Liberalism, Democracy, and the Jewish State

Liberalism, Democracy, and the Jewish State
By GADI TAUB
The future of the state of Israel is once again a topic of heated public debate. For good reasons: The possibility of a nuclear threat from a hostile Iran is one; deadlock in the peace process in the region, and the chance of a gradual shift into chronic civil war between Israelis and Palestinians, is another. But it has become common in some circles to ask not only whether Israel can survive, but also if it has a right to.
Some commentators believe that "the Jewish Question" that has been buzzing around in the West for some three centuries — the question of how this ancient people, the Jews, should fit into a modern political order — should be reopened. National self-determination for Jews in a state of their own, such critics say, can no longer be part of a morally acceptable answer. That is a telling development. As in the past, Western attitudes to the "Jewish Question" are reliable indications of larger political moods and of the shifting meanings of political concepts.
The first thing one senses about the framing of the topic today is hardly a surprise: the growing unease with nation-states. The horrors of Fascism and Nazism made us all wary of extreme nationalism. Until the 1970s, national-liberation movements in rapidly collapsing Western colonies still reminded the democratic world that nationalism is not always the enemy of liberty but sometimes its ally. But the decline of colonialism and the deterioration of liberation movements into third-world tyrannies, combined with the rise of the European Union and globalization, changed that. The postcolonial era gave rise to a hope of transcending nationalism, and has relegated nationalist sentiments in the West's political imagination to the parties of reaction. Current debates about Israel's future clearly reflect that trend. But they also indicate a less-obvious feature of the antinational mood: a growing rift between liberalism and democracy.
A recent wave of books on the future of Israel offers a glimpse into that tendency. The four discussed here (there are many others) are polemical rather than scholarly, and they are vastly different from one another. One is an autobiographical account, by Daniel Cil Brecher, a German Jew who immigrated to Israel and then back to Europe; another is the work of a French Jewish journalist, Sylvain Cypel, who spent more than a decade in Israel; the third is a fiery anti-Zionist exhortation, by Joel Kovel, a Jewish psychiatrist and now a professor of social studies at Bard College, who challenged Ralph Nader for the presidential nomination of the Green Party; and the last is an analysis of the challenges facing Israel, by Mitchell G. Bard, a pro-Israeli, Jewish-American activist. It is hard to imagine these four authors getting along around one dinner table. But they do share something: All are, to various degrees, uneasy with the idea of national identity.
Unease may be too strong a term for Bard's Will Israel Survive? A trace of discomfort does appear, though, in his understandable anger, as an American, toward those Israelis who insist that if you are Jewish and consider yourself a Zionist, you must immigrate to Israel. Bard's definition of Zionism is considerably more flexible. It includes all who generally sympathize with Israel. That helps sidestep the core of the original ideology: The founders of Zionism thought that under modern conditions, Jews would preserve their identity and sense of "peoplehood" only by shifting from a religious to a modern and national basis. They insisted that Jews have a collective right, like other peoples (as Israel's Declaration of Independence declared), to self-determination. Bard does not object to that idea so much as he is ambiguous about it. His justification of Zionism heavily accentuates anti-Semitism (especially from contemporary fundamentalist Islam) and downplays self-determination. His support of Zionism is thus more negative than positive.
In Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse, Cypel, a senior editor at Le Monde, targets nationalism more directly. In his view, Israel suffers from collective egocentrism. Both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict see themselves as victims, and both deny the victimhood of the other. The key to any solution is therefore putting an end to denial. But Israel, Cypel thinks, has gone the opposite way: It has built a wall, and the wall is about blocking, not seeing, the other side.
Cypel greatly exaggerates denial. He takes little note, for example, of the fact that many of the harsh truths he discusses, and which Israel, he says, denies, were not unearthed from dusty archives by his own journalistic efforts. He relies heavily on works of Israeli scholars and on Haaretz, Israel's single highbrow daily newspaper. Those are hardly clandestine sources. Contrary to Cypel's assertion that none of the works of the Israeli historian Benny Morris, for instance, appeared in Hebrew until 2000, Morris's seminal The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49 was actually published in Hebrew in 1991 and stirred a lengthy, high-profile debate in the Israeli popular news media. For someone who spent more than a decade in Israel, Cypel, now based in Paris, is curiously out of touch with Israeli politics.
