John Chuckman
Some Israelis are fond of comparing Israel’s displacement of
Palestinians to the historical experience of North Americans in displacing
indigenous people, but the comparison is inaccurate on almost every level.
First, comparing events of two hundred years ago and today is misleading: norms
of human rights and ethics and law have changed tremendously in that time.
Besides, people all over the world see and read of such injustices today,
something not possible at an earlier time.
Second, the indigenous people of, for example, Canada
consist of roughly one million out of a national population of 35 million, whereas
Palestinians have reached slightly more than half the population of Israel-Palestine
which is about eleven million. The scale
and relative size of any event are important, as we are reminded time and again
concerning the Holocaust
Third, the original indigenous North American people lived
in a non-intensive economy of hunting and gathering and early agriculture, activities
not compatible by their very nature with European settlement and development in
a given region. But the Palestinians often are shopkeepers and farmers and tradesmen
and professionals, activities fully compatible with the European development
Israel represents.
Fourth, and most importantly, all of North America’s
indigenous people are full citizens of their countries with rights to move and
to work anywhere and the right to vote in elections and the freedom to marry
anyone or claim any benefit owing to a citizen, whereas Israel holds the best
part of five million Palestinians (Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem) in a
seemingly perpetual state of having no rights and no citizenship. A Jewish
Israeli cannot even marry a Palestinian Israeli without serious consequences. The
million or so Palestinians who are Israeli citizens - owing to the accidents of
war in 1948 and certainly not to Israel’s embrace of diversity - are only
technically so, having passports but having many restrictions and constant
suspicions placed upon them. More than a few influential Israelis have spoken
to the idea of driving them entirely out of the country at some point.
If, as Israel always insists as a pre-condition for peace
talks, Israel were to be formally recognized by Palestinians as “the Jewish
state,” what happens to the million or so Palestinians who are now (nominally)
Israeli citizens?
Israel long has been concerned with the relative rates of
growth of Jewish and non-Jewish populations in Israel proper and in the
occupied territories. The populations are now roughly equal for the first time,
and from now on the Jewish population likely will diminish as a fraction of the
whole. These relative growth rates reflect the advanced European and American
status of many Ashkenazi Jews, the people who largely run and own Israel.
Advanced people today in all Western countries do not replace their populations.
That is why even stable old European states are experiencing social
difficulties with large in-migrations.
Significant in-migration always changes a country. Even a
country such as Britain which we are used to thinking of in a well-defined set
of characteristics is undergoing change, but the truth is our thinking about
the character of a place like Britain is illusory. Britain over a longer time
horizon was Celtic, Roman, Germanic, and Norman French with bits of others such
as Vikings thrown in – all these going into the make-up of what we call the
British people, what we think of as represented by, say, Winston Churchill with
derby, umbrella, cigar, and distinctive accent, but, of course, Sir Winston also
was half American (his mother).
Ethnic purity of any sort is a nonsense, and one hesitates
even to use the phrase after the lunacies of the Nazis. Oddly, early in the
Third Reich, the Nazis had considerable difficulty agreeing on what defined a
Jew for purposes of the infamous 1935 Nuremberg Laws. After years of preaching
hatred against Jews during their rise to power, you might think the Nazis clearly
understood exactly what the object of all that hatred was, but that proved not
to be the case. Under the compromise reached between various factions of the
party, “three-quarter Jews,” those with three Jewish grandparents, were
considered Jews. “Half-Jews,” those with two Jewish grandparents and two
“Aryan” grandparents, were considered Jews only if they practiced the faith.
“Quarter Jews” were considered as non-Jews. Attempting to rationalize the
irrational always leads to absurd, not to say dangerous, results.
And yet, in a bitter paradox, Israel perpetuates a version
of this thinking. A conception of just who is a Jew is necessary because all
those regarded as Jews have the right to immigrate to Israel and to receive
generous assistance in settling there. But as with any such conception, it
suffers disagreements and adjustments over time, a recent one involving whether
to recognize certain African groups holding to ancient variations of Jewish
belief. Moreover, inside Israel there are great disagreements about rules set
by one group of Jews, the ultra-orthodox, governing important parts of the
lives of other groups of Jews.
