Arab and Jewish populations, and the consequences would be two-fold: first, the Israeli Arabs would lose their voice in the government. Second, Israel would lose its democratic legitimacy.
The specter of the apartheid comparison has haunted Israel since before the fall of South Africa’s National Party. Zionist intellectuals have been able to mount convincing rebuttals based in no small part on the Israeli Arab role in the political process. If the Arab parties were disqualified or harassed into abstention, and if there were no Arab representation in the Knesset, it would be difficult argue with those who called Israel an apartheid system.
As strategically and morally flawed a circumstance as that would be, it’s probably not far from the intentions of the extreme-right Israeli politicians who spearheaded the effort to ban the two parties. Chief among them is Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beitenu. Lieberman, who was once a member of Kach, ran his Knesset campaign on a platform obsessed with the largely imagined threat of an Israeli Arab fifth column. His trademark is a call for the administration of loyalty oaths to all Palestinian citizens of Israel. Even more extreme is Moshe Feiglin, the leader of the Manhigut Yehudit faction of the Likud party. Feiglin supports creating a council of rabbis with veto power over the Israeli legislature; annexing Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan (yes, Jordan); and requiring that the IDF use only lethal weaponry, a measure intended to result in the slaughter of peaceful Palestinian protesters. An article in the American Prospect by Gershom Gorenberg calls Feiglin’s ideology “the meeting point of fundamentalism and fascism.”
Extreme right-wing politicians have long been a political reality in Israel. Not since Kahane, however, have they enjoyed such electoral success. As of this writing, a week before the Israeli parliamentary contest, Lieberman’s party was polling ahead of Labor. [UPDATE: His party beat Labor by two seats.] Feiglin won the 20th slot on the Likud list in internal party elections, virtually guaranteeing him a seat in the Knesset, but was eventually shoved down the list by embarrassed Netanyahu supporters. In his American Prospect article, however, Gorenberg argues that Feiglin allies occupy many of the Likud list’s top slots.
Even more troubling is the ultra-right’s apparent influence on the overall political atmosphere in the Knesset. In 2003, the motion to disqualify Balad passed narrowly in the Central Elections Committee, with support of 54% of the body. This year, the motion to disqualify Balad received support from 89% of the committee members. An editorial in the Israeli daily Haaretz argued that the vote proved that “Lieberman’s dangerous and anti-democratic worldview has thus succeeded in infecting the centrist stream of Israeli politics.”
The danger is clear. American support for Israel (the so-called “special relationship”) is predicated on shared values, democracy chief among them. American Jews can base their support for Israel on ethnic solidarity when they’re chatting around the Shabbat table, but arguments in the public forum need to rest on a rational foundation. It will be impossible to construct a rational defense of an Israel of loyalty oaths and disenfranchised Arabs.
There’s nothing we can do about the results of an Israeli election, but American Jews do have influence over mainstream Israeli politicians. While J Street spends its time locked in righteous yet futile battles with the boomer establishment over Israel’s use of military force against civilian populations, we need to help turn the influence of the American Jewish community towards convincing Israelis that democratic rights must be extended to all. It’s hard to imagine such an initiatives being met with the same kind of resistance that J Street’s efforts have come up against. Beating back the brewing anti-democratic storm may not feel as pressing as confronting the situations in Gaza and the West Bank, but it is just as vital to the future of the state.