It is still true that Israel's public, like Palestine's, dwells more on its own pains than on those of the other side. That is probably true of all conflicts, but Cypel nevertheless makes it the center of his analysis of this one. On that basis, he reasons that any resolution must first cure both peoples of the inherent collective egocentrism of their national narratives. Cypel, however, is a Frenchman, and France is both strongly republican and decidedly national. He also remembers the Algerian movement of national liberation. So he isn't easily tempted to say that doing away with the desire for national independence is the key to peace — or the necessary precondition for democracy. Instead he classifies Israeli and Palestinian nationalism as the wrong kinds of nationalism. The problem: They are "ethnic" national identities. Cypel does not make clear exactly how the term "ethnic" applies to Israel's national identity. But he clearly has in mind the contrast with France's brand of republican nationalism, which formally (although not necessarily in social practice) equates citizenship with national identity: If you receive French citizenship, you automatically acquire, at least in theory, a French identity.
A Stranger in the Land: Jewish Identity Beyond Nationalism, Brecher's book, is written in a more minor key, and details his personal search for an escape from the contradictions of identity. History and political analysis are woven into biography here. Brecher's parents fled Europe in the great upheavals of World War II, wound up in Israel, but never felt at home there. They finally settled in Germany in 1953. Their son, Daniel, however, was uncomfortable as a German Jew and immigrated to Israel in 1976. But its very nature as a national Jewish state was jarring to Brecher. His own humanistic view was shaped by the experience of "a minority group harmed by nationalism," and so he was uneasy with what he saw as Israel's drive for an "ethnically pure society." Falling out of love with Israel began with minor political dissent, greatly exacerbated after he served in a reserve unit in the first Lebanon war (which began in 1982). Brecher's stationing seems in retrospect singularly ironic: He served with other academics in a lecturers' unit assigned to raise soldier morale.
The book's tone is uniformly morose. But it does have a happy ending, with the author moving back to Europe and finding his home in the cosmopolitan environs of Amsterdam. The personal is also the political here: Brecher's reconciliation with himself, he believes, also applies to Israel. Israel should transcend nationalism and become "a state of all her citizens," he says, one where "the rights and development of the individual citizen are protected and promoted regardless of race and religion, where freedom and human rights stand in the foreground rather than the dogmas of Zionism."
In Joel Kovel's Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, nationalism is even more clearly equated with evil. Kovel is a man of unequivocal judgments, and his verdict on Zionism, as a particularly bad kind of nationalism, is fierce. Israel is, he says, "absolutely illegitimate," a "monstrous venture" of "state-structured racism." The history of the Zionist creed interests Kovel very little, since the problem, in his view, begins with Judaism. Judaism, he says, always had two opposing tendencies: exceptionalism and universalism. Zionism is a direct descendant of the exceptionalistic side. Its origins are in the idea that the Israelites were God's chosen people. According to Kovel's slapdash Hegelianism, all forms of identity are negations of others: If they do not negate negation, they do not achieve universalism, and they are therefore malignant. Nationalism in general, and Zionism in particular, fail on that count. They define themselves by excluding others; thus they violate nothing less than natural justice (which Kovel more or less equates with liberalism).
A more vigorous editor would have done the book a great deal of good by tuning down Kovel's shrill evangelical tone and maybe counseling against zoological metaphors. It would have been wiser, for example, not to court charges of racism by comparing Jewish settlers to "those insects who lay an egg in the interior of the prey's body, whence a new creature hatches as a larva that devours the host from within."
But the truth is that Kovel is not a racist, just an absolutist kind of liberal zealot. His crusade for "overcoming" Zionism is militant because there can be no compromise with absolute evil. He strives for complete destruction of Zionism as a creed, by calling first for a blacklist of all those who support pro-Israel lobbies in North America; then for organizing cultural and economic boycotts of Israel; and finally for overwhelming the Jewish majority with returning Palestinian refugees. Only then can reconstruction begin. Kovel would have little truck with the suggestions of a binational state currently circulating. Reconstruction should aim for something like Brecher's non-national liberal democracy.
Before Israel was founded, a Zionist leader who was to become its first president, Chaim Weizmann, said Israel would be Jewish in the same sense that England is English. What is it, then, that makes the idea of a Jewish democratic state seem more contradictory to so many critics today than an English democratic state?
The issue does not seem to be the connection of the state to Judaism as a faith. From its outset, Zionism wrought a secularizing revolution in Jewish identity. That is why most Orthodox Jews initially objected to it. To this day, the large ultra-Orthodox minority in Israel, although it takes an active part in Israel's politics, abhors Israel's national identity. It is still true, however, that Zionism preserved many ties to Judaism as a religion, and often made concessions to the Orthodox. The result is no clear separation between church and state. Is that what singles Israel out as nondemocratic? Probably not. England has a state church, as do Denmark and Norway, and that doesn't seem to constitute evidence of a nondemocratic character. The Greeks identify their religious with their national identity; the Poles don't clearly separate Roman Catholicism from theirs. But those states, too, are considered democratic. Moreover, a strict separation of church and state — as, for example, in France — is not necessarily more egalitarian. France is extremely aggressive toward minorities whose religion has a public dimension (like Muslim women who cover their heads in school). Israel's Muslim minority is, in that respect, better off: Israel has a publicly financed Arab-language school system, for example, and a state-sponsored system of Muslim courts for marriage and family status. Arabic is one of the official languages of the state.
