Israel's
Choice: "Jewish Only"
Or Democratic?
By Sonja Karkar
28 April, 2007
The
Electronic Intifada
The
time will have to come for Israel to declare its hand: is it "a
state of the Jewish people throughout the world" as it defines
itself, or a state of all its citizens, both Jewish and non-Jewish?
So far Israel has managed to convince the Western world that it is the
only democracy in the region, but neglects to add that this democracy
works only for its Jewish citizens. This is the conundrum: Israel has
been unable to reconcile what it says it is, with want it wants to be
-- democratic and exclusively Jewish.
All of Israel's one million
plus Palestinian residents -- the survivors and descendants of the 1948
Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine -- have long felt discriminated
against, despite Israel paying lip-service to their democratic rights.
They also felt on the sidelines of what was being played out in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories, that is until Azmi Bishara, the outspoken
political leader of the National Democratic Assembly (NDA) or Balad
in Israel and a Knesset member, began campaigning for the collective
rights of Palestinians. His vision is not just for change inside Israel,
but involves an all-inclusive civil rights struggle against political
Zionism -- the racist and colonialist policies that have dispossessed,
marginalised and oppressed all Palestinians for almost 60 years. This
is what Israel is at pains to put down by any means. It cannot afford
to have someone like Azmi Bishara rallying people to his way of thinking.
Now, after many attempts to muzzle him, Israel has finally succeeded
in getting him to resign from the Knesset and to stay out of the country.
A list of unpublished charges
were drawn up against Bishara whilst he was abroad -- charges so serious
that they would likely have landed him in jail on his return. While
the charges themselves are not known, it is not difficult to guess at
what they involve. Bishara has been previously charged with undermining
the "Jewish nature of the state", but the charges have always
been dropped. This time it seems that Israel's state security services
may have formulated charges that not only label Bishara a national security
threat, but accuse him of treason and espionage. The media is not allowed
to discuss any of it and even Bishara himself is reticent on the matter,
no doubt to protect himself from being further arraigned because he
is adamant that he will eventually return to Israel.
Effectively, Bishara and
the NDA skated on thin ice legally whenever they called for full and
complete equality between Jews and Palestinians in a state for all its
citizens. Israel's Basic Law stops people from participating in elections
if any party platform implies the "denial of the existence of the
state of Israel as the state of Jewish people". Only recently,
Israel's Shin Bet (secret police) let it be known that it would "disrupt
the activities of any groups that seek to change the Jewish or democratic
character of Israel, even if they use legal means." However, Bishara's
intention was not to create a fifth column inside Israel. He was in
favour of exercising his and his movement's democratic civil rights
to demand that Israel treat all its citizens equally and recognise its
Palestinian citizens as a national minority in their own homeland. The
latter demand, of course, is enormously contentious because that would
require Israel to acknowledge the falsity of its own historical narrative
of exclusive rights to a land it claimed was without people. From that
would follow that the indigenous Palestinians were, and still are being,
systematically uprooted to make way for an exclusively Jewish democratic
state in all of the land.
The discourse has been taken
up in the Palestinian public arena and now Israel is beginning to feel
the same stirrings that finally exposed Apartheid South Africa for the
racist state it was. It knows that sooner or later it will be forced
to commit to being a "Jewish state only" or recognise the
Palestinians as equal citizens and a national minority in their own
land. Already Palestinian intellectuals have drafted a document called
The Democratic Constitution which envisages Israel as a multicultural
democracy for the people living and born there. Whatever Azmi Bishara
does now in exile, the seed has burst: he has inspired a subjugated
people to seek again their liberation. What is surprising is that Israel
has taken so long to understand the lessons of history -- that no one
person or state no matter how powerful can oppress a people forever.
However, Israel still has the option to switch course and institute
democracy for all, and if genuinely undertaken, this may well be the
solution worth working towards for both peoples.
Sonja Karkar
is the founder and President of Women for Palestine in Melbourne, Australia.
See www.womenforpalestine.com
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