Lieberman
And Israeli Apartheid
By Saree Makdisi
15 November, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Former
President Jimmy Carter’s new book, which slaps the “apartheid”
label on Israel, comes out this week. Before the book hit the stands
though, members of his own party rushed to distance themselves from
his allegations. While the label makes supporters of Israel uncomfortable,
there is ample evidence that Israel practices institutionalized discrimination
against its non-Jewish citizens. Israel, in fact, goes further than
South Africa. While whites in South Africa sought to control non-whites,
Israel has since its establishment pursued various means of getting
rid of its non-Jewish population altogether.
The addition of Avigdor Lieberman’s
party to Israel’s ruling coalition — and the appointment
of Lieberman himself as Minister in charge of “Strategic Threats
to Israel” — has also occasioned some discomfort among Israel’s
most earnest supporters. But Lieberman’s ascent to deputy Prime
Minister should give pause to those who so vigorously chided Carter
for using the term “apartheid” to describe Israeli policies.
We are told that Lieberman
is unhelpful; that he is the wrong partner for the current Prime Minister;
that he is unlikely to facilitate peace with the Palestinians; that
he is unrestrained and irresponsible — and even (according to
the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz) that he is a strategic threat
himself.
This consensus is not a reaction
to Lieberman’s insalubrious background — though former nightclub
bouncers rarely rise to national office in any country — but rather
to the fact that he is willing to dispense with diplomatic niceties
and to express Israel’s ambitions in their crudest and most unapologetic
form.
Lieberman wants an Israel
free of the land’s indigenous population.
His party’s declared
aim is to eject Israel’s Palestinian minority — now approaching
a quarter of the population — and to annex the parts of the occupied
West Bank and east Jerusalem with heavy Jewish settler populations.
The irony here, of course,
is that Lieberman was born not in Israel but in a remote province of
the former Soviet Union. He moved to Israel as an adult.
Because he is Jewish, he
was eligible for instant citizenship under Israel's law of return.
But it was evidently not
enough for Lieberman that, as a Russian-speaking immigrant fresh off
the plane, he was instantaneously granted rights and privileges denied
to Palestinians born in the very country to which he had just moved
(not to mention those expelled during the creation of Israel in 1948).
The very presence of an indigenous non-Jewish population in Israel was,
in effect, unacceptable to him.
So he wants the non-Jews
out. And he says so bluntly.
It is Lieberman’s blunt
racism — rather than the policies he stands for — that makes
Israel’s advocates, particularly the liberal ones, feel so uncomfortable.
For the only significant
differences between Lieberman and other mainstream Israeli politicians
are matters of style rather than substance.
All Israeli politicians are
committed to preserving Israel’s Jewishness. They have to be.
It’s the law.
As the state of the Jewish
people, Israel is, after all, the only country in the world that expressly
claims not to be the state of its actual citizens (who include a million
non-Jews), let alone that of the people whom it actually governs (half
of whom are Palestinian Arabs).
Most of Israel’s land,
for example, is the property not of the Israeli people, but of Jewish
people everywhere. As non-Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel are barred
from access to state land, even though the land used to be Palestinian.
Israel’s newly revised
nationality law, similarly, prohibits Palestinian citizens of Israel
from marrying Palestinians from the occupied territories and living
with their spouses in Israel. The same law does not apply to Jewish
Israelis who marry Jewish settlers living in the occupied territories.
Interestingly, similar legislation had been proposed in South Africa
at the peak of Apartheid, only to be rejected by that country’s
supreme court. Israel’s nationality law, however, was endorsed
by Israel’s High Court just this year.
There is nothing new in all
this, however. The simple fact of the matter is that non-Jews have always
been, at best, an impediment to Israel's Jewishness.
This is why, when Palestinian
citizens of Israel demand that their state become the state of all its
citizens, they are denounced for imperiling the Jewish nature of the
state. It’s also why Israel repeatedly demanded the renunciation
of the Palestine National Charter as a prelude to negotiations with
the PLO. The longstanding Palestinian call for a democratic and secular
state — a state for both Arabs and Jews — has always been
regarded as a direct threat to Israel’s Jewishness.
To citizens of the advanced
Western democracies, the concept of a democratic and secular state —
a state of all its citizens — seems elementary. To Israel, however,
it is anathema.
The only thing that distinguishes
Avigdor Lieberman from run of the mill politics in Israel is that he
is willing to take Israel’s vision of itself to its logical conclusion.
Rather than tolerating non-Jews as second or third class citizens, he
wants them out altogether.
The issue, then, is not that
Lieberman is more racist than other Israeli politicians. It is, rather,
that he shamelessly utters what most of his peers dare not say aloud.
Saree Makdisi
is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and a frequent
commentator on the Middle East.
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