As for today’s population shifts, the larger a country’s
population, the more easily it absorbs in-migrants with minimal disturbance,
but countries the size of Denmark or even Holland have experienced serious
disturbances given the generosity of their past acceptance of refugees. And
just so Israel, whose small population has struggled with huge in-migrations of
Russians and others in recent decades. Many older Israelis have been irritated
by them, and many of the Russians irritated at what they find in Israel.
Smaller groups of in-migrant Jews and of refugees, ones with dark skins, have
aroused some very ugly scenes recently in Israel, especially among the
ultra-orthodox, scenes not altogether different to those of Bull Connor’s
Birmingham, Alabama.
The Arab population in Israel-Palestine grows along the
rates of third-world populations which have not experienced full demographic
transition, something demographers have identified as an historic event in all
advanced countries, a one-time population adjustment from the ancient human
pattern of high birth and death rates to a modern one of low rates for both.
High birth rates yield a young and growing population in any land where high
death rates once claimed the lives of many children and kept population growth
suppressed, but vaccines and improvements in diet and hygiene have lowered
traditional infant mortality in many parts of the world. In advanced countries,
the pattern has been for birth rates to fall once lower death rates are seen as
the new reality, yielding slow to non-existent or even declining population
growth. This last part of demographic transition requires a degree of
prosperity to be achieved, something which Israel’s occupation makes impossible
for Palestinians.
Countries with modern, non-replacement levels of fertility
must rely on in-migration to grow and, in many cases, just to keep their
populations where they are. All of advanced Europe and the United States and
Canada are in this situation. A declining population has many implications,
from shortages of key skills and talents to a decreased pool for soldiers and an
outright decline in a country’s economic output. All advanced nations today
maintain their populations through immigration.
Israel has been built almost wholly through immigration.
Because Israel defines itself in such limiting terms as a state for only one
group of people, with that group being a tiny fraction of world population
(about 15 million out of 7 billion), Israel faces likely an insurmountable
problem obtaining required future migrants. Its last source of substantial
population growth was from Russia, and there are no more large pools of Jewish
population left in the world willing to trade their situation for that of
Israel. Jews now living comfortably in Europe and North America are certainly
willing to visit Israel and perhaps donate and perhaps even do a business deal,
but most are not willing to pack up and move there.
And why should they? Life is good in Europe and much of
North America. In modern Israel there are endless tensions and arguments and
difficulties, and immigrants face everything from national service requirements
(for men and women) to punishing taxes and high costs of living and, in more
than a few cases, intense prejudices. It is not surprising that recent World
Bank data show significant net out-migration for Israel over the last 5 years,
something new in the country’s brief history.
Why does Israel hang on to the occupied territories, the
source of great stress and conflict, with their Arab population approaching 5
million? The answer, to a great extent, is found in a concept called Greater
Israel. Greater Israel is supposed to reflect information from the Old
Testament about the extent of biblical Israel. It includes the West Bank and
Gaza, a slice of Syria, much of Lebanon, and other bits, all depending on which
of several definitions you accept, there being no maps in biblical literature
and words having been used with far less precision than we accept today. And
there is something almost silly and chimerical about taking so literally
ancient writings which include people being swallowed by a whale or turned into
a pillar of salt. Whether chimerical or not, It is easy to see how dangerous
the concept is today.
Many astute observers believe Israel’s 1967 War was deliberately
engineered to seize much of the territory required for Greater Israel. At the
time, France and the United States, while promising security for Israel, warned
it not to use the war to increase its territory, but Israel did use the war
that way. One of the explanations for Israel’s intense attack on the USS
Liberty, a well-marked spy ship about which Israel had been informed in advance,
was to silence America’s minute-to-minute information as Israel hurriedly
turned its armored forces from Egypt towards the north and murdered hundreds of
Egyptian prisoners of war to expedite the operation. Israel’s own behavior
since 1967 certainly supports the idea of conquest as the war’s goal.
One suspects many Israeli leaders secretly believe in Greater
Israel, with a number of them having spoken about it. It is important to know
that the ultra-orthodox – whose parties are required for either major party’s
forming a government - are the fiercest and most unapologetic believers in
Greater Israel. For them “the promised land” must be as promised thirty
centuries or so ago. Of course, believers in Greater Israel are not typically
heard to explain what would happen to millions of Palestinian residents, other
than such flip notions of their all moving to Jordan where they supposedly
belong. What we see in Israel’s regular building of new settlements in the
occupied territories does, for all the world, resemble a policy of slow-motion
ethnic-cleansing towards creating Greater Israel. It certainly is a policy extremely
hostile to any hopes of peace and stability.