But then there is the Law of Return. The law grants automatic citizenship to immigrating Jews. Is that what makes Israel nondemocratic? Hardly. Many other countries with diasporas have such laws: Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, and Poland, to name a few.
Or is the core of the problem, as Cypel says, that Zionism is an "ethnic" national identity? The term "ethnic democracy" is often used in the controversy over Zionism, ever since the Israeli sociologist Sammy Smoocha coined it to describe Israel in 1996. Smoocha was short of clear on what the term indicates, but he certainly did not mean what today's critics insinuate and what Israeli law clearly forbids: confining full civil rights to Jews only.
Despite repeated usage, it is still not clear why the term "ethnic" is useful for describing Israel, which is far less ethnically homogeneous than, say, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Poland, or Sweden. In what sense does "ethnic" describe the common identity of Israeli Jews from Argentina, England, Ethiopia, Germany, Morocco, Russia, and Yemen? And how does one classify the ultra-Orthodox, a large group that does not share Israel's national identity but is nevertheless Jewish? Are they part of the ethnos but not of the nation? The real dividing lines in Israel are national — between those who do and those who don't share the national Jewish identity. And apart from adding a pejorative ring, substituting "ethnic democracy" for "national democracy" does not accomplish much.
Nor does the existence of national minorities within Israel's boundaries present any unique problem to its democracy. Other nation-states also have national minorities that want to preserve their separate identities: the Basques in Spain and the Germans in Poland, say. Few observers, however, make that grounds for denying the rights of the majority in Poland or Spain to national self-determination. Granted, Israel's situation is peculiarly complicated by the fact that the state is in conflict with the Palestinian nation, to which a minority in Israel belongs. But that, too, is not the root of the intuitive feeling that the Israeli state is inherently malignant. The origin of unease has more to do with four decades of Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank.
The alleged contradiction between "democratic" and "Jewish" is thus, at bottom, a reading of the occupation back into Zionism. Increasingly, Israel's most vehement critics tend to see things this way: Zionism is a blood-and-soil ideology that postulates that the land belongs exclusively to Jews. Therefore the occupation is its natural extension. And so an end to the occupation may alleviate some of the symptoms but not cure the disease. That is why Kovel and Brecher, along with many others, believe that the only way to make Israel fully democratic is to make it non-Zionist — that is, not a nation-state.
It is ironic that such a reading comes at a time when the most important change Israel has undergone is best described as the triumph of Zionism over the occupation. Contrary to the blood-and-soil theory, such a clash was inevitable. For the founders of Zionism, the idea of self-determination preceded — logically, and often historically — the decision to realize it in Zion. They considered Argentina, Australia, the Crimea, Madagascar, North America, and Uganda, among other places, for a homeland. None of those locations was more politically feasible than Zion, and none had Zion's nostalgic draw. But for mainstream Zionism, it was nevertheless clear that the land of Israel was the means, while democratic self-determination was the goal.
Hence, in Israeli public opinion, the "two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has won over the ideology of a Greater Israel. Shortly after the occupation began, the left (which by the early 1990s had grown to about half the electorate) insisted that the occupation undermined the very moral grounds on which Zionism rests, the "natural right" of all peoples to self-determination. Then, in recent years, many on the political right, which for decades had supported settlement in the territories, began to realize that the occupation would drag Israel into binationalism. In that case, without a clear Jewish majority, Israel would eventually have to give up democracy to preserve its Jewish identity. Very few on the right were ever willing to consider that possibility. And so the preservation of Israeli democracy necessitated turning against settlements.
It was precisely the interdependence between national identity and democracy that led even staunch hawks like Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert to turn their backs on the occupied territories. What is commonly referred to as "the demographic question" (extensively treated in Bard's book) is also "the democratic question," which, in turn, is the question of national self-determination. That is something Israel's current radical-liberal critics find so hard to imagine: that national sentiments can act to maintain and protect democracy; that Israel's national identity was the force that gave the final blow to support for the occupation. For them nationalism is, at best, an unpleasant bedfellow for democracy — at worst, its simple opposite.
But nationalism and democracy were born together, and that was no coincidence. In fact, it was the rise of modern nationalism that made modern democracy feasible.
