Tag: West Bank

Do we all agree? No. Care? A lot.

If there was any doubt that Jews around the world have strong feelings and opinions about Israel, it was disabused by a major new paper produced by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI).

Jewish and Democratic: Perspectives from World Jewry was released several weeks ago at a conference in New York state. It is the result of 40 discussion groups and seminars around the world, as well as questionnaires and an analysis of existing research. The process included participants from much of Canada, though none from Vancouver.

The diversity of comments and the consensus that appears from the document are not particularly startling, but they are interesting for their quantification of some things we probably already assumed. The most significant “finding” seems to be that Jews around the world take great interest in Israel, its security, future, successes, failures and ethical challenges.

The report was undertaken in response to Israel’s Ministry of Justice considering legislation that would codify Israel’s Jewish and democratic character “at a time when different ideological groups within Israel hold conflicting views of how these components should be prioritized.” Israel has always tried to be democratic and Jewish. Long-term concerns are that high Arab and low Jewish birthrates could imperil the Jewish majority and, therefore, the Jewish and democratic system, particularly if some resolution is not found for the stateless Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. More immediately, tensions have existed over questions of whether Israel is Jewish enough and/or democratic enough. Given the range of opinion on the matter, efforts to pin down the perfect recipe for a democratic Jewish state will be like nailing Jell-O to the wall.

We suspect that any proposed legislation will flounder in a tsunami of pilpul, much like the continual but inconclusive debate over “who is a Jew,” which revives itself several times in this report. Even so, the discussion is worth having and the report is full of provocative nuggets.

Jews of all ages are apparently more willing to criticize Israeli policies than was the case several decades ago. In considering Israel’s “Jewish and democratic” nature, the most common concern among Diaspora Jews is the inequality between Jews and Arabs within Israel, as well as political and military control over non-citizen Palestinians in the West Bank. Concern over treatment of Bedouins also arises. As small minorities in their home countries, Diaspora Jews have a “special sensitivity to minority rights,” says the report. (We like that the report uses the term “world-Jews,” which sounds like a hip neologism, like “world music.”)

Many participants express concerns over the enforcement of Orthodox standards in civil society. One comment is that Israel is now a “Jewish Orthodox democracy.” Another participant asserts that, “As a Jewish state, Israel needs to be pluralistic and Jewishly diverse.”

Previous research has indicated that many Jewish Americans (and others) resent that the Kotel has a strict gender separation and that enforcement is controlled by the Orthodox. At the conference where the report was released, one Conservative woman expressed her view: “Our support of Israel is unambiguous, it’s wall-to-wall. But I want to know there is a place for me where I can put on my tallit every morning. May I do that in the state of Israel and not have things thrown at me? Will the government arrest me? Is there a place for me in Israel?”

It turns out we’re not so different, Diaspora and Israel. Nearly three-quarters of Israelis disapprove of the way their governments handle religious issues.

Overall, the report suggests that Diaspora Jews on the far right prioritize Israel’s Jewish character over its democratic nature, while those on the far left view Israel’s Jewish character as an anachronism. The majority, the report says, want to have it both ways – and believe it is possible to do so.

Despite recent suggestions of a weakening of the bond between Israel and Diaspora Jews, particularly among young people, Jews in diverse countries overwhelmingly declare themselves connected with Israel and identify as Zionist. The report acknowledges that some younger Jews, particularly in the United States, as evidenced in the Hillel movement, are reacting against strictures laid down by their elders over what are appropriate views to hold on topics around Israel. The report takes some pains to note that these young people do not necessarily disagree with the broader consensus around Israel, its Jewish and democratic nature or other factors, but do resent being told what they are allowed to believe, hear and say.

Breaking news? Not much. Still, the report – and, most especially the constructive dialogues that went into creating it – is a sort of snapshot in time of the Diaspora’s thoughts on Israel. Beyond the details, which are themselves interesting, is the tremendous consensus that we care about Israel very, very deeply.

