by Noam Chomsky
8. Conflicts within Israel 8.1 Within the Jewish Community
D
uring the war in Lebanon, the conflict between two communities—roughly, the older, West Europe-oriented, wealthier and more educated sectors, and the working class and lower middle class (mostly Sephardic) Jews joined by much of
the youth and by religious-chauvinist elements, many from the recent U.S. and USSR immigrations—became increasingly sharp. In a study of the protest against the war, sociologist Benjamin Beit-Halahmi of Haifa University observed that “it is clear that the opposition to the 1982 war is that of a minority of the Israeli population,” the “elite.” The Sephardic community and the youth were less represented, and in general supported the war—as did some leaders of the traditional peace groups, he notes. The favorable publicity given to the opposition by the press is misleading, since the journalists too tend to belong to the elite. “Opposition to the 1982 war increased even further the alienation of the traditional Ashkenazi elite, which identifies with a progressive tradition in Zionism. This group is in the midst of a process of alienation, which has been growing stronger since 1977 [when Begin’s Likud took power], and each development since then causes this alienation to deepen.” As for the war itself, “the price of the direct military victory and of political and human oppression is paid not only by the vanquished, but by the victors as well.”178
The lines of the conflict were drawn still more sharply after the Lebanon war (see section 7.2 above), a matter to which we return.
8.2 Non-Jews in the Jewish State The conflict between the two communities has long been simmering within Israel. There is, of course, a still deeper internal conflict. Israel has been and remains a vibrant democracy on the western model for its Jewish citizens, but it has always embodied a fundamental contradiction, as noted earlier (see chapter 3, section 2.2.1). Israel is a Jewish state with a minority of non-Jewish citizens. It is not the state of its citizens, but of the Jewish people, those in Israel and in the diaspora. There is no Israeli nationality. While it is commonly argued that Israel is Jewish only in the sense that England is English, so that those who (vainly) insist on the facts are uniquely rejecting the rights of Jewish nationalism, that is a flat falsehood. A citizen of England is English, but a citizen of Israel may not be Jewish, a non-trivial fact, much obscured in deceptive rhetoric.179
The legal structures and administrative practice of the state and society reflect these principles, again, a fact consistently suppressed in the voluminous literature concerning Israel and in particular in admiring left-liberal commentary; and also by Israelis writing for an American audience. Thus Amos Oz asserts that “To this day, only about 5 percent of the land is privately owned; the rest is public property, in one way or another,” including the lands of the kibbutz in which he lives. He presents this fact (the actual figure appears to be about 8%) as one indication that:
...Israel could have become an exemplary state, an open, argumentative, involved society of unique moral standards and future-oriented outlook, a small-scale laboratory for democratic socialism—or, as the old-timers liked to put it, “a light unto the nations.” But at that point, when everything seemed ready for such an emergence, crisis set in.180
The “vision” is being lost, though it may still be resurrected by “a growing tendency on the part of young Israelis” (mythical, to judge by available evidence) to recover “the ideological, ethical and political propositions of the early Zionists.”*
But Oz and others who advance such arguments do not present accurately the “propositions” of the early Zionists—for example, the transfer proposals discussed earlier—or the “one way or another” in which the land remains “public property,” a rather significant matter. Through a complex system of legal and administrative arrangements,
* In the U.S., Oz is regarded as a spokesman for the “peace forces” in Israel. See, for example, Hayden, The American Future, or Oz’s interview with Eugene Goodheart, Partisan Review, #3, 1982. Here he recommends that Israel “make a generous proposal which will no doubt be rejected by the Palestinians right now” (what is should be, he does not say). So far there has been a firm and consistent rejection by the Palestinians of any such proposals from Israeli moderates and doves.” “There is,” he says, “no Palestinian equivalent to the Israeli Peace Now movement. The “so-called reasonable Palestinians…do hint or suggest that they will accept the idea of partition, accept the existence of Israel under certain terms and are ready to negotiate,” but to their own people, they “are just as extremist as Arafat”—who, in fact, has urged negotiations and a two-state settlement for years, going beyond even the Israeli Peace Now movement (which is vague about these matters), let alone the Labor Party, in a search for a peaceful settlement (see final * in section 4.2.3 above and chapter 3). It is an interesting commentary on left-liberal American intellectuals that this is taken seriously here. Predictably, Oz also grossly misrepresents the positions of critics of Israeli policies. See also chapter 3, note 111.
public land is under the control of the Jewish National Fund, an organization committed to use charitable funds (specifically, tax-free contributions from the United States) in ways that are determined to be “directly or indirectly beneficial to persons of Jewish religion, race or origin.” Much of the development budget is in the hands of the Jewish Agency, which has similar commitments. These and other “national institutions” serve the interests of Jews, not citizens of Israel, 15% of whom are non-Jews. The consequences of these arrangements and others like them for the lives of non-Jewish citizens are considerable,181 putting aside here the activities of these and other “national institutions” in the occupied territories. We would hardly regard similar arrangements in a “White State” or a “Christian State” as an illustration of “unique moral standards” and “democratic socialism” of the highest order. The notorious UN Resolution identifying Zionism as a form of racism can properly be condemned for profound hypocrisy, given the nature of the states that backed it (including the Arab states), and (arguably) for referring to Zionism as such rather than the policies of the State of Israel, but restricted to these policies, the resolution cannot be criticized as inaccurate.
