David Berlin, Special to The CJN
The Arab League issued an official communiqué on March 26, declaring that “it would never recognize Israel as a Jewish state.” The statement came near the end of a two-day Arab leaders’ summit in Kuwait.
Addressing the plenary a day earlier, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas charged that during the past eight months of negotiations, Israel has refused to budge an inch on its settlement plan. Abbas reproached Israel for aggressively pursuing the “Judaization of Jerusalem” and for its relentless expansion of the settlement project.
The Arab weekly Al-Ahram noted that while the “Gaza Strip receives nearly 40 per cent of its food and clothes through the Karm Abu Salem crossing, this crossing is closed on Jewish holidays.
None of these charges, nor the Arab League’s incorrigible position, surprised many Israelis. On the contrary, at least since U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recommended that Israel back away from the Jewish state designation, the issue has thoroughly and often madly engaged Jews, not only in Israel, but also in North America and the European Union.
Indeed, the debate has become so intense that Ari Shavit, a senior columnist for Ha’aretz newspaper, found it fit to suggest that an overall offensive is being waged by American and Israeli peace seekers who are furiously attacking the Jewish People’s right to self-definition.
Shavit insists that such a right should be upheld. He claims that just as Israel must recognize Palestine as a Palestinian homeland, so, too, must the Arab states in general, and Palestinian leaders in particular, acknowledge Israel as a Jewish homeland.
Like Naftali Bennett, the leader of the Jewish Home party, Shavit believes that if there is no recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, there will also not be a “two-state solution.
Other Israelis dismiss both the logic and the morality of this position. To Israelis like Y., former deputy head of the Mossad, demanding that Abbas recognize Israel as a Jewish state is forcing him to betray the 1.3 million Arab-Israelis currently living on the Israeli side of the Green Line. Over coffee in downtown Tel Aviv recently, Y. told me that at the office (misrad – which is how Mossad members refer to their headquarters), they used to call Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand for recognition of a Jewish state “the goat trick.”
The goat trick, Y. explained, always comes at the end of a round of negotiations, when one of the negotiators says, “And oh, by the way, I also want that goat of yours. This last demand, as trivial as it may sometimes be, is the straw that breaks the camel’s back… It has no other meaning than to kill negotiations.”
To many older Israelis, the analogy “Palestine for Palestinians” = “Israel for Jews” is not only a good example of bad logic (it should read Palestine for Palestinians = Israel for Israelis), nor the end of John Kerry’s initiative, but even more, it is also the death knell of the original Israeli spirit.
In an essay titled “Israelis used to be Hebrews. Now what are we?” the 90-year-old Israeli poet Haim Guri reminded his fellow countrymen that as Hebrews (Ivrim), we Israelis were once far less Jewish. “There was the General Federation of Hebrew Workers…, Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew city, the Hebrew University…” There was a demand: “Ivri daber Ivrit” – a Hebrew person speaks Hebrew.
Hebrew identity, Guri wrote, was not the diametric opposite of Jewish identity, which is how the Canaanite movement saw it. Rather, it was an expression of a historical and revolutionary change of direction among those who came from the Diaspora and their offspring. Before the First Zionist Congress in 1897, author Micha Joseph Berdyczewski asked, “Are we the last Jews or the first Hebrews?”
Being Hebrew was an expression of renewal and change, Guri said. “When we filled the streets in 1939…, tens of thousands demonstrating against the British White Paper, we shouted, ‘Free immigration,’ ‘a Hebrew state.’ We did not call for a Jewish state.”
How will this still civil, civil war come to an end? According to Hebrew University history professor Daniel Bateman, a lot depends on world Jewry, which must now decide whether it can live with Israel as a modern nation state that’s inwardly Jewish but does not wear Judaism on its sleeve, whether it still needs Israel to remain explicitly Jewish. What is certain is that unless world Jewry feels confident enough in itself, unless, that is, the Diaspora is prepared to cut the umbilical chord strapping it to the State of Israel, and unless world Jewry grants Israelis the freedom to duke it out amongst themselves and promises to remain faithful no matter how things pan out, unless that happens there will probably be no peace agreement now or at any time in the future.
David Berlin was the first editor in chief of The Walrus magazine. His latest essay, Making Sense of the Sixties, appears in this month’s issue of the magazine.