Government about halfway there in recognizing Jewish refugees

In 1948, there were an estimated 856,000 Jews in Arab and Muslim countries, from Algeria to Iraq. The estimated Jewish population in 2012 was 4,315 – 3,000 of whom are in Morocco alone.

Four months after the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development’s November 2013 report “Recognizing Jewish Refugees from the Middle East and North Africa,” Canada’s Cabinet accepted one of its two recommendations. The next day, on March 4, Parliament “concurred in” the report.

As the United States pushes for at least a framework for a peace agreement in the coming weeks, the Palestinian side will continue to use as a significant bargaining chip the millions (under the unique definition of “Palestinian refugee”) of people seeking a “right of return.” The parliamentary committee recommended that Canada officially recognize these displaced persons and, secondly, that our federal government “encourage the direct negotiating parties to take into account all refugee populations as part of any just and comprehensive resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflicts.”

Responding to the committee’s recommendations, Cabinet made nice noises, concurring heartily with the first recognition, which is, ultimately, merely symbolic. On the second recommendation, the Conservative government resorted to diplomatic verbiage, saying, it “understands the positive intent underlying this recommendation but, at this time, Canada has offered its support to the peace process as presently structured.”

During the Israeli War of Independence in 1948-49, somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 Arab Palestinians were made refugees. History – and the Arab countries in which these refugees found themselves – has not been kind to them. The 1967 war created more refugees, while placing those Arab Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank under Israeli control.

This history, which includes a definition of refugee known nowhere else in the world – one that is passed down from generation to generation, exacerbating rather than ameliorating the refugee situation – is well known. Yet, it is remarkable how many otherwise well-informed people are unaware of the Jewish refugees throughout the Middle East in the same era. To varying degrees, life for Jews in Arab- and Muslim-majority countries deteriorated rapidly after the 1948 war, and hundreds of thousands were either forced to leave their homelands or found it prudent to do so. The 1967 war finished the job.

But even the Jews who migrated to Israel during this period have often acknowledged that they were not comfortable assuming the role of historical victim. First of all, Jews who were forced from Arab and Muslim countries were welcomed (discrimination and economic disparities affecting Mizrahi Jews notwithstanding) by the new state of Israel, which they helped to build and strengthen.

Compared with the Arab Palestinians who had been displaced and who were, and still are, held in a form of statelessness, the Jewish emigrants were absorbed by Israel and the other countries to which they migrated, including Canada. More significantly, those who went to Israel joined a country that was absorbing refugees from Europe, whose experiences of statelessness had been more harrowing and catastrophic. Faced with new fellow citizens who had lost not only their material possessions and their ancestral villages, but also entire extended families, most of their civilization and even their mother tongue, the Jews who migrated from the Middle East and North Africa often found it best to keep their own tragic experiences closer to the vest.

Small nonprofit groups like JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa) have kept this history alive. On the political front, in 2008, the United States became the first (and so far only) country to official recognize the Jewish refugees. More than a year ago, Liberal MP Irwin Cotler tabled a motion that Canada should recognize these forgotten refugees. In the parliamentary committee hearings, Canadians, including some refugees themselves, told personal stories of this history.

The government is on the right track. It is a matter of righting the historical record and of simple justice that, when Palestinian refugees are considered in the process of reconciliation, so should Jews who were forced from their homelands in the same era. But it is necessary for Canada, as the vaunted “honest broker” we claim to be, to demand that Jewish refugees also be considered among the many difficult historical realities that must be resolved for a lasting and just peace to be realized.

The rhetoric of Palestine denial

The intensifying Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have caused opponents of a Palestinian state to revive former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir’s 1969 canard that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” However, “Palestine denial” is less a debating point than a conversation- stopper: if there are no Palestinians, then there is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and thus no need even to discuss West Bank policies. One problem: Palestinians do, in fact, exist.