How can you be so hostile and yet say that you search for
peace? You cannot, at least in the real world. So how does any realistic person
interpret Israel’s continued stealing of other people’s homes and farms? Israel
calls these periodic thefts “facts on the ground” towards negotiation, but that
ambiguous expression much resembles Israel’s public pledge never to be the
first in the region to employ nuclear weapons, yet we all know that Israel does
indeed have nuclear weapons while no one else does (most recent estimate is 80
nuclear warheads and a stockpile of fissile material adequate to better than
double the number). While many Israelis rail against liberals who criticize
such things, the simple fact is that the very definition of liberal-minded
makes it impossible to accept them.
No place can sustain a sense of crisis indefinitely,
something Israel has done since its founding, and the continued occupation of
the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights only add greatly to
that sense of crisis. The costs in material terms and in psychological ones are
high. Indeed, it is an unnatural thing for any state to sustain itself as a
garrison state, a garrison state being a fortified place where service in the
armed forces, various secret services, and a large bureaucracy concerned with
such matters, provides an unhealthily large part of the national economy. Such
institutions consume great amounts of wealth and produce little beyond basic
security, and any nation with an inordinately large set of such institutions is
at a comparative disadvantage to other nations not so burdened.
Apart from the immense cost of occupation, Israel’s army is
showing increasing signs of unhappiness and demoralization with its role in the
occupied territories. Adding to the general malaise expressed by hundreds of
soldiers and veterans, the recent government commitment to subject the
ultra-orthodox to military service for the first time is sure not to prove a
happy experience. It is the ultra-orthodox parties who have most driven the
ferocity of Israel’s position with its neighbors. These are the people who
every once in a while run out and seize Palestinian land, building shacks on it
and calling it a settlement, or who chop down ancient olive groves so that the
Palestinians who own them cannot make a living. And these are the people who
absolutely will not live with others who are different, including even many other
Jews. Their men will not ride with women on a bus, and there is a long history
of attacks on people living near or passing through their neighborhoods, as the
defacing of non-orthodox temples, the physical assaults on outsiders in the
streets, and such extreme acts as burning down the homes of women regarded as
loose, sometimes with the occupants inside. When their young men and women have
to wear uniforms and do duties in the occupied territories and at borders – and
note women as well as men are drafted into the army - they are going to be very
unhappy, but if the government fails in its intentions, there will be
continuing unrest in the larger part of Israel, many of whom regard the
ultra-orthodox as an embarrassment and a national problem.
Israel hopes with such measures as drafting the young
ultra-orthodox to better integrate them into society, but this seems a hopeless
idea. Can you integrate old-order Mennonites into society at large? To even
attempt to do so is to destroy the foundation of their beliefs, much like
America’s futile attempts to alter behaviors of fundamentalist Muslims in
Afghanistan.
Since the beginning there have been internal conflicts in
Israel between the ultra-orthodox and others. Many outsiders are not aware of
the extent of the secular, indeed worldly, nature of a great part of Israel’s
population. A very large part of Israel’s population is secular, estimated at well
more than 40% while the orthodox and ultra-orthodox are about 20%. Yet many social
rules legislated in Israel are to please the ultra-orthodox – after all, they do
hold the balance of power in Israeli elections - and since a great part of
Israel’s population is not observant in religion, regarding its Jewish identity
as cultural, most Israelis live under legislation with which they are
uncomfortable, but it is difficult to imagine how these differences and irritations
can ever be rectified. Indeed, within Israel’s Jewish population, the only
people with larger-than-average birth rates are the ultra-orthodox. Much as
with Mennonites or old-fashioned Mormons, the ultra-orthodox eschew many of the
benefits of modern society and live to some extent as though it were still the
19th century, including 19th century rates of fertility.
It is also demoralizing for a good part of the population to
realize that their country is in much the same business as past discredited
societies such as apartheid South Africa. How else can it be, given the
occupied territories and Israel’s notion of itself as the Jewish state? It is
also demoralizing to read overwhelming expressions of disapproval in the
world’s press and to see the reactions of others when travelling on an Israeli
passport. Indeed, the Israeli government has gone to the desperate extreme of
paying thousands of students to counter criticisms of Israel on internet
commentary and social sites around the world.
