Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Israel's 'national suicide'

Mark LeVine - Israel's 'national suicide'
The "Palestinian demographic bomb" is a myth created to continue 
discrimination against Palestinians and Israeli-Arabs.
Last Modified: 16 Jan 2012 15:09
 
Irvine, California - Say what you will about Israel's High Court of 
Justice, it knows how to name a decision.
 
In titling last Wednesday's legal decision, upholding the controversial 
Citizenship Law that prevents Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens 
from living in Israel "Human rights are not a prescription for national 
suicide", the court's majority well summed up the existential 
predicament Israel faces today - indeed, has always faced - as it 
attempts to be both Jewish and democratic.
 
"National suicide" is, of course, an incredibly loaded term in the 
Israeli context. In the historical shadow of the Holocaust, Chief 
Justice Asher Grunis's appellation immediately raised the spectre of an 
existential threat to the Jewish people, or nation (Am Yisrael), being 
posed by the mere possibility of Palestinian Arabs joining Israeli 
society through marriage.
 
Right-wing lawmakers such as National Union chairman Ya'acov Katz have 
declared that the law would protect Israel from "the threat of being 
flooded with two-to-three million Arabs from outside its borders". But 
such claims are utterly nonsensical. The true number, as Grunis and the 
five other Justices who joined the 6-5 majority surely know, would be in 
the low thousands.
 
So why would they argue that allowing Palestinian spouses to become 
Israeli, which as the decision's title clearly admits is a basic human 
right, constitutes an act of "national suicide" for Israeli Jews?
 
To answer this question, we need to consider other possible meanings of 
the national suicide claim. We could imagine that the justices believe 
that recognising such marriages would accelerate the already "dangerous" 
trend towards demographic equality between Jewish and Palestinian 
citizens, based on higher fertility rates among Palestinians.
 
The only problem with this oft-repeated claim is that it's false; the 
growth rate among the Palestinian population of Israel has actually 
slowed in the past decade, while those of religious Jews has exploded.
 
The true meaning of human rights
 
Simply put, the threat of a Palestinian "demographic bomb", as Prime 
Minister Netanyahu has called it, is little more than a contrivance to 
justify the further exclusion of Palestinians from full citizenship 
rights within Israel.
 
But accurate or not, the average Jewish Israeli is likely not spending 
much time parsing the logic or statistical foundations of the High 
Court's decision - because they understand the deeper meaning of the 
argument underlying the decision's title: to extend full human rights to 
Palestinians will lead inevitably to the "national" - that is, political 
- suicide of Israel as a Jewish state.
 
Why?
 
Because to recognise that Jews and Palestinians can become one in the 
most intimate way possible - through love, sex and children - is to open 
Israeli Jews to the possibility that there is nothing essential that 
separates them from Palestinians, that as human beings with deep roots 
in this land, Palestinians have the same human rights as Israeli (or 
diaspora) Jews.
 
Once people accept this reality, Zionism - which, at its core, is based 
on the exclusive Jewish claim of rights to and sovereignty over the Land 
of Israel - loses whatever remains of its moral and political legitimacy.
 
Such a recognition, then, would spell the death knell, not of Israeli 
Jews as people, but of Zionism as a viable political ideology.
 
Indeed, the High Court's decision reveals the paradox at the heart of 
Israel's political foundations - that its very claim to be both 
democratic and Jewish has always been a lie, because no state which 
privileges, through law, power and policies, one group over others 
simply because of the most basic identity (religion, ethnicity or 
gender, for example) of its members, can be democratic in any meaningful 
sense of the term.
 
And so, with all the sadness and regret that such an occasion deserves, 
Justice Grunis declares that "a small group - those men and women in 
Israel's Arab minority who want to marry residents of the region - must 
pay a heavy price for greater security for all Israelis, including their 
own".
 
This language is crucial for two reasons: first, its unquestionable 
racism reveals the cancer at the heart of contemporary Israeli political 
ideology - not among the hilltop settler youth attacking Palestinian 
shepherds or the haredim who spit on pre-teen Jewish girls - but at the 
very heart of Israel's political and juridical establishment.
 
If the highest judge of Israel's highest court can stoop to such a 
decision, then Israel is not heading "down the slope of apartheid", as 
Haaretz editorialised in criticising the decision - it's already there. 
And the chances of it climbing out are slim indeed.
 
Second, the language reveals Justice Grunis' understanding that, thanks 
in good measure to the past six decades of Israeli policy, Palestinians 
in the West Bank and Gaza (not to mention the majority of Palestinian 
refugees) are citizens of nowhere. They are merely "residents" of 
"regions" whose future is still in dispute; a purgatory which Israeli 
courts have played a major role in sustaining through innumerable 
decisions that have legalised and institutionalised - at least as far as 
the Israeli state is concerned - occupation, settlement, expropriation 
of land and resources and the stripping of basic human rights from 
Palestinians, on both sides of the Green Line.
 
Apartness to apartheid
 
This "apart-ness" from Israeli Jews and the full benefits of citizenship 
that accrue only to them, is of course the core principle of apartheid 
as a political and territorial system. And it is the "heavy price" that 
must be paid "for greater security for all Israelis, including their own".
 
"Their", of course, refers only to Israeli Jews - not their Palestinian 
fellow citizens.
 
The indigenous population as the ultimate "other" against which a 
national identity must be forcibly constructed is a basic trope of 
almost every national identity that has emerged on the soil of a 
conquered people. In Israel's case it goes back not merely to the 
beginning of Zionism, but to the construction of the earliest 
Hebrew/Israelite identity in the biblical era, as recounted in the 
Hebrew scriptures.
 