In December, Israeli diplomat Danny Ayalon posted a YouTube video entitled “The Real Truth About Palestine,” in which he claimed that Palestine is a place, not a nation: “Like Antarctica, the Amazons or Sahara, naming a place doesn’t create a nation of Antarcticans or Saharans.” And in a recent Front Page Magazine essay, Hoover Institution scholar Bruce Thornton referred to “the so-called Palestinians” and stated that the very idea of a Palestinian nation is but “a device for promoting the incremental war against Israel.”

In 2012, three U.S. Republican presidential candidates endorsed Palestine denial: Newt Gingrich called Palestinians “an invented people”; Rick Santorum said “there are no Palestinians … all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis”; and Herman Cain referred to “the so-called Palestinian people.”

Palestine denial, like Holocaust denial, is easily refuted. Most historians, since the publication of Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities three decades ago, have accepted that every people is invented, some very recently.

Italian consciousness dates to 1764 and, until 1871, Italy wasn’t a country. Earlier residents considered themselves Neapolitans or Venetians or Florentines, and their primary loyalties were to their religion or ruler. But “Italian” is not a timeless identity, nation, or people.

Before a UCLA professor coined “Asian American” in 1968, Americans whose backgrounds were Chinese or Filipino or Japanese weren’t really part of a unified ethnic group. Yet the government now applies census and voting-rights laws to Asian Americans as if they existed – which, today, they do.

Czechoslovakia, carved from former Austro-Hungarian territory containing mostly Czechs but also Germans and Slovaks, lasted from 1918 to 1992. But the state was only partially successful in creating a unified Czechoslovakian identity out of those ethnicities. The joke among Jewish historians is that there were Czechs and Slovaks, but the only Czechoslovaks were the Jews of Prague.

Being Jewish is itself an invented identity. Though Judaism is thousands of years old, it’s not ageless. Ancient concepts of tribes and kingdoms differ greatly from today’s nation idea. In fact, Hebrew has a different word for biblical peoplehood (am) and modern nationhood (l’om). Jewish nationalism traces only to the late 1800s, when secular European Jews faced rising nationalist antisemitism in their countries of residence, as expressed in France’s Dreyfus Affair and the Russian pogroms. The central Zionist myth of uninterrupted but dispersed Jewish nationhood with consistent identity tracing to biblical times and finally gathering in modern Israel is historically inaccurate.

Palestinian identity and peoplehood started in the early 20th century, but intensified after the events of 1948 and 1967. The Palestinian nation then developed a strong sense of shared history and future, grievance and aspiration. It has a flag, a shared language (Palestinian Arabic), particular cuisine and a varied literary canon.

Palestine denial is hackneyed and utterly predictable. Its followers boast of the following 1977 citation by Zuheir Muhsain of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s pan-Arabist faction: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel.” The obsession over a hoary 35-year-old quote from a Palestinian with a minority viewpoint suggests no other textual evidence exists.

Deniers also champion Mark Twain’s 1867 Innocents Abroad, always using the same passage, which describes Palestine in part as a “desolate country” where Twain “never saw a human being on the whole route.” But this 68-word mantra, presented as a single coherent opinion, selectively combines sentences and phrases from pages 488, 520 and 555 of the travelogue. Never mentioned are Twain’s half-dozen anecdotes about encounters with Arabs in Palestine. Innocents Abroad actually offers more support to the Palestinian narrative than the Zionist one.

Finally, West Bank residents are purportedly just a motley collection of Arab economic migrants, not a unified nation. Of course, the United States was also populated by economic migrants, and everyone recognizes the American people.

Denial rhetoric invalidates Palestinian rights by contradicting common sense and nearly all nationalism scholarship. It also leads to very strange questions. Are Italians a nation? Do Pakistanis (a 75-year-old identity) deserve a state? Should we tell a person who says she’s Asian American, “No, you’re not”?

Opponents of a Palestinian state can raise many legitimate points. But the “myth of Palestine” is not one of them. The idea needs to be retired, so real discussions about the Israeli and Palestinian futures can start.

David Benkof has a master’s degree in modern Jewish history from Stanford. He teaches Hebrew in Jerusalem. He can be reached at [email protected].