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September/October 2008
A Democracy Fix for Israel
Clyde Haberman
The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel |
If Israel may be said to possess original sin, it is the founders’ decision to forgo a written constitution. That is a central theme of The Hebrew Republic, Bernard Avishai’s latest dissection of what ails the country he has long viewed with both affection and despair. How different things might have been, Avishai says. After Israel came into being in 1948, it was supposed to have a constitution guaranteeing basic rights and affirming “the principle of the complete equality of all citizens.” But David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, had more pressing concerns, not the least of which was appeasing Orthodox Jewish political parties looking for special status. He needed them to build a working coalition. A written constitution? A nice idea, Ben-Gurion decided, but future generations could deal with it.
Only they didn’t. An Israeli constitution seems destined to be like the arrival of the Messiah: ever in the future. In the meantime, Ben-Gurion’s “surrender,” to use Avishai’s word, has become “a recurrent legal ricochet.” Israel, though unquestionably a democratic state as well as a Jewish state, can hardly be described as a bastion of equal rights.
Israeli Arabs are second-class citizens. They cannot readily own land or buy apartments in the big cities. Institutions like the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund, which seemed destined for extinction with the creation of the state, remain formidable reinforcers of discriminatory practices. Israel’s Arabs are much poorer than its Jews. Their towns are short-changed when the government hands out money for schools, health programs, housing, roads and bridges. Thanks to the Law of Return, a Jew who has spent his entire life in Brooklyn may make aliyah and immediately enjoy more rights and privileges than an Arab whose family has been on the land for generations.
Then, too, there is effective discrimination against secular Jews, who cannot be married, divorced or even buried in the manner they may wish. Orthodox rabbis have a monopoly over these and other rituals; it’s their way or the highway. That also goes for arguably the most fundamental issue of all: defining who is a Jew. Avishai reminds us that the people who live in Israel are not officially recognized as Israelis. They are recorded by the government as being not Israeli nationals but rather members of a particular religious or ethnic group.
Avishai’s solution is to replace the Jewish state with his Hebrew republic. Israel would become a country of all its citizens, an egalitarian society comparable to any country in the European Union. It would have a formal constitution with a Bill of Rights, similar to what had been anticipated in 1948. The Law of Return would disappear. Religion and state would be kept separate, ending rabbinical control over defining Jewish identity and Jewish values. “In a Hebrew republic,” Avishai writes, “rabbis would have to compete for minds and hearts with, say, poets.”
This is the enlightened republic that the early Zionists envisioned, he says. It doesn’t mean that Israel would lose its essential Jewish character. That would endure, he says. Jews would simply lose the privileged treatment they now claim as a birthright. Only Hebrew itself would retain a special status, becoming the official language. Both Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs already speak it. Some Arab authors even prefer it to Arabic. “Look, on the one hand this is the language of the enemy, the conqueror,” Avishai quotes Sayed Kashua, an Israeli Arab writer, as saying. “And yet this is the language that means a kind of freedom for me, more freedom. There are things I can write about in Hebrew that I cannot write about in Arabic.”
Avishai, whose academic career has included professorships at Duke and MIT, expands here on themes that he explored in earlier writings, like his 1985 book, The Tragedy of Zionism. He envisions an eventual federation of Israel, Jordan and Palestine. Of course, that first requires a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, but he offers no guide on how to make that come about. Given the blood that has been shed since the 1993 Oslo accords, and the attitudes that have hardened on both sides, there is scarcely reason for unbridled optimism.
But something has to give, and soon, Avishai says, because time is not on Israel’s side. For starters, “Israel cannot hope to live at war forever with the entire Islamic world.” Then, too, demographic pressures are building in a country where about one-fourth of first-graders are Arabs and another one-fourth are from ultra-Orthodox families—neither group exactly committed to the ideals of the Zionist founders.
One more thing, and it is a big factor: As Avishai sees it, Israel’s modern prosperity, enviable though it is, contains the seeds of its own subversion. It is built increasingly on high-tech prowess and globalization. There is nothing to stop ambitious young Israelis from taking their talents elsewhere. Why should they want to stay in a land of perpetual hatred and political instability? A “disastrous brain drain” is already under way, Avishai says. Even now “the working hypothesis among my friends is that a third of the children of educated Israelis are working abroad.”
Dissenters on this score, however, receive a fair hearing—notably, Benjamin Netanyahu, who may yet have a second turn as prime minister. Netanyahu insists to Avishai that there is scant connection between Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and its economic vitality. The author doesn’t buy it. In perhaps the book’s most memorable succint pronouncement, he says, “Israeli elites cannot hope to have an economy like Singapore’s and a nationalities war like Serbia’s.”
Is this Hebrew republic feasible? More to the point, perhaps, is it even desirable? Many Jews and Arabs—a majority, for all we know—would say absolutely not. Skepticism does seem a reasonable default position. But one has to give Avishai credit for an optimism that eludes others. His new state “could be in place in about one generation,” he says, and most Israelis would not notice much difference in their lives. If you will it, he declares, in effect, it becomes a reality, not a fairy tale. Which, come to think of it, is what another Zionist said more than a century ago. Though it took some time, he eventually proved to be right.
Clyde Haberman, who writes the NYC column for The New York Times, was the newspaper’s Jerusalem correspondent from 1991 to 1995 and again in 2001.