The devices that are used to perpetuate discriminatory practices are sometimes remarkable. For example, the state offers benefits to large families, but some way must be found to ensure that Arab citizens are excluded. The standard method in such cases is to restrict benefits to families of those who have served in the armed forces, hence not to Arab families. But there is still a problem, since religious Jews are exempt from army service. The legislation therefore incorporates a special provision for families of students in yeshivas (Jewish religious schools). There are numerous similar examples. It might also be noted that Israel is perhaps the only western democracy in which there is legal discrimination against Jews. To cite one recent example, in 1983 the Knesset again defeated a bill that would have given Reform and Conservative Jews equal rights with those of Orthodox Jews, not a small matter given the role of the Rabbinate in civil life in Israel. 182
Given the founding principles of the state, it is a crucially important matter to maintain a clear distinction between Jews and non-Jews. “The officials of the Ministry of the Interior are very tough with any members of the Israeli minorities who try to change their names, because they are afraid that they may want to try ‘to appear in public as Jews,’ and this may bring about mixed marriages, God forbid,” it is reported in an article critical of these practices. Repeatedly, Arabs have been condemned by the courts for pretending to be Jews. In 1977, an inhabitant of Kafr Kassem was sentenced to a year in prison “for pretending to be a Jew in order to marry a [Jewish] woman,” after “he had tried to convert—but did not succeed.”183 The sentence might have been expected to cause some embarrassment—but apparently did not—in the light of the history of this criminal’s village, where 47 Arabs were murdered by Israeli Border Guards in 1956.184 This was recognized to be a c
rime. The officer held responsible for the orders by the court was fined one piaster (ten cents) for a “technical error.” Gabriel Dahan, who was convicted of killing 43 Arabs in one hour, served just over a year, the longest sentence served, and was then promptly engaged as officer for Arab affairs in Ramle.* Note that his crime was considered by the courts to be
* See Tom Segev. “Kafr Kassem Remembered.” Ha’aretz, Oct. 23, 1981, for a rare report in the Israeli literature, reconstructing the events, which, Segev notes, are not taught in Jewish or Arab schools and are not known to many Israelis. Meir Pail is quoted as saying that “only a pathological hatred of the Arabs” made the massacre possible. Former Prime Minister Sharett said that the massacre “had made one thing clear: To spill Arab blood was permissible for Jews.” Segev reports the attempts to cover up the atrocity, the special
approximately equal in severity to that of the inhabitant of the village who pretended to be a Jew. To cite only one further example, the city of Denver has a sister city: Karmiel, in the Galilee. The citizens of Denver who relax in Karmiel Park are surely unaware that their sister city has excluded Arab citizens of Israel; even a 20-year Druze veteran of the Israeli Border Guards was denied the right to open a business there. Furthermore, this “magnificent example of Zionism at its successful best,” as it is described by an admirer,185 is built on the lands of an Arab village, expropriated under a cynical ruse in the mid-1960s.186 In short, the citizens of Denver are victims of a clever propaganda trick, which can be successful—and is—because of the “ideological support” for Israel noted earlier, which protects it from scrutiny.
Quite generally, when one looks beneath the surface, one finds that the utopian vision has always been seriously flawed. Americans who now write ruefully about contemporary Israel as a “Paradise Lost”187 are victims of considerable delusion and very effective propaganda, though they are right in feeling that much that was praiseworthy in the society, sometimes uniquely so, was lost (as many predicted) as a result of the 1967 military victory. While it is convenient (and not totally false) to shift the blame to Arab intransigence, honesty should compel us to
privileges accorded the prisoners, and their successful subsequent careers, particularly that of Issachar Shadmi, who was in charge and had told the soldiers under his command that “it was ‘better to kill someone’ (or, according to another version, ‘several people’) than to get bogged down by arrests.” The victims had technically violated a curfew, which they knew nothing about since it was imposed after they had left the village for work; they were killed on their return that evening, cold-blooded premeditated murder. On expropriation of the lands of the village, both before and after the massacre, see TNCW. p. 465.
recognize that the primary source lies elsewhere: in the policies of the Labor governments and their successor and the support offered to these policies by the United States, crucially including the attitudes and activities of alleged “supporters of Israel,” who have much to answer for, if truth be acknowledged.
