Perhaps the hardest thing for people not living in Israel to grasp is that for most Israelis, talk about how to deal with the question of Palestine is just foreground. In the background is a contest over what kind of state Israel must be. It is not just thinking about war, with Iranian proxies, say, which makes the situation demoralising. Thinking about peace is also demoralising, though in a different way. For Israel would not come out of a sustained war the same country it was when it went in, but nobody expects it to come out of a peace process the same country, either.
What leaks into nearly every conversation these days is uncertainty about Israel’s future boundaries. I don’t just mean geographic boundaries. I mean legal, institutional and cultural limits. Most people in the country will insist that Israel is and must remain Jewish and democratic. Almost nobody can tell you what this means.
Obviously, Israel cannot maintain an occupation, denying a great many people political rights, and remain democratic in any ordinary sense. But there is an even more disturbing problem, which calls the Jewish state into question. Can a state for world Jewry be a republic of citizens, many of whom are not Jews? And just what is a Jew in the legal terms statehood presumes: a member of a Hebrew-speaking civil society, a follower of Orthodox Jewish law or a bearer of J-positive blood? The question is troubling enough as it is, but it also has immediate consequences for the ways Israelis imagine their fight, especially since the Netanyahu government, which has been promoting its “Jewish nation-state law”, seems so satisfied to promote rabbinic law as Jewish and speak of democracy purely in terms of majority rule.
“Look,” most Israelis will now tell you, “we might have to push the Arab states around or make them believe that we can – and we have to be able to do this with the blessing of western democracies or at least Trump’s America.” If you ask them: “But isn’t pre-emption and lethal force making your neighbours more determined to fight you?” they answer: “Our neighbours hate us anyway and, sadly, most of our own Arab citizens do, too. It is naive to believe that they won’t, given the kind of state we are.”
So Israel’s democracy – indeed its survival – does not simply depend on how its military does against threats in Israel’s immediate neighbourhood. It will have to change – and seems stuck. To their credit, Israelis have already met the daunting challenges of building a vibrant Hebrew culture and an exacting economic engine, qualifying themselves to be included among advanced, global players. The challenge of the old industrial world was national self-sufficiency, which Israel’s socialist and military leaders of the 1960s were reasonably good at. The challenge of the new economy is integration into global markets, corporations and universities, which today’s Israelis are really good at.
And yet Israel’s Arab citizens, a fifth of the population, are threatening a shock to Israel’s civil society, which the state apparatus has no means to absorb. Even if the occupied territories just disappeared, and if things were somehow to revert to the status quo ante 1967, the country would face a crisis – not an uprising like Gaza’s, perhaps, but something like the suburbs of Paris in 2005. In 2015, 60% of Arabs accepted Israel having a Jewish majority. Today, 44% do. The trend, in the age of Netanyahu, is clear. For their part, nearly half of Israeli Jews say they will not live in the same building as an Arab.
True, Israeli Arabs are the children and grandchildren of Palestinians who were led by reckless strongmen at the end of the British mandate. The latter rejected partition in 1947 and were short-sighted to count on their Arab neighbours to put an end to the Zionist project. Ethnic cleansing happened on both sides during the 1948–49 war. And, also true, Israeli democracy has been a kind of liberation for many Arab intellectuals and professionals; many report of being relieved to find a civil space to speak of sexuality and family foibles; Israeli Arab workers earn, on average, about seven times the average income in the territories. If Israeli Arabs disappeared, the Israeli medical system and tourist facilities would collapse. More than 70% of Israeli Arabs say they would prefer to live in Israel than a Palestinian state.
The vast majority of Israeli Arabs are now third-generation Israelis. Many have assimilated. They cannot be told that Israel is a haven in a heartless world. Their country has evolved into an advanced, global, multicultural state and its democratic flaws have become insufferable to them. They believe, and their experience confirms, that no matter how well they perform as citizens they cannot aspire to live as equals or even live where they please. Their resentment is toward a pervasive legal structure that discriminates in favour of Jews as individuals.
“Jewish and democratic” is not simply a slogan. It appears in something like constitutional law in Israel and has become as totemic as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Bundled together with the 1950 Law of Return, which accords immediate citizenship to any Jew who immigrates to the country, and with the (partly informal) Status Quo Agreement, establishing the Orthodox rabbinate as officials of the state, the Basic Laws amount to the so-called “small constitution”. The Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty took final shape in 1994 and is the closest thing Israelis have to a bill of rights. It guarantees the protection of life, body, dignity, property, privacy and – touchingly – intimacy. No citizen of a western country would be embarrassed by its language.
But unlike some other Basic Laws, this one can be revoked by a simple majority of the Knesset – not a hypothetical flaw. Netanyahu’s government, determined to expel Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers, has legislation pending that will allow the Knesset to override supreme court constitutional rulings, also by a simple majority vote. Although liberal norms are fixed in the hearts of elite Israelis – journalists, scientists, business professionals and scholars accustomed to working in the west and performing by its standards – they are hardly fixed in the Israeli settler right and Orthodox community. Besides, the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty falls well short of the European Union’s charter of fundamental rights, or Israel’s declaration of independence, for that matter. There is still no civil marriage in Israel, no separation of religion and state and no universal (or, for most, secular) standard for earning Israeli nationality. There is weak protection against being held without charge for “security” offences and very weak protection against discrimination on racial or ethnic grounds. One could go on.
No wonder, then, that a poll of the Israel Democracy Institute from 2008, even before Netanyahu came to power, exposed a fascinating anomaly: 96% of Israeli Jews wanted a “democratic” state and 85% wanted it “Jewish”. Yet where democratic freedom and Jewish law clashed, only 54% said they would protect democratic freedoms. By 2015, a Pew study found that 48% of all Israeli Jews agree with the statement: “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel”.
The real problem is that Israel came into being, in effect, as two states, not one. Israel was established so successfully after 1948 because a revolutionary Zionist national home, populated by Hebrew-speaking worker-citizens, had succeeded in establishing a pioneering state within the larger colonial state administered by the British mandate. David Ben-Gurion originally thought this Zionist state would be a kind of scaffolding to be dismantled when the Israeli state was built. Alas, it proved more resilient than that. So Israel is inarguably Jewish and democratic, but this really means that Israel is a democratic state encasing an older, heroic state, made up of residual Zionist institutions and an officially sanctioned rabbinate. Israelis share a public realm of democratic law and judicial protection, assuring the equality of all citizens, including the minority Arab population. But Israeli Jews share an inner state, in both senses of the term, focused on the material and spiritual needs of Jews alone.
Ideology of the settlers has taken root
It is tempting to look back on 1967 with a certain wistfulness: young people, heady victories, reckless enemies, unavoidable hubris. Wistfulness goes well with what is probably the most common conception of Israel that educated people in the west – and many liberals in Israel itself – have: that Israel somehow came off the rails in 1967; that this was once a nicely social democratic state and is now being ruined by the blowback from its occupation – by quickly multiplying, pietistic settlers, whom successive governments somewhat naively tolerated; that if only Israel could end terrorist attacks, emancipate itself from the occupation and replant most settlers back within the green line, then the country and its Zionism could get back to being themselves.
But the settlements are less of a problem than the ideology of the settlers, which has taken root in the broader population. Security strategy was a part of how these settlers justified themselves; security is ontology in Israeli political science. But for most today, settlements have no strategic value – missiles, not invasion are the existential fear. Rather, a kind of inertial intimacy with the ancient lands around Jerusalem has proved more than a little intoxicating. My wife, the literary critic Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, has written about this curiously eroticised impulse – betrayed in Prophets and Jewish lyric poetry since Andalusia – to repossess the “distressed, kidnapped, damsel-land”. All of us back in 1967, young and old, religious and secular, were drawn to the Land of Israel’s once-prohibited places.
After 1967, and even after 1973, we roamed freely to places such as Hebron. We sat leisurely in Ramallah cafes, wiping plates of hummus, imagining ourselves in Damascus – as we soon would be, no doubt, when the Arab states finally came to their senses – mistaking the fear and natural hospitality of Palestinian merchants for resignation in the face of Israeli sovereignty. We went on little pilgrimages, in our cars and buses – to Rachel’s Tomb on the road to Bethlehem or the putative Machpelah Cave near Hebron, where the patriarchs and their wives were said to be buried.
We then returned home to our block of flats and BBC melodramas at night. We thus became dangerously tolerant of the fanatics who were moving into Hebron, advancing a new holy trinity – “people of Israel, land of Israel, Torah of Israel” – and who now number more than 600,000 within a 40-mile radius of Jerusalem. This menace of cancer cells is that they evolve into forms that seem so passably normal on the surface, that they seem invisible to the immune system.
But ideology is only half the story. The settlements were established so effortlessly after 1967 because the Zionist institutions that built them, and the laws and culture that drove them, had been going full throttle within the green line since the 1948 war. One strains to recall this now, but the 1948-49 war of independence occasioned an Israeli annexation of Palestinians’ territory pretty much equal in size to the West Bank.
The leaders of the state – from Golda Meir to Yigal Allon – had seen it all before, you see. In the chaos of the 1948-49 battles, some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs either fled their homes or, as in Lod and Ramle, were driven out. The targets of blame and numbers of people suffering this catastrophe – what Palestinians call their Naqba – have been heatedly debated since the archival work of the so-called New Historians in the 1980s. But one decisive fact was never debatable, which was that Arab refugees, understandably leaving a war zone, were not permitted to return. Their “abandoned” lands were then taken over as state property to be used for Jewish settlement. The writer and Mapai leader Moshe Smilansky wrote: “Someday we will have to account for [this] theft and spoliation, not only to our consciences, but also to the law.”
The folly of annexationist policies is still more or less obvious to a majority of Israelis, most American Jews, even US officials claiming to be preparing Trump’s “ultimate deal”. But the same people who condemn settlements today seem unable to acknowledge the political institutions and mythology that enabled them to get going in the first place. For the settlers’ ideals and energy did not just grow out of thin air. Both emerged more or less inexorably from an institutional Zionist logic and a powerful Zionist bureaucracy – right for their time as a revolutionary national movement under the British mandate, but increasingly wrong for a modern state and civil society.
And the corollary of the settlers’ culture war is theocracy. Orthodox communities are growing faster than any others; their privilege has a momentum of its own. Over the past 70 years, Israel’s strongly Orthodox Jews – both National Religious and Haredi – have increased from about 10% to at least a third of the Jewish population. Only about 42% call themselves secular, though about two-thirds would like the buses to run on the sabbath, so “secular” here must mean something closer to atheist. The demographer Arnon Soffer argues that Israel will be a majority Orthodox state by 2030. Thirty years ago, about 70% of Israeli students attended the secular stream. Today, just 39% do.
The National-Orthodox schools teach settler-ideology, “love of the land”, sexual modesty, ancient temple veneration and what the great Jewish historian Salo Baron called the “lachrymose version of Jewish history”. Haredi schools are closed, rather cultish affairs, and instructors can be violent in their discipline. Yeshivot teach rigorous observance of Jewish law, interpreted by revered rabbis. The language of instruction may be Yiddish, while Hebrew is reserved for Torah and liturgy. Youth usually marry in their teens, often to partners chosen for them by parents and matchmakers. They study virtually nothing of science and technology in their schools and often seem in positive fear of western liberal humanities. Haredi kindergartens are subsidised by the municipal tax, the arnona.
Residential middle schools for boys, the pnimiyot, are subject to the more or less airless indoctrination of the 19th-century, one-room schoolhouse, or heder; in these publicly supported schools, there are rarely secular studies and no computer training. The boys learn the mind-bending techniques of scholastic rabbinic debate, but are not exposed to what would pass for critical thinking – that is, the capacity to look at the perversities of thinking itself, which make the claim of revelation somewhat, well, suspect.
Their insulated world, what Arthur Koestler called their “claustrophilia”, make them worshippers of Holy Land, and thus implicit champions of the settlement movement, which has afforded them cheap housing across the green line from Beit Shemesh and Modiin. By the way, roughly the same proportion of Orthodox citizens want the state “to support the emigration of Arab citizens”. Thirty-four percent of Israelis say that Arab culture is inferior to Israeli culture. About a third of Israeli Jews would have Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, pardoned.
Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: opposing models?
Jerusalem is ground zero of an emerging Orthodox alliance: more than 45% of schoolchildren in Greater Jerusalem are now Haredi, a number often linked to the estimated 200,000 mainly secular Jews who have left the city for the coastal plain over the past generation. In Jerusalem, about 30% of schoolchildren are Arab, while about 13% are National Religious. That leaves about 12% in secular schools, which Haredi activists may harass and take over when their neighbourhoods outgrow their own.
But the influence of the Orthodox does not stop at the schoolroom door. Where everyone is hungry for unity, Orthodox Judaism has become a kind of comfort food. Framed portraits of obscure Haredi rabbis hang discreetly behind cash registers in fruit stores and dry cleaners. As one of my secular students put it, only half-mockingly: “The idea was a Jewish state, wasn’t it? So what is more Jewish than a rabbi?” Many secular friends, who otherwise agree with gay rights, opposed the parade in Jerusalem, claiming earnestly that this was, after all, a holy city, and perhaps gays should stick to Tel Aviv. In a way, the two cities, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, now constitute the choice. Some 42% of Israelis, the so-called centre, say, not without humility, that all they want is for Israel to have a “Jewish majority”. The nature of that majority will be fought out by two urban models. Jerusalem has become the head of the settler octopus, the seat of its yeshivot, the personification of Greater Israel. Tel Aviv, and its northern suburbs, have become a hub for Global Israel, hip, cosmopolitan, cybernetic, cynical.
There is a Hebrew political culture for both, but only the latter Hebrew is self-ironising, playfully anglicised – erotic, brassy, metaphorical, mischievous. This is the Hebrew every with-it Israeli knows and every democratic Israeli unknowingly counts on. This is what just won the Eurovision song contest. Then again, even Tel Aviv Hebrew carries the weight of the Torah-culture’s archaic power. You cannot live in a state with an official Judaism, valorising that power, and expect no erosion of “citizenship” per se. You can try, as most secular Israelis try, to speak the language, ignore the archaism and tolerate the Judaism. But then it is harder to teach children what democracy is. From its origins, Israel tried to contain the tension. It cannot do so indefinitely. Nor does it need to define things that torture its intelligentsia but no democratic state actually needs to define. A Jewish state – it cannot be emphasised enough – does not have an identity like that of a Jewish person. A state is also not a family, or a club, or a congregation. It is a commonwealth, a social contract, in which individuals who are subject to equal rules of citizenship work out their lives – if they wish, in voluntary association with people, families, clubs and congregations.
The only plausible “Jewish and democratic” state is a democratic state that speaks the Jewish national language, in effect, a Hebrew republic. Again, the Hebrew of Tel Aviv is spacious enough for Arabs to absorb its nuances and yet remain Arabs, at least in the hybridised way minorities everywhere adapt to a majority’s language and the culture it subtends. Diaspora Jews are nothing if not proof of how this can work. Those preoccupied with demographic trends, including leaders of Israel’s peace camp, have an understanding of “Jewish and democratic” that is shallow and mechanical. They are painting by numbers. If there is hope here, it is that the businesses and towers of Tel Aviv are facts on the ground just like the settlements in the territories are. Nor are settlers alone in determining Israel’s political fate. The most important and least specified force comes into relief when we look at the centre in a different light, not as political leaders, but as economic players. I am referring to a new generation of elite professionals whose talk about demographics is actually a placeholder for a potentially open-minded vision – people who are willing hostages to the market pressures and liberal values inherent in globalisation.
If they intend to maintain their country’s economic vitality and retain their own power, this elite will have to nudge Israel in the direction of global integration, no matter what their traditional prejudices about Zionism’s cause may be. Ultimately, this must mean not only two states, Israel and Palestine, but the separation of religion and state and the retiring of old Zionist institutions. The only Israel that could integrate in this way, so they are discovering, is a country that looks much like that Hebrew republic. And given that Israel and Palestine together are no bigger than greater Los Angeles, the confederation advocated by Israeli Arabs may well be the only way to make two states work.
In any case, the advocates of Greater Israel will ultimately have to be defeated by advocates for Global Israel – not an easy challenge so long as the Trump administration cheers on the former. But Trumps and Netanyahus come and go. Eventually, things that can’t go on don’t. If Israel were to take shape as a Hebrew republic, would Israeli Arab elites agree to join it? And if they did, would Israel’s Jews accept them? You walk down Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv and the questions do not seem rhetorical. But a new generation will have to think, not just about bad apples, but about bad barrels, too.