"Jewish and democratic"? The price of a national self-deception

Journal of Palestine Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 64-74

  Rouhan, Nadim N ^a,b  

^a GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Arab Ctr for Appl Social Res   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM; DEMOCRACY; NATION STATE; STATE BUILDING;

ASIA; EURASIA; ISRAEL; MIDDLE EAST;

EID: 33645161948     PISSN: 0377919X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/jps.2006.35.2.64     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Azmi Bishara, From the Jewish State to Sharon: A Study in the Contradictions of Israeli Democracy [in Arabic] (Ramallah: Muwatin, 2005);
2. Nadim Rouhana, "Israel and Its Arab Citizens: Predicaments in the Relationship between Ethnic States and Ethnonational Minorities," Third World Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1998), pp. 277-96;
3. Nadim Rouhana and As'ad Ghanem, "The Crisis of Minorities in Ethnic States: The Case of Palestinian Citizens in Israel," International, Journal of Middle East Studies 30, no. 3 (1998), p. 321;
4. Nadim Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997);
5. Sammy Smooha, "Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype," Israel Studies 2, no. 2 (1997), p. 198;
6. Oren Yiftachel, "The Concept of Ethnic Democracy and Its Applicability to the Case of Israel," Ethnic and Racial Studies 15, no. 1 (1992), p. 125.
7. Baruch Kimmerling, "Religion, Nationality, and Democracy in Israel" [in Hebrew], Zmanim 50-51 (Dec. 1994), pp. 116-31.
8. I am using the term "ethno-religious" because the "public good" includes not only the Israeli Jews but also Jews who do not consider themselves as a national group (like the Jews in the U.S., for example) and non-Jews who, based on the closeness of their kin relationship to Jews, are entitled to Israeli citizenship according to Israel's Law of Return.
9. This way of thinking has even been embraced in an arena that should be the most liberal of all: Israeli universities. Ha'Aretz reported in November 2003 that the heads of Israeli universities decided to abandon an experimental admissions procedure when they realized that the main beneficiaries were not Jewish youngsters from low-income development towns, but rather Arabs. Relly Sa'ar, "Universities Return to Aptitude Exams to Keep Arabs Out," Ha'Aretz, 27 November 2003.
10. See Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State.
11. While the program of "state for all its citizens" has been discussed or brought up by some academics and political groups over the years, it was most compellingly articulated by Azmi Bishara, the leading Arab intellectual and the leader of the National Democratic Assembly, an Arab party which made this program central to its political discourse. See Azmi Bishara, The Ruptured Political Discourse and Other Studies [in Arabic] (Ramallah: Muwatin, 1998).
12. I have so far avoided using the word "project" to refer to the various efforts mentioned in this chapter in order to avert the implication that these efforts were simultaneously predesigned or precoordinated. I use the term here to refer to the forcefulness of the various efforts, particularly when they are bearing fruit at the same time, and also to imply that from now on these efforts can indeed become a project, in the sense that some informal feedback and mutual reinforcement among the various institutional efforts can naturally create the effect of a national effort.
13. For a concise catalog of some of these realities in the last five years, see Mada's three annual political monitoring reports: "Citizens without Citizenship" (July 2003);
14. "Israel and the Palestinian Minority 2003: Mada's Second Annual Political Monitoring Report" (November 2004);
15. and "Israel and the Palestinian Minority 2004: Mada's Third Annual Political Monitoring Report" (August 2005).
16. Ruth Gavison, "Jewish and Democratic," Adalah's Review 2 (2000), p. 32;
17. Ruth Gavison, "Jewish and Democratic? A Rejoinder to the 'Ethnic Democracy' Debate," Israel Studies 4, no. 1 (1999), p. 44;
18. Amnon Rubenstein and Alexander Jacobson, Israel and the Family of Peoples [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Schocken Books, 2003).
19. Ruth Gavison, "Implications of Seeing Israel as a Jewish (and Democratic) State" [in Hebrew], Discussion Paper no. 383 (Center for the Study of Rationality, Hebrew University, Jerusalem), p. 18 (emphasis added).
20. Smooha, "Ethnic Democracy"; Sammy Smooha, "The Model of Ethnic Democracy: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State," Nations and Nationalism 8, no. 4 (2002), p. 475.
21. See Smooha's presentation at "The Middle East in 2005" conference organized by UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies on 20 May 2005.
