A Nation? What
Nation?
By Uri Avnery
03 October, 2004
Gush Shalom
It
sounds like a joke, but it is quite serious.
The government
of Israel does not recognize the Israeli nation. It says that there
is no such thing.
Could you imagine
the French government denying the existence of the French Nation? Or
the government of the United States of America not recognizing the (US)
American nation? But then, Israel is the land of unlimited possibilities.
Every person in
Israel is recorded in the Interior Ministrys registry of
inhabitants. The registration includes the item nation.
This entry also appears on the Identity Card that every person in Israel
is legally obliged to carry with them at all times or risk criminal
prosecution.
The Interior Ministry
lists 140 recognized nations which its officers can register. This includes
not only established nations (Russian, German,
French etc.) but also Christian, Muslim,
Druze and more. The nation of an Arab citizen
of Israel, for example, may be recorded as Arab, Christian
or Catholic (but not Palestinian the
Interior Ministry is not yet aware of the existence of such a nation.)
Most Israeli inhabitants
carry, of course, identity cards saying Nation: Jewish.
This has now become a subject of debate.
A group of 38 Israelis
have asked for the cancellation of their registration as Jewish
and its replacement with Israeli. The Interior Ministry
refuses, saying that no such nation appears on its list. The group has
petitioned the High Court of Justice to instruct the ministry to register
them as belonging to the Israeli nation. This week, the
case came before the court.
The 38 include
some of the most eminent professors in Israel (historians, philosophers,
sociologists and the like), well-known public figures and others (including
my humble self). One of the initiators is a Druze. They are far from
belonging to one political camp indeed, they include both leftists
and rightists. One of them is Benny Peled, former commander of the Air
Force, a very right-wing person, who died after the petition was submitted.
The Supreme Court
(sitting as the High Court of Justice) handled the case like a hot potato.
(Even though Justice Mishal Heshin was delighted to find in the ministrys
list the Assyrian nation actually a small religious
community, a remnant of antiquity which still speaks an Aramaic dialect.)
On the main point,
the judges said that the High Court dealing generally with administrative
matters is not equipped to rule on such a profound question.
It advised the petitioners to apply to the District Court, where a wide
discussion is possible and expert witnesses can be called. The petitioners
accepted this advice, and so the battle will be transferred to another
judicial forum that will have to devote to it many hearings.
Why does the Israeli
government refuse to recognize the Israeli nation? According to the
official doctrine, there exists a Jewish nation, and the
state belongs to it. After all, it is a Jewish State, or,
in the words of one of the laws, the state of the Jewish people.
According to the same doctrine, it is also a democratic state, and all
its citizens are supposed to be equal, irrespective of their national
affinity. But basically the state is Jewish.
According to this
doctrine, Jewry is both a nation and a religion. In the first years
of Israel, it was still the rule that if a person declared, bona fide
, that he is a Jew, he was registered as such. But when the religious
camp attained more power, the law was amended and from then on a person
was registered as a Jew only if his mother was Jewish or he had converted
to the Jewish faith and not adopted another religion. This is, of course,
a purely religious definition (according to Jewish religious law, a
person is Jewish if his mother is. The father is irrelevant in this
context.)
This situation
has created another problem. In Israel, the orthodox rabbinate enjoys
a monopoly on Jewish religious affairs. Two other Jewish religious factions
that are very important in the United States, Conservative and Reform,
are discriminated against in Israel and conversions conducted by them
are not recognized by the government. Some years ago, the High Court
decided that persons converted to Judaism in Israel by these two communities
must also be registered under Nation: Jewish. Whereupon
the Interior Minister at that time, a religious politician, peremptorily
decreed that all future identity cards will show, under the item nation,
only five stars. But in the Ministrys registry of inhabitants,
it still says Nation: Jewish.
The roots of the
confusion go back to the beginnings of the Zionist movement. Until then,
Jews throughout the world were a religious-ethnic community. This was
abnormal in contemporary Europe, but quite normal 2000 years ago, when
such communities Hellenic, Jewish, Christian and many more
were the norm. Each was autonomous in the Byzantine Empire and had its
own laws and jurisdiction. A Jewish man in Alexandria could marry a
Jewish woman in Antioch, but not his Christian neighbor. The Ottoman
empire continued this tradition, calling the communities millets (from
an Arabic word for nation).
But when the modern
national movements arose in Europe, and it appeared that the Jews had
no place in them, the founders of the Zionist movement decided that
the Jews should constitute themselves as an independent nation and create
a national state of their own. The religious-ethnic community was simply
redefined as a nation, and thus a nation came into being that was also
a religion, and a religion that was also a nation.
That was, of course,
a fiction, but a necessary one for Zionism, which claimed Palestine
for the Jewish nation. In order to conduct a national struggle,
there must be a nation.
However, two generations
later, the fiction became reality. In Palestine a real nation, with
a national reality and a national culture developed. Members of this
nation considered themselves Jews, but Jews who are different in many
respects from the other Jews in the world.
Before the creation
of the State of Israel, and without a conscious decision being made,
in everyday Hebrew parlance a distinction was made between Hebrew
and Jewish. One spoke of the Hebrew Yishuv (the
new society in Palestine) and Jewish religion, Hebrew
agriculture and Jewish tradition, Hebrew worker
and Jewish diaspora, Hebrew underground and
Jewish Holocaust. When I was a boy, we demonstrated for
Jewish immigration and a Hebrew state.
When Israel came
into being, things became simpler. Every Israeli who is asked abroad
about his national identity, answers automatically: I am an Israeli.
It would not enter his head to say I am a Jew, unless specifically
asked about his religion.
There is no contradiction
between our being Israelis and Jews. Modern man is composed of different
layers that do not cancel each other out. A person can be a man by gender,
a vegetarian by inclination, a Jew by religion and an Israeli by national
group. A woman in Brooklyn can be Jewish and American at one and the
same time Jewish by origin and religion, belonging to the (US)
American nation.
According to modern
Western norms, a nation is defined by citizenship, indeed in many languages
nationality does denote citizenship. Every American citizen
belongs to the (US) American nation, whether he is by origin Scottish,
Mexican, African or Jewish. By religion, an American can be Catholic,
Jewish, Buddhist or Evangelical. That has no bearing on his belonging
to the nation, which is a political collective.
European nations,
too, adapt themselves slowly to these norms. Only Fascists demand total
conformity of race, nation and language.
Why is this important?
Contrary to the now defunct Fascist doctrine, belonging to a nation
is a matter of autonomous decision. The hundreds of thousands of Russians
who came to Israel legally (as close relatives of Jews), who serve in
the Israeli army and pay Israeli taxes if they want to belong
to the Israeli nation, they do indeed belong to it. Arab citizens who
want to belong to the Israeli nation are indeed Israelis without
giving up their Palestinian identity and their Muslim, Christian or
Druze religion.
For many people
it is difficult to give up the Zionist myths with which they grew up.
They try to evade any discussion on this subject and indeed,
it is hardly ever mentioned in our media. Our petition to the High Court
of Justice, and soon to the District court, is designed to provoke,
at long last, such debate.
Two thousand years
ago, the Prophet Jonah found himself on a ship tossed by a storm. The
frightened seamen, looking for someone to blame, asked him (Jonah, 1,8):
What is thy country? And of what people art thou? To which
Jonah replied: I am Hebrew!
In response to
the same question we declare: We are Israelis!