The fundamental internal contradiction in the commitment to a “democratic Jewish State” has always been present, but it becomes more difficult to suppress with steps towards integration of the occupied territories, one reason why the Labor Alignment—more concerned with the democratic socialist image than Likud—has always been opposed to absorbing the Arabs of the occupied territories within the state proper. In the earlier history of Zionism, the issue was sometimes frankly addressed. As noted earlier, it was not until 1942 that the Zionist movement was officially committed to the establishment of a Jewish state. Earlier, its leaders—particularly those from the labor movement that dominated the Palestinian Yishuv (Jewish settlement)—forcefully opposed the concept of a Jewish state on the explicit grounds that “the rule of one national group over the other” is illegitimate. David BenGurion and others declared that they would never agree to a Jewish state, “which would eventually mean Jewish domination of Arabs in Palestine.”188 With the coming of the war and the Nazi genocide, these currents were reduced to a minority, though they persisted until the UN partition resolution of November 1947. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the issues have generally been suppressed while the prospects feared have been realized; and in the U.S., they have been concealed by means that hardly do credit to those responsible.
9. The Zionist Movement and the PLO
I
n the pre-state period, the nuclei of the two present political groupings were in often bitter conflict, in part, class conflict. The Labor Party was a party of Jewish workers (NB: not workers; in fact, it
opposed efforts by the Mandatory government to improve the conditions of Arab workers* while urging a boycott of their labor and produce),189 while the Revisionists, the precursors of Begin’s Herut, were in fact an offshoot of European fascism, with an ideology of submission of the mass to a single leader, strike-breaking, chauvinist fanaticism, and the rest of the familiar paraphernalia of the 1930s.190
9.1 “The Boundaries of Zionist Aspirations” * Few leaders of the pre-state Labor Party were so concerned with justice for the Arabs as Chaim Arlosoroff, who was assassinated in 1933 (by Revisionists, Labor alleged). It is therefore interesting to consider his views on this matter. In a 1932 memorandum to Chaim Weizmann, he wrote that a major problem was that the British administration was “considerate of the sensibilities of the Arabs and Moslems,” and “it would be very hard for them to depart from this practice to the extent of becoming responsive to our demands.” Another problem was that the Mandatory authorities might promulgate “regulations for the protection of tenant farmers,” etc., all harmful to the Zionist enterprise. He therefore proposed “a transition period during which the Jewish minority would exercise organized revolutionary rule.” On the powerful influence of Bolshevik ideas on the Labor Party, particularly its leader David Ben-Gurion, see Yoram Peri, Between Ballots and Bullets. The left wing of the Labor Alignment, Mapam, was predominantly Stalinist until the mid-1950s.
The two factions also differed in their political tactics when the prospects for a Jewish state became realistic. Supporting a British partition proposal of 1937, Labor Party leader David Ben-Gurion stated that:
The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan; one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.191
Ben-Gurion, and the large majority of the Zionist movement, reacted with similar pragmatism to the partition proposal of 1947.
In contrast, even after the state was established in 1948, Menachem Begin declared that: The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel] will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.192
Echoes of these conflicting positions remain today. It might be noted that the “boundaries of Zionist aspirations” in BenGurion’s “vision” were quite broad, including southern Lebanon, southern Syria, today’s Jordan, all of cis-Jordan, and the Sinai.193 This was, in fact, one of Ben-Gurion’s constant themes. In internal discussion in 1938, he stated that “after we become a strong force, as the result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine... The state will only be a stage in the realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion into the whole of Palestine by a Jewish-Arab agreement... The state will have to preserve order not only by preaching morality but by machine guns, if necessary.” The “agreement” that Ben-Gurion had in mind was to be with King Abdullah of Jordan, who would be induced to cede areas of cis-Jordan under his control, while many of the Arab residents would leave.194 Earlier, Ben-Gurion had explained to Arab interlocutors that “our land
” included Transjordan, and that it extended from the Sinai to “the source of the Jordan.”195 In internal discussion he urged that “we do not suggest now to announce the final aim,” which is “far-reaching,” even more so than the aim of those who were opposing partition. “I am unwilling to abandon…the great Jewish vision, the final vision,” he added. This vision, here unspecified in scale, “is an organic, spiritual and ideological component of my Jewishness and my Zionist aspiration,” Ben-Gurion explained.196
Zionist leaders were sometimes quite open about the matter in public discussion. The Twentieth Zionist Congress at Zurich in August 1937 took the official position that “the scheme of partition put forward by the Royal Commission [the British Peel Commission] is unacceptable,” but, nevertheless, the Congress indicated a degree of support for the idea. In particular, Ben-Gurion and Weizmann favored it. In a press interview concerning the deliberations at the Congress, Ben-Gurion explained: