Defending
Israel From Democracy
By Jonathan Cook
06 June, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Nazareth.
The
second Palestinian intifada has been crushed. The 700km wall is sealing
the occupied population of the West Bank into a series of prisons. The
"demographic timebomb" -- the fear that Palestinians, through
higher birth rates, will soon outnumber Jews in the Holy Land and that
Israel's continuing rule over them risks being compared to apartheid
-- has been safely defused through the disengagment from Gaza and its
1.4 million inhabitants. On the fortieth anniversary of Israel's occupation
of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel's security establishment is quitely
satisfied with its successes.
But like a shark whose physiology
requires that, to stay alive, it never sleeps or stops moving, Israel
must remain restless, constantly reinventing itself and its policies
to ensure its ethnic project does not lose legitimacy, even as it devours
the Palestinian homeland. By keeping a step ahead of the analysts and
worldwide opinion, Israel creates facts on the ground that cement its
supremacist and expansionist agenda.
So, with these achievements
under its belt, where next for the Jewish state?
I have been arguing for some
time that Israel's ultimate goal is to create an ethnic fortress, a
Jewish space in expanded borders from which all Palestinians -- including
its 1.2 million Palestinian citizens -- will be excluded. That was the
purpose of the Gaza disengagement and it is also the point of the wall
snaking through the West Bank, effectively annexing to Israel what little
is left of a potential Palestinian state.
It should therefore be no
surprise that we are witnessing the first moves in Israel's next phase
of conquest of the Palestinians. With the 3.7 million Palestinians in
the occupied territories caged inside their ghettos, unable to protest
their treatment behind fences and walls, the turn has come of Israel's
Palestinian citizens.
These citizens, today nearly
a fifth of Israel's population, are the legacy of an oversight by the
country's Jewish leaders during the ethnic cleansing campaign of the
1948 war. Ever since Israel has been pondering what to do with them.
There was a brief debate in the state's first years about whether they
should be converted to Judaism and assimilated, or whether they should
be marginalised and eventually expelled. The latter view, favoured by
the country's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, dominated. The
question has been when and how to do the deed.
The time now finally appears
to be upon us, and the crushing of these more than one million unwanted
citizens currently inside the walls of the fortress -- the Achilles'
heel of the Jewish state -- is likely to be just as ruthless as that
of the Palestinians under occupation.
In my recent book Blood and
Religion, I charted the preparations for this crackdown. Israel has
been secretly devising a land swap scheme that would force up to a quarter
of a million Palestinian citizens (but hardly any territory) into the
Palestinian ghetoes being crafted next door -- in return Israel will
annex swaths of the West Bank on which the illegal Jewish settlements
sit. The Bedouin in the Negev are being reclassified as trespassers
on state land so that they can be treated as guest workers rather than
citizens. And lawyers in the Justice Ministry are toiling over a loyalty
scheme to deal with the remaining Palestinians: pledge an oath to Israel
as a Jewish and democratic state (that is, one in which you are not
wanted) or face being stripped of your rights and possibly expelled.
There will be no resistance
to these moves from Israel's Jewish public. Opinion polls consistently
show that two-thirds of Israeli Jews support "transfer" of
the country's Palestinian population. With a veneer of legality added
to the ethnic cleansing, the Jewish consensus will be almost complete.
But these measures cannot
be implemented until an important first battle has been waged and won
in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. One of Israel's gurus of the
so-called "demographic threat", Arnon Sofer, a professor at
Haifa University, has explained the problem posed by the presence of
a growing number of Palestinian voters: "In their hands lies the
power to determine the right of return [of Palestinian refugees] or
to decide who is a Jew In another few years, they will be able to decide
whether the state of Israel should continue to be a Jewish-Zionist state."
The warning signs about how
Israel might defend itself from this "threat" have been clear
for some time. In Silencing Dissent, a report published in 2002 by the
Human Rights Association based in Nazareth, the treatment of Israel's
10 Palestinian Knesset members was documented: over the previous two
years, nine had been assaulted by the security services, some on several
occasions, and seven hospitalised. The report also found that the state
had launched 25 investigations of the 10 MKs in the same period.
All this abuse was reserved
for the representatives of a community the Israeli general Moshe Dayan
once referred to as "the quietest minority in the world".
But the state's violence
towards, and intimidation of, Palestinian Knesset members -- until now
largely the reflex actions of officials offended by the presence of
legislators refusing to bow before the principles of Zionism and privileges
for Jews -- is entering a new, more dangerous phase.
The problem for Israel is
that for the past two decades Palestinian legislators have been entering
the Knesset not as members of Zionist parties, as was the case for many
decades, but as representatives of independent Palestinian parties.
(A state claiming to be Jewish and democratic has to make some concessions
to its own propaganda, after all.)
The result has been the emergence
of an unexpected political platform: the demand for Israel's constitutional
reform. Palestinian political parties have been calling for Israel's
transformation from a Jewish state into a "state of all its citizens"
-- or what the rest of us would call a liberal democracy.
The figurehead for this political
struggle has been the legislator Azmi Bishara. A former philosophy professor,
Bishara has been running rings around Jewish politicians in the Knesset
for more than a decade, as well as exposing to outsiders the sham of
Israel's self-definition as a "Jewish and democratic" state.
Even more worryingly he has
also been making an increasingly convincing case to his constituency
of 1.2 million Palestinian citizens that, rather than challenging the
hundreds of forms of discrimination they face one law at a time, they
should confront the system that props up the discrimination: the Jewish
state itself. He has started to persuade a growing number that they
will never enjoy equality with Jews as long as they live in ethnic state.
Bishara's campaign for a
state of all its citizens has faced an uphill struggle. Palestinian
citizens spent the first two decades after Israel's creation living
under martial law, a time during which their identity, history and memories
were all but crushed. Even today the minority has no control over its
educational curriculum, which is set by officials charged with promoting
Zionism, and its schools are effectively run by the secret police, the
Shin Bet, through a network of collaborators among the teachers and
pupils.
Given this climate, it may
not be surprising that in a recent poll conducted by the Israel Democracy
Institute 75 per cent of Palestinian citizens said they would support
the drafting of a constitution defining Israel as a Jewish and democratic
state (Israel currently has no constitution). Interestingly, however,
what concerned commentators was the survey's small print: only a third
of the respondents felt strongly about their position compared to more
than half of those questioned in a similar survey three years ago. Also,
72 per cent of Palestinian citizens believed the principle of "equality"
should be prominently featured in such a constitution.
These shifts of opinion are
at least partly a result of Bishara's political work. He has been trying
to persuade Israel's Palestinian minority -- most of whom, whatever
the spin tells us, have had little practical experience of participating
in a democracy other than casting a vote -- that it is impossible for
a Jewish state to enshrine equality in its laws. Israel's nearest thing
to a Bill of Rights, the Basic Law on Freedom and Human Dignity, intentionally
does not mention equality anywhere in its text.
It is in this light that
the news about Bishara that broke in late April should be read. While
he was abroad with his family, the Shin Bet announced that he would
face charges of treason on his return. Under emergency regulations --
renewed by the Knesset yet again last week, and which have now been
in operation for nearly 60 years -- he could be executed if found guilty.
Bishara so far has chosen not to return.
Coverage of the Bishara case
has concentrated on the two main charges against him, which are only
vaguely known as the security services have been trying to prevent disclosure
of their evidence with a gagging order. The first accusation -- for
the consumption of Israel's Jewish population -- is that Bishara actively
helped Hizbullah in its targeting of Israeli communities in the north
during the war against Lebanon last summer.
The Shin Bet claim this after
months of listening in on his phone conversations -- made possible by
a change in the law in 2005 that allows the security services to bug
legislators' phones. The other Palestinian MKs suspect they are being
subjected to the same eavesdropping after the Attorney-General Mechahem
Mazuz failed to respond to a question from one, Taleb a-Sana, on whether
the Shin Bet was using this practice more widely.
Few informed observers, however,
take this allegation seriously. An editorial in Israel's leading newspaper
Haaretz compared Bishara's case to that of the Israeli Jewish dissident
Tali Fahima, who was jailed on trumped-up charges that she translated
a military plan, a piece of paper dropped by the army in the Jenin refugee
camp, on behalf of a Palestinian militant, Zacharia Zbeidi, even though
it was widely known that Zbeidi was himself fluent in Hebrew.
The editorial noted that
it seemed likely the charge of treason against Bishara "will turn
out to be a tendentious exaggeration of his telephone conversations
and meetings with Lebanese and Syrian nationals, and possibly also of
his expressions of support for their military activities. It seems very
doubtful that MK Bishara even has access to defense-related secrets
that he could sell to the enemy, and like in the Fahima case, the fact
that he identified with the enemy during wartime appears to be what
fueled the desire to seek and find an excuse for bringing him to trial."
Such doubts were reinforced
by reports in the Israeli media that the charge of treason was based
on claims that Bishara had helped Hizbullah conduct "psychological
warfare through the media".
The other allegation made
by the secret police has a different target audience. The Shin Bet claim
that Bishara laundered money from terrorist organisations. The implication,
though the specifics are unclear, is that Bishara both helped fund terror
and that he squirrelled some of the money away, possibly hundreds of
thousands of dollars, presumably for his own benefit. This is supposed
to discredit him with his own constituency of Palestinian citizens.
It should be noted that none
of this money has been found in extensive searches of Bishara's home
and office, and the evidence is based on testimony from a far from reliable
source: a family of money-changers in East Jerusalem.
This second charge closely
resembles the allegations faced by the only other Palestinian of national
prominence in Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah, head of the Islamic Movement
and a spiritual leader of the Palestinian minority. He was arrested
in 2003, originally on charges that he laundered money for the armed
wing of Hamas, helping them buy guns and bombs.
As with Bishara, the Shin
Bet had been bugging Salah's every phone call for many months and had
supposedly accumulated mountains of evidence against him. Salah spent
more than two years in jail, the judges repeatedly accepting the Shin
Bet's advice that his requests for bail be refused, as this secret evidence
was studied in minute detail at his lengthy trial. In the closing stages,
as it became clear that the Shin Bet's case was evaporating, the prosecution
announced a plea bargain. Salah agreed (possibly unwisely, but understandably
after two years in jail) to admit minor charges of financial impropriety
in return for his release.
To this day, Salah does not
know what he did wrong. His organisation had funded social programmes
for orphans, students and widows in the occupied territories and had
submitted its accounts to the security services for approval. In a recent
interview, Salah observed that in the new reality he and his party had
discovered that it was "as if helping orphans, sick persons, widows
and students had now become illegal activities in support of terrorism".
Why was Salah targeted? In
the same interview, he noted that shortly before his arrest the prime
minister of the day, Ariel Sharon, had called for the outlawing of the
Islamic Movement, whose popularity was greatly concerning the security
establishment. Sharon was worried by what he regarded as Salah's interference
in Israel's crushing of Palestinian nationalism.
Sharon's concern was two-fold:
the Islamic Movement was raising funds for welfare organisations in
the occupied territories at the very moment Israel was trying to isolate
and starve the Palestinian population there; and Salah's main campaign,
"al-Aqsa is in danger", was successfully rallying Palestinians
inside Israel to visit the mosques of the Noble Sanctuary in the Old
City of Jersualem, the most important symbols of a future Palestinian
state.
Salah believed that responsibility
fell to Palestinians inside Israel to protect these holy places as Israel's
closure policies and its checkpoints were preventing Muslims in the
occupied territories from reaching them. Salah also suspected that Israel
was using the exclusion of Palestinians under occupation from East Jerusalem
to assert its own claims to sovereignty over the site, known to Jews
as Temple Mount. This was where Sharon had made his inflammatory visit
backed by 1,000 armed guards that triggered the intifada; and it was
control of the Temple Mount, much longed for by his predecessor, Ehud
Barak, that "blew up" the Camp David negotiations, as one
of Barak's advisers later noted.
Salah had become a nuisance,
an obstacle to Israel realising its goals in East Jersualem and possibly
in the intifada, and needed to be neutralised. The trial removed him
from the scene at a key moment when he might have been able to make
a difference.
That now is the fate of Bishara.
Indications that the Shin
Bet wanted Bishara's scalp over his campaign for Israel's reform to
a state of all its citizens can be dated back to at least the start
of the second intifada in 2000. That was when, as Israel prepared for
a coming general election, the departing head of the Shin Bet observed:
"Bishara does not recognise the right of the Jewish people to a
state and he has crossed the line. The decision to disqualify him [from
standing for election] has been submitted to the Attorney General."
Who expressed that view? None other than Ami Ayalon, currently contesting
the leadership of the Labor party and hoping to become the official
head of Israel's peace camp.
In the meantime, Bishara
has been put on trial twice (unnoticed the charges later fizzled out);
he has been called in for police interrogations on a regular basis;
he has been warned by a state commission of inquiry; and the laws concerning
Knesset immunity and travel to foreign states have been changed specifically
to prevent Bishara from fulfilling his parliamentary duties.
