Israel's precarious democracy, 1: historical and demographic background

This year Israel celebrates 75 years as an independent state. It was born in the wake of the Holocaust, as large numbers of Jewish refugees from nazi-occupied Europe fled to what was then the British League of Nations Mandate of Palestine. Britain had acquired Palestine in December 1917, when Lieutenant General Sir Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks during the Great War. By then the nascent Zionist movement was already bringing Jewish immigrants from Europe into the territory. The previous month, the British government had issued the Balfour Declaration, named for Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, which stated:

His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

During the three decades in which Great Britain controlled Palestine, the government in London discovered that the influx of Jewish settlers from Europe was not popular with its Arab inhabitants and attempted, rather too late, to curtail immigration. However, Jewish immigrants found ways to evade British efforts to stem the tide. After the end of the Second World War, survivors of the Holocaust streamed into Palestine, as Britain was preparing to vacate the territory.

In 1947 the still new United Nations Organization decided to partition Palestine between its Jewish and Arab inhabitants in an effort to resolve what had developed into a protracted crisis during the previous decades. At the time the Jewish population still constituted a minority of the territory. According to the plan, each community would control three nearly noncontiguous stretches of land connected to each other at two small points in the north and near the coast, with an economic union tying the two communities together. Tel Aviv, along the Mediterranean coast, would be the capital of the Jewish state, while Jaffa, immediately to its south, would remain an Arab exclave. Because of its significance for the world's major religions and for both Jews and Arabs, Jerusalem was to become an international zone.

However, the plan was never implemented. Arabs opposed it because it granted the Jewish state 62 percent of the territory, although at the time the Arab population was twice the Jewish population. But the proximate cause of the plan's failure was the outbreak of war. David Ben-Gurion, head of the World Zionist Organization and future prime minister, declared Israel's independence as a Jewish state on 14 May 1948. Almost immediately thereafter, five Arab states attacked Israel, leading to a war that lasted into the following year.*

The war permanently ended the UN's partition plan, and the de facto boundaries that emerged from the conflict now favoured Israel, while leaving it militarily vulnerable at its narrowest width. Not only had Israel defended its new status as an independent nation, but it had gained territory originally assigned to Arab Palestine, and what remained of the latter was now partitioned between the Kingdom of Jordan and Egypt. These borders remained in place through the second Israeli-Arab war, which coincided with the Suez Crisis in October-November 1956, up until the outbreak of a third war in June 1967, when it acquired what are now known as the Occupied Territories and, temporarily, the Sinai peninsula (see map below right). By this time Israeli Jews had attained majority status, with an Arab minority possessing Israeli citizenship.

Although the Jewish population of Palestine had been 32 percent of the total in 1947, by the following year it stood at 82 percent, after a mass exodus of Arabs. The Jewish population peaked at nearly 90 percent in 1960 and has gradually declined since then, with the current Jewish population standing at 73.5 percent, not including Arabs in the occupied territories. A report last year indicated that, within the territory of the original British mandate, including the occupied territories, Israeli Jews now constitute between 46 and 47 percent of the population, giving them minority status once again. Do keep this demographic shift in mind as we probe further into the fraught character of Israel's democracy.

But there's another demographic factor to take note of. In the early decades of Israeli nationhood, the country was dominated by Ashkenazic Jews, that is, Jews with European roots. These Jews were the backbone of the Israeli Labour Party, a social democratic party which, along with its predecessors, dominated the country's politics until 1977. Zionism itself had been an enterprise largely of European Jews, who had suffered under various antisemitic regimes, especially in Russia and Germany, but even in professedly egalitarian France. There had been Jews in the Middle East and North Africa since biblical times, known as Sephardim or Mizrahi. But they were latecomers to Zionism. After 1948, several Arab countries expelled their Jewish populations and other Jews left voluntarily fearing for their safety. These numbered nearly a million. Moreover, with the coming of Arab nationalism following the Second World War, the leaders of the new states in the region sought greater homogeneity in their populations. When Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalist regime took power in Egypt in 1952, minority communities such as Greek Orthodox Christians and Jews left a country they had inhabited since antiquity. Many of these newly exiled Jews immigrated to Israel, legally enabled to do so by Israel's 1950 Law of Return.

As a result of these migrations, the ethnic makeup of Israel's Jewish population shifted, with the Ashkenazic community declining and Jews from elsewhere growing as a proportion of the whole. While Jews of European origin tended towards social democratic and even Marxist politics, as manifested in their support for the kibbutz settlements, Middle Eastern Jews tended to be more traditional in their sympathies, holding fast to the legacies bequeathed them by their forebears. Their presence altered the political landscape of Israel, especially with the victory of Menachem Begin's Likud bloc in 1977.

Since then Jews from other parts of the world, most notably Ethiopia, have added to the ethnic mix, bringing with them their customs and traditions. Israel's constantly changing demographic balance has complicated its political life, as we will see shortly.

In part 2, we will look at the institutional factors conditioning the modern Israeli polity—factors that further complicate its domestic and foreign affairs.

 

* A personal note: my late father, who was twenty years old at the time, briefly served as a war correspondent in Palestine for a consortium of British newspapers, a position he quickly relinquished after a near brush with death.