Most 18th-century political thinkers were dubious that large states could be republics. Shaped by classic republican ideas, they believed that republics had to be grounded in the virtus of their citizens. Only a stern political education would train citizens to overcome their private egotistic passions and act in the name of Reason, for the public good. Such education was problematic in large states, the political thinkers believed. The great revolutions in America and France proved them wrong. It was passion, not its overcoming, that sustained republics: Love of one's country — patriotism — would transcend egotism and make citizens jealous guardians of their nation's interests, as well as of the liberties of their fellow citizens.
That love, revolutionaries believed, also transcended national chauvinism. It fueled what the French revolutionaries called the War of All Peoples Against All Kings. Still, the Terror that followed swiftly on the revolution in France gave republicans pause. Today, especially after the horrors of the 20th century, we remember well how extreme nationalism can turn against democracy. We easily forget, however, the extent to which democracy is functionally dependent on the nation-state.
Although some of the authors discussed here are European, today's unease with national sentiments has a distinctly American flavor. That has less to do with any short-lived hope in Europe that the European Union has transcended nationalism than with globalization. The winds of globalization have spread an American form of liberal principles around the globe, casting today's discussion in largely American terms. That includes America's tendency to misunderstand the nature of its own national democracy.
Americans often tend to believe that they have a "pure" liberal democracy — that is, a democracy above and beyond the "identity" (the way the term is used in the multicultural paradigm). To be sure, identity is in vogue in America: In the mantra of multiculturalism, a plethora of hyphenated self-definitions are created and re-created. But the unarticulated premise is that "identity" is what comes before the hyphen; what comes after — "American" — somehow stands for democratic procedures that form a universal liberal framework.
Not only does that ignore how much "American" is a strong identity, it also confuses the procedures of liberal democracy with that identity. Ever since the late 18th century, blindness to their own strong nationalism has led many Americans to believe that imposing the American Way on others is tantamount to liberating them. From Jefferson's vision of an "empire for liberty," to Woodrow Wilson's determination to "teach" South Americans to "elect good men," to George W. Bush's badly conceived war in Iraq, that streak has persisted. At its best, America was and is a true champion of liberty. But it is not at its best when liberty is confused with Americanization.
So when Joel Kovel lays out his plan of attack against Zionism, or when Daniel Brecher demands that Israel renounce its Jewish character in favor of an American-style liberal democracy, or when far more sophisticated intellectuals like New York University's Tony Judt propose, as he has repeatedly, a "one-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (one neutral political entity encompassing both nations), they are reiterating the same old blunder: For all their sometime criticisms of American foreign policy, they, too, confuse Americanization with liberation.
Imposing America's model of one liberal state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea would mean suppressing the aspirations of both Jews and Palestinians to self-determination. It may be noble of such writers to shoulder what was once called the White Man's Burden, and take it upon themselves to teach the natives the right form of self-determination. But from the point of view of the natives, that does not seem like a way to promote democracy. It seems more like an assault on self-determination with a liberal accent.
Kovel, and, for that matter, Judt on Israel are closer to Bush on Iraq than they would like to believe: American notions of democracy are what count, not what Iraqis, or Palestinians, or Israeli Jews want. And, as in Iraq, such a solution would mean civil war. If anyone needed a demonstration of that, Hamas's military takeover of Gaza has supplied it. If Hamas and Fatah cannot reconcile their differences without resorting to force, then throwing a Jewish minority into the mix is unlikely to produce a peaceful liberal democracy.
If the foreseeable future holds stability for Israel's democracy, democratization for Palestine, and peace for both, that future will be tied to national self-determination. It will have to rely on stable nation-states. Transcending nationalism would be, in this case, promoting civil war.
Looking beyond the case of Israel and Zionism, one wonders if the rising anti-national mood does not indicate a more general flaw in contemporary liberal logic: Liberalism and democracy may be drifting apart.
Reducing democracy to liberalism's protection of individual rights, and positing them in opposition to nationalism, may indeed be a step on the way to transcending nation-states. But transcending nation-states may prove to transcend democracy along with them. Some very important individual human rights may be increasingly guarded, but citizens may lose control over their institutions and political fates.
Institutions that transcend the nation-state — whether one looks at multi-national corporations, the International Court in the Hague, the World Bank, or the European Union — may stand at the vanguard of the liberal faith. But the same institutions also exercise great influence, even jurisdiction, over people and peoples who have little or no democratic control over them. The liberal assault on nationalism is also beginning to look like an assault on the principle of government with the consent of the governed. That is worrisome, because liberalism without democracy is likely to be just as unsustainable as democracy without liberty.
Gadi Taub is an assistant professor of communications and public policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of a number of works of fiction, as well as of The Settler and the Struggle Over the Meaning of Zionism (in Hebrew; Miskal-Yedioth Ahronoth Books, 2006).

Published in "The chronicle of higher education, The chronicle Review
August 10, 2007