The elite class of Israel consists largely of Ashkenazi Jews
from Europe and North America. Recent historical research and DNA testing do tend
to support an old but unproven idea, once subject to the accusation of
anti-Semitism, that their origin is not the ancient Hebrew people but a 7th
to 9th century people from the Caucasus called the Khazars, converts
to Judaism. And, to add more irony to the situation, historical research (and
some DNA testing) supports the idea that today’s Palestinians are in part descendants
of the Hebrews. There is no record from Rome of its having expelled the
population when it conquered the region, nor would such an act be
characteristic of Rome in its many conquests. Whatever the final truth of the
matter, these ideas, now taken seriously by some world-class scientists and
scholars, can only add to the unease and discomfort of modern Israelis.
Israel, since its founding, has been the most subsidized
state in the world, maybe even in the history of the world. Israel’s economy
for that reason cannot be sensibly compared to anything. It receives about $500
per year per Jewish citizen from the United States, and it has done so for
decades. But that is only the beginning. There are periodic loan guarantees of
tens of billions. There is constant access at the highest level for this nation
with the population of Ecuador, something no other country, even a far more
important one, has.
It has a plum free-trade agreement – indeed, without
exporting its subsidized crops Israel’s agriculture would disappear - a costly gift
to Israel because it has no tangible benefits for Americans. The opportunity
cost of the water Israel squanders on tomatoes and clementines to export is
unbelievably high because it is the cost of desalination-plant water. It thus sends
subsidized produce to the United States under free trade, produce the United
States doesn’t even need.
Israel receives billions worth of intelligence and defense
cooperation every year from the United States, something few other countries
receive. The billion and a half dollars a year going to Egypt is a bribe paid
on Israel’s behalf by Americans since the Camp David Agreements. Israel receives
heavily below-cost natural gas from Egypt, the result of U.S. pressure.
Everyone knows this is scandalous, and the U.S. offered to pay a subsidy if
Egypt raised the price. Israel also receives billions from the Jewish
communities of America and Europe, and it receives important business
intelligence and connections.
The great privilege granted to American Israelis to be
recognized as dual citizens, a status of which the United States in general disapproves,
means they move back and forth regularly, all the while sharing business and
other intelligence. Israel’s farms and cities and water supply were all taken
with absolutely no payment or reparations from other people, that being the
biggest subsidy ever received, the very substance of the nation. Israel has
received tens of billions in reparations from Germany – wholly appropriate in
view of the past – but still a subsidy, and today Germany still subsidizes
things like submarine construction. The list is even longer than this, but I
think the point is clear: Israel is, in no meaningful sense, an independent
national economy. It is in truth a gigantic international welfare case.
Israel, despite the subsidies, does not offer a good living
for a great many of its citizens. Huge demonstrations – much hidden in the
Western press – revealed great discontent in a country where the costs of
basics like home ownership are intimidating. And it is hard to see how it can
be otherwise in a very small, economically-inefficient country with military
and security costs like no other.
Subsidies do not continue forever, and many of the sources
of Israel’s subsidies must eventually tire of its never honestly trying to
create meaningful peace. Many Jews in America, while continuing to support
Israel, increasingly are irritated and embarrassed by its counter-productive
policies and often outrageous acts. How long can they be depended upon?
Israelis like to complain of Western liberals and their
views of the country, but they fail to remember who their historic allies and
enemies were. Today’s “friends of Israel” represented by the likes of Dick
Cheney or Newt Gingrich or America’s religious right were the very types who
exuded anti-Semitism and admired Nazis a bit more than half a century ago. How
secure are such attachments?
The Holocaust generation will completely disappear soon,
taking with it a great deal of the intense fear and guilt which powered Israel’s
creation. The efforts of ideologue Zionists for decades would never have made
Israel a reality. It took the immensity of the Holocaust, influencing both Jews
and nations like the United States - which could have accepted refugees before
the Final Solution, but flatly refused, sending boatloads back to Germany - to
create modern Israel. The United States position on Israel has always been
riddled with hypocrisy, imposing a terrible burden on Palestinians for
something which was neither their fault nor anything they could have prevented
and giving huge aid to Israel instead of helping with compensation for
Palestinians rendered refugees in their own land.
The virtual industry we have seen in building museums and
publishing books dedicated to the Holocaust largely goes against normal human
nature: people have a built-in capacity to forget great pain and turn to the
stuff of living. Saying that does not mean that the Holocaust will be
forgotten, only that it will assume its place in history with so many other
terrible events and great upheavals, events and upheavals which are hard
historical facts, not ever-present sources of pain and fear. But the Holocaust
as a continued rationalization for the injustice and abuse we see in Israel-Palestine
is losing its force both inside and outside Israel.
No democratic state can thrive under the long continued
presence of a large military and intelligence establishment, the United States
being the world’s premier example of this truth. For its size, Israel’s military-intelligence
establishment is quite huge. Such institutions simply do not operate under
democratic rules, and they do not promote democratic values within society.
Quite the opposite, through their training of cohorts of young people, their
secret demands on politicians, and secretive operations, they erode democratic
values and respect for human rights. That fact combined with Israel’s continued
occupation and abuse of millions and the fundamental fact that Israel’s idea of
democracy begins with one group making all decisions do mean that Israel’s
democracy is a rather poor one.
Moreover, it is an historical fact that democracies, not
protected by a Bill or Charter of Rights, will everywhere and always abuse
minorities. Power, however granted, is power, and there is nothing magical
about democratically-granted power which protects any group or party differing
in its views. Yet, by its very nature, Israel can never have a Charter of
Rights, and therefore Israel can never be a proper democracy.
Last, Israel plays a decisive role in keeping in place the
very dictatorships and monarchs around it that its politicians regularly decry
in speeches aimed at American audiences. Why was the Egyptian Revolution, for
example, completely turned around so that eighty million people are back to
living under a junta? Why was a clean democratic election with Hamas, a party
which represented genuine reform from Fatah, treated as a terrorist event,
leading to elected officials being arrested wholesale and their leader openly
threatened with assassination, a bloody invasion of what is essentially a giant
refugee camp, piracy on the high seas, and a years-long punishing blockade?
Israel does not want, and will not allow, democracy in any meaningful sense to
emerge amongst its neighbors. And the fundamental reason for this is that
Israel knows the popular will of virtually all of its neighbors is not friendly
to Israel’s most selfish interests. So does that mean that all of Israel’s
neighbors are doomed to tyrannies or monarchs in perpetuity? I think it does,
so long as Israel is the kind of state that it is.
In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, one
extremely wealthy American supporter of Israel supplied Newt Gingrich with the
best part of $20 million towards Gingrich’s ambition of becoming the Republican
candidate. Even in America’s money-drenched political system, such generous
support does not come free. The price in this case was Gingrich’s periodically announcing
in speeches that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian,” an echo of Golda
Meir’s years-ago, dismally dishonest claim. Do Jews in Israel or America really
enjoy hearing such paid-for nonsense from American politicians? More than anything,
Gingrich resembled a pet monkey on a chain dancing for his supper. Such
performances only demonstrate desperation by Israel’s apologists, a kind of frenzied
wish-fulfillment to make a tremendous real problem disappear, and I’m sure many
are embarrassed or disturbed by them.
Many of Israel’s Ashkenazi people hold dual citizenships,
America and other countries having made an exemption to their traditional
opposition to dual citizenships. While it might have been an adventure or a
special opportunity to live in Israel or an expression of religious or cultural
attachment, it is very likely many of them increasingly will take advantage of
their situation to return to the lands of their birth. There is a better life
for almost any class of people to be had in Europe or North America than in
Israel. Better economies, greater opportunities, higher standards of living, no
military draft for children, no daily scenes of abuse, no need to rationalize
or apologize about your citizenship, no intense, unresolvable internal
conflicts, and no sense of being surrounded with hostility.
No matter how many ultimately leave, large numbers of Jews
will continue to live in the Middle East, but a purely Jewish state is no more
sustainable in the long run than was the Soviet Union with its built-in
anti-economic assumptions generating perpetual economic weakness. So, too, a
state based on fear, which is in part what Israel is today. Fear does not
sustain and ultimately cannot be sustained in any population. Stalin’s Soviet
Union operated on fear for a considerable amount of time, but in the end even
the dedicated communists desperately wanted to end fear. The many Jews who do remain
will have to accommodate the realities of the region. They will come to accept
Albert Einstein’s idea of Zionism: Jews living in the Middle East without the
apparatus of a special state and a large army and living with respect for their
neighbors. Perhaps, what will ultimately emerge is a single nation living in genuine
peace. At least we can hope.
