Political stability requires a stable population living within a well-defined territory. The population should have long roots in the territory and share a strong enough sense of solidarity to enable people to work together for common purposes. They should share traditions and customs and a love for the land in which their forebears have lived for generations. Blessed with these preconditions, diverse peoples can become a nation, taking pride in their common history, with a determination to bequeath to their children what they have inherited from their ancestors. Once there is a sense of common nationhood, a people can develop political institutions embodying self-government, their durability secured by general agreement on the rules of the game.
Immigration of outsiders into a nation introduces a potentially destabilizing element, especially if the newcomers are dissimilar to their hosts. Everyday interactions among people depend on robust traditions of civility, as Walter Lippmann called them, which continue to live in their hearts. If new people who do not share these traditions move into the nation's homeland, interactions among neighbours become more difficult, unless the newcomers make a concerted effort to adopt the ways of their hosts. For long ages people have moved from one place to another, sometimes enough to outnumber the aboriginal peoples who are their new neighbours. Such movements have often led to open conflict, especially when the ways of one people clash with the other's.
Successful immigration depends on cordial relations between the hosts and the newcomers. Such relations cannot be assumed in advance. The migration of Europeans to the Americas, beginning half a millennium ago, occurred on European terms to the detriment of the native populations. Spanish, English, Portuguese, and French colonists not only made no effort to adopt their hosts' mores and customs, but overwhelmed them by sheer numbers and forced them into accepting European ways. Similar stories can be told of Australia, New Zealand, and indeed many other countries around the world.
Israel is a country of immigrants. By many measures, it is a great success. Jewish immigrants made an arid land come to life as the newcomers brought with them agricultural and industrial techniques unfamiliar to the Arab residents already living there. However, the Zionist enterprise was predicated on the good graces of an imperial power which had come into temporary control of Palestine. When London issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, it conveniently neglected to consult its inhabitants as to their willingness to receive such immigrants. What started out as a strategic policy to hasten an Allied victory in the Great War quickly became the cause of protracted conflict on the ground, with Britain withdrawing from the territory before settling the conflict, a pattern repeated elsewhere as it relinquished control of its sprawling empire.
Today it is widely regarded as unconscionable for a great power to offer an inhabited territory to another people irrespective of the wishes of its inhabitants. By the end of the Second World War, the process of decolonization gathered speed as one European power after another withdrew from its colonial holdings in Africa, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. Many of these withdrawals occurred peacefully, but certainly not all. Israel and Palestine were among those suffering in the wake of Britain's too hasty departure. Israel's creation came at a time of transition—a moment when the colonial enterprise was fading and falling into disrepute, and independent states were springing up in large numbers around the globe. Israel's status during this time was ambiguous. Was it an example of an independent state replacing imperial rule from without? Or was it an example of a settler population attempting to replace an aboriginal community, thereby perpetuating colonialism? Israel uniquely had characteristics of both situations.
Thus, the Israel/Palestine issue has seen a clash, not only between two peoples, but between two competing stories of liberation. For Jewish Israelis, the foundation of a Jewish state offered liberation after two millennia of Jews living as scattered diaspora communities in often hostile countries, culminating in the Holocaust in the last century. For Palestinian Arabs, however, liberation is still to come as they battle second-class status in a land where they were born and from which many were exiled after 1948. Both communities can tell tales of oppression, tenaciously holding onto them to vindicate their own respective positions, thereby hindering a workable solution to the conflict.
Two years after the declaration of independence, Israel enacted its famous Law of Return, which permits diaspora Jews to return to Israel and immediately receive citizenship. This law presupposes a clear definition of Jewish identity, a contentious issue which I will not get into here. For our purposes, we need only note that it presupposes two classes of citizens, one of which is privileged over the other. One of the preconditions of a successful democracy is equality under the law. Although non-Jewish Israelis are nominally equal under the law, enjoying the right to vote and the right to reside unhindered throughout the country, Israel still calls itself a Jewish state. Jews from elsewhere have a right to settle in Israel, but the same right is by no means extended to Palestinian Arabs and their descendants who fled the country in 1948 or later.
Israeli citizenship is thus based on ius sanguinis rather than ius soli, that is, blood rather than place of birth determines citizenship. Israel is not unique in following this principle, as many countries recognize the children of citizens born elsewhere as their own citizens. Germany continues to accept ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, although over the decades the principle of German citizenship has evolved from ius sanguinis to ius soli, in part to harmonize its laws with the other members of the European Union. Where Israel is unique is in accepting Jewish immigrants with no previous connection to the modern state of Israel on the assumption that their remote ancestors must have lived in the territory it now occupies. Israel effectively privileges one ethnic group over others, even if resident non-Jewish citizens are otherwise treated as legal equals.
To be sure, as a democratic state, Israel has a considerably better record than its neighbours, as indicated in Democracy Matrix's Ranking of Countries by Quality of Democracy at the University of Würzburg. Its non-Jewish citizens share a higher level of economic prosperity than their counterparts in most of the Arab world. According to Freedom House, Israel provides its citizens better "access to political rights and civil liberties" than most countries in the world. Among other countries in the Middle East, only Lebanon and Kuwait can claim to be even "partly free." Nevertheless, as an ethnically-based state, with a strong religious component to its identity, Israel's democracy is precarious at best. The elephant in the room is, of course, that Palestinian Arabs in the Occupied Territories are outside the Israeli body politic and do not share the rights enjoyed by Arab Israelis. Their legal status has been unclear for more than half a century, with no sign of resolution any time soon.
As it moves into the future, Israel will have to make some difficult choices, all of which are potentially dangerous for its continued existence as a Jewish state. We will take these up in part 4.
No comments:
Post a Comment