22. See Leslie Evans, "Future of Iraq, Israel-Palestine Conflict, and Central Asia Weighed at International Conference," online at www.isop.ucla.edu.
23. See, for example, Oren Yiftachel, "'Ethnocracy': The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine," Constellations 6 (1999), p. 364;
24. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, interviewed in Lily Galili, "A Jewish Demographic State," Ha'Aretz, 28 June 2002;
25. Gary Sussman, "The Challenge to the Two-State Solution," Middle East Report 231 (Summer 2004);
26. Ilan Pappé, "Power and History in the Middle East," Logos 3, no. 1 (2004).
27. See, for example, Menahem Hofnung, Democracy, Law and National Security in Israel (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 1996);
28. Avner Yaniv, ed., National Security and Democracy in Israel (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner, 1993);
29. Gabriel Sheffer, "Has Israel Really Been a Garrison Democracy? Sources of Change in Israel's Democracy," Israel Affairs 3, no. 1 (1996), pp. 13-38;
30. Alon Pinkas, "The Impact of the 1967 Occupation of Territories on Institutional Democracy in Israel" in E. Kaufman, S. Abed, and R. Rothstein, eds., Democracy, Peace, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynn Reiner, 1993).
31. See Mada's Web site page (www.mada-research.org) for some information on this official effort and in particular on the debates organized by Mada on the "Constitution and the Arab Minority."
32. This charge about the IDI cannot be made lightly. Obviously it requires some investigation into the IDI's constitutional activities and the role it assigns to Arab participants. For such a preliminary investigation, see Nadim N. Rouhana, "'Constitution by Consensus': By Whose Consensus?" Adalah Newsletter 7 (November 2004);
33. Nadim N. Rouhana, "The Jewish Institute for Ethnic Democracy: A Response to the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI)," Adalah Newsletter 9 (January 2005).
34. See the "Letter Regarding the Current Constitution-making Process" sent on 30 March 2005 to MK Michael Eitan, head of the Knesset's Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee, by the author and Nimer Sultany after they participated in a meeting of that committee, available online at www.mada-research.org.
35. See Nadim Rouhana and Nimer Sultany, "Redrawing the Boundaries of Citizenship: Israel's New Hegemony," JPS 129 (Autumn 2003), p. 5.
36. The international community's unquestioning acceptance of Israel as Jewish and democratic also helps the entrenchment of this self-deception. Reasons for this international attitude aside, it leaves the burden of depicting the self-deception on those who pay its price the most - the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
37. See Nadim Rouhana and Areej Sabagh-Khoury "Force, Privilege, and the Range of Tolerance," in Hanna Herzog and Kinneret Lahad, eds., Knowledge and Silence: On Mechanisms of Denial and Repression in Israeli Society [in Hebrew], (Jerusalem: The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 2004).
38. See also Albert Memmi's description of the privileges of the colonizer and his argument that all colonizers enjoy the privileges, including even those who disagree with the system: Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).
39. See State Commission of Inquiry into the Clashes between Security Forces and Israeli Citizens in October 2000, A Report, Vol. 1 [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Governmental Press, September 2003), p. 60.
40. Prime Minister Sharon answered an Arab Knesset member who asked him about citizenship as follows: "All the rights over the Land of Israel are Jewish rights. In the Land of Israel, all the rights must be given to the people who live here. That is the difference between rights over the Land and rights in the Land" (The 333rd sitting of the Fifteenth Knesset, 22 July 2002). This quote, which is most probably accepted by mainstream Israeli thought, reflects the same idea in a different way.
41. See note 2 for an explanation on the use of the term "ethno-religious."
42. See Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977);
43. for the application of this model to Israel, see Nadim N. Rouhana, "The Option of Binational State" in Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, As'ad Ghanem, and Ilan Pappé, eds., Seven Roads: Theoretical Options for the Status of Arabs in Israel [in Hebrew] (Givat Haviva Institute of Peace Studies, 1999).
44. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1970).
45. See note 7.
46. See Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, in particular the chapter "The Colonizer Who Refuses."
47. See Nimer Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel, 2003), pp. 65-84. See in particular the case of Azmi Bishara.