True to Ayalon's advice,
Bishara and his political party, the National Democratic Assembly (NDA),
were disqualified by the Central Elections Committee during the 2003
elections. The committee cited the "expert" opinion of the
Shin Bet: "It is our opinion that the inclusion of the NDA in the
Knesset has increased the threat inherent in the party. Evidence of
this can also be found in the ideological progress from the margins
of Arab society (such as a limited circle of intellectuals who dealt
with these ideas theoretically) to center stage. Today these ideas [concerning
a state of all its citizens] have a discernible effect on the content
of political discourse and on the public 'agenda' of the Arab sector."
But on this occasion the
Shin Bet failed to get its way. Bishara's disqualification was overturned
on appeal by a narrow majority of the Supreme Court's justices.
The Shin Bet's fears of Bishara
resurfaced with a vengeance in March this year, when the Ma'ariv newspaper
reported on a closed meeting between the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert,
and senior Shin Bet officials "concerning the issue of the Arab
minority in Israel, the extent of its steadily decreasing identification
with the State and the rise of subversive elements".
Ma'ariv quoted the assessment
of the Shin Bet: "Particularly disturbing is the growing phenomenon
of 'visionary documents' among the various elites of Israeli Arabs.
At this time, there are four different visionary documents sharing the
perception of Israel as a state of all citizens and not as a Jewish
state. The isolationist and subversive aims presented by the elites
might determine a direction that will win over the masses."
In other words, the secret
police were worried that the influence of Bishara's political platform
was spreading. The proof was to be found in the four recent documents
cited by the Shin Bet and published by very diffrerent groups: the Democratic
Constitution by the Adalah legal centre; the Ten Points by the Mossawa
political lobbying group; the Future Vision by the traditionally conservative
political body comprising mostly mayors known as the High Follow-Up
Committee; and the Haifa Declaration, overseen by a group of academics
known as Mada.
What all these documents
share in common is two assumptions: first, that existing solutions to
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are based on two states and that in
such an arrangement the Palestinian minority will continue living inside
Israel as citizens; and second, that reforms of Israel are needed if
the state is to realise equality for all citizens, as promised in its
Declaration of Independence.
Nothing too subversive there,
one would have thought. But that was not the view of the Shin Bet.
Following the report in Ma'ariv,
the editor of a weekly Arab newspaper wrote to the Shin Bet asking for
more information. Did the Shin Bet's policy not constitute an undemocratic
attempt to silence the Palestinian minority and its leaders, he asked.
A reply from the Shin Bet was not long in coming. The secret police
had a responsibility to guard Israel "against subversive threats",
it was noted. "By virtue of this responsibility, the Shin Bet is
required to thwart subversive activity by elements who wish to harm
the nature of the State of Israel as a democratic Jewish State -- even
if they act by means of democratically provided tools -- by virtue of
the principle of 'defensive democracy'.
Questioned by Israeli legal
groups about this policy when it became public, the head of the Shin
Bet, Yuval Diskin, wrote a letter clarifying what he meant. Israel had
to be protected from anyone "seeking to change the state's basic
principles while abolishing its democratic character or its Jewish character".
He was basing his opinion on a law passed in 2002 that charges the Shin
Bet with safeguarding the country from "threats of terror, sabotage,
subversion".
In other words, in the view
of the Shin Bet, a Jewish and democratic state is democratic only if
you are a Jew or a Zionist. If you try to use Israel's supposed democracy
to challenge the privileges reserved for Jews inside a Jewish state,
that same state is entitled to defend itself against you.
The extension in the future
of this principle from Bishara to the other Palestinian MKs and then
on to the wider Palestinian community inside Israel should not be doubted.
In the wake of the Bishara case, Israel Hasson, a former deputy director
of the Shin Bet and now a right-wing Knesset member, described Israel's
struggle against its Palestinian citizens as "a second War of Independence"
-- the war in 1948 that founded Israel by cleansing it of 80 per cent
of its Palestinians.
The Shin Bet is not, admittedly,
a democratic institution, even if it is operating in a supposedly democratic
environment. So how do the state's more accountable officials view the
Shin Bet's position? Diskin's reply had a covering letter from Attorney-General
Menachem Mazuz, the country's most senior legal officer. Mazuz wrote:
"The letter of the Shin Bet director was written in coordination
with the attorney general and with his agreement, and the stance detailed
in it is acceptable to the attorney general."
So now we know. As Israel's
Palestinian politicians have long been claiming, a Jewish and democratic
state is intended as a democracy for Jews only. No one else is allowed
a say -- or even an opinion.
Jonathan Cook
is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author
of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish
and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in
the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website
is www.jkcook.net
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