In Before Israel: The Canaanites as Other in Biblical Tradition, one of 
the most underutilised articles on the deep history of the 
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Robert L Cohn argues that there are two 
primary origin myths through which ancient Israelites understood their 
interactions with the native Canaanite population of the land they 
believed to have been promised and given to them by God.
 
The more well-known narrative, which he terms the conquest and 
settlement arche (origin myth), is located primarily in the Books of 
Joshua and Judges. In it, the Canaanites are depicted as the dangerous 
"other" who exist both before and within the People of Israel. To 
justify their dispossession by the People of Israel, they were described 
as "horrendous sinners" and "defilers" of the land; a belief that had to 
be constantly reinforced since the Canaanites were not merely continuing 
to live among Israelites, but were sharing their most intimate practices 
- from sex to worship - with them.
 
Indeed, the cultural and linguistic overlap between Canaanite and 
Israelite societies meant that Israelite religious and political leaders 
had to spend significant energy to ensure that the members of the tribes 
who defined themselves through their exclusive worship of only one God 
kept themselves apart from their polytheistic (or at least more 
theologically syncretistic) neighbours.
 
At the same time, they had to discourage any attempt to see or treat 
Canaanites as part of the Israelite community, or even as a legitimate 
presence in the land the Israelite tribes believed had been given to 
them by God.
 
What is interesting is that there is another, earlier, arche surrounding 
the Canaanites, this one from the Book of Genesis. In these earliest 
descriptions of Canaanites, they are not yet a conquered people, but 
rather the legitimate masters of their land. God's promise to Abram - he 
had not yet become "Abraham" by entering into a direct covenant with God 
- was to give the land to him and his descendants in the future, after 
generations of suffering and servitude at the hands of others.
 
For the moment, as Cohn points out, Abram and his family were "the 
aliens, the wanderers, the endangered", while Canaanites the legitimate 
occupants of the land.
 
This is one of the most powerful, yet disheartening insights of the 
Bible: that without power, without sovereignty and a state or government 
that can wield violence over others, people becomes aliens in their own 
land, or even worse, wanderers outside the bounds or protection of any 
political community. In short, "Palestinian", which is the best 
contemporary description for the existence of Jews during their almost 
2,000 years of exile between the destruction of the Second Temple in 
70CE and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
 
The price of conquest
 
With the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 and the 
initiation of the settlement project by Jews in the Occupied 
Territories, Israelis were faced with a similar problem to that faced by 
their Israelite ancestors: how to keep the conquered population from 
corrupting and weakening the still fragile national identity while 
exploiting the people, territory and resources for the benefit of the 
core community?
 
The deeper and more entrenched the occupation became in the decades 
after 1967, the more integrated Palestinians became into Israeli 
society, and thus the more of a threat they constitute to the "national" 
existence of Israel as a Jewish, yet ostensibly democratic state.
 
Oslo was supposed to solve this problem by creating two ethnically and 
territorially differentiated states. But the peace process and its 
policy of "integration through separation" could neither slow down the 
continued territorial integration of the West Bank with Israel, nor 
offer the kind of globalised cosmopolitan identity that would overcome 
and heal the divisions and imbalances in power and rights between the 
two communities.
 
And so Chief Justice Grunis is right when he warns that Israel is headed 
for "national suicide" if it grants Palestinians the human rights they 
deserve; not physically, but as a viable polity.
 
The main question is whether, in an even more dystopian version of 
Thelma and Louise, Israel will take Palestine with it over the ledge - 
and whether Palestinian national identity imagined as a mirror image of 
an exclusive Zionist Israeli identity has become so weakened and 
corrupted through a century of conflict and occupation that it has 
neither the political nor ideological power to bring independence and 
justice to Palestinians.
 
Not suicide, but reinvention
 
The irony that Justice Grunis fails to note is that the only way for 
Israel to avoid suicide is precisely to respect and protect fully the 
human rights of everyone living in historic Palestine/Eretz Yisrael, 
without exception. It is only through a reinvention of Israeli national 
and political identity based on an open and holistic vision that 
Israelis Jews can ensure they retain their fundamental rights, as the 
country inevitably evolves away from a two-state system and towards a 
common, if conflicted, existence.
 
This is, not surprisingly, the same dilemma facing Israel's Arab 
neighbours. But with the exception of Tunisia, which is just now 
celebrating the first anniversary of Ben Ali's flight from the country, 
no governing elite has been willing to allow the real empowerment of 
their citizens through a real democratic process that is grounded in 
respect for the fundamental human rights of all citizens.
 
Whether in Tel Aviv, Cairo, Manama, Sanaa or Damascus, oppressive 
governments deploying chauvinistic identities that set neighbours 
against each other might survive in the near term. But the very ideology 
and tactics deployed to preserve them will ultimately cost the regimes, 
and the communities they claim to be protecting, their futures.
 
In choosing power over human rights, Israel is merely leading the way 
towards a future that has no place for Zionism or the region's other 
repressive and chauvinistic political systems and identities, against 
which millions of citizens across the Arab world have rebelled in the 
last year.
 
Indeed, if the new year is anything like the one just past, the coming 
Arab Spring will see more and more of the supposed beneficiaries of the 
status quo reaching out beyond their narrow interests to begin the hard 
work of constructing a common future.
 
This will be the lasting legacy of the still inchoate revolutions of the 
last year, and it's a future that not only Arabs and Israelis, but the 
world, has a powerful stake in helping to build.
 
Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting 
researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University 
in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) 
and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).
 
Follow him on Twitter: @culturejamming
 
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/2012114143038377629.html
 
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toh, se ne e' accorta anche Al Jazeera. Finite, dunque, le pippe sulla
bomba demografica.