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I continue to read the public's reactions to the new nation-state law and feel as though something is missing. I'm trying to understand, but I have trouble doing it. The outcry of journalists, essayists, jurists and literary figures on how this racist law violates the spirit of traditional Zionism seems sincere and sincere. But it seems to me that once removed the provision intended to give explicit constitutional legitimacy to the establishment of distinct communities for Jews, none of the other elements of the law, including the smell of Arrogance emanating from its wording, does not eschew Zionism.
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Did all those who protested against the law wonder if the Zionist enterprise could exist without an ethnocentric policy, known as the name of journalistic racism? In other words, if the Zionist leaders of the early twentieth century had not made their settlements purist and did not try to ensure that the Arabs did not participate in the plans to "make the desert bloom", an exclusive Jewish society was born?
In 1917, when Lord Balfour sent Lord Rothschild his famous letter, there were 700,000 Arabs and less than 70,000 Jews in Palestine, and about half of the Jews were ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists. An open-minded national policy that sought to integrate the natives into the project of "redemption from the land" would have killed the Zionist project in its infancy. Therefore, and perhaps not by chance, Arthur Ruppin, this talented father of Jewish colonization, this sophisticated intellectual who once belonged to the Brit Shalom movement, was an openly racist thinker.
Even the leftist Hashomer Hatzair movement, which clung to the slogan "fraternity of nations" and advocated the idea of a binational state for a while (provided that it "s"). he is mostly Jewish, of course), would not do it. I agree to let the natives join his kibbutzim. Its members, like the rest of the Zionist left, understood how they should behave, and we must admit that they were right: to achieve the national vision, they had to not only encourage Jewish-only colonization, but also to transfer more land locals to newcomers.
"Another dunam, another goat" was the supreme command of the emerging new society, and most of these cultivated dunams were not created by draining the swamps. The principle of "Hebrew work", which aimed at removing as many Arab workers as possible from the Jewish labor market, completed the land enterprise.
Nevertheless, until the War of Independence in 1948, the redemption of the land was not a success story; only a little over 10 percent of the land was transferred to Jews. But the war came and saved the situation.
The expulsion or flight of 750,000 natives led to a much larger land purchase. Fields and orchards that had previously been cultivated by local farmers, who were later dubbed "Absentee Property", were not returned to those who fled the battles, which were neither allowed to return or be compensated.
These lands were immediately transferred to the new state of Israel. The new democratic sovereign power has seen fit to transfer most of them to the Keren Kayemeth Jewish National Fund LeIsrael, whose property does not even belong to all Israeli citizens, but to the Jewish people wherever they are. It is found.
On the eve of the war, KKL-JNF had about 900,000 dunams (225,000 acres). In 1950, he already controlled nearly 3.5 million dunams. And from that day, it was forbidden to sell this national badet; he can only praise it – and only to the Jews.
Since then, more and more land has been expropriated from farmers who worked there and about 700 new Jewish communities have been established on these lands. True, some cities for the Bedouins were also established, so that they would not be wandering unattended across the homeland territory. But no community has been created for Palestinian citizens of Israel. Slogans such as "Judaizing Galilee" and "Judaizing the Negev" were so accepted by both left and right that no one thought they had racist connotations.
Yet, the great liberals will retort, and rightly so, you can not compare 1948 or even 1958 to 2018. The territorial contiguity achieved at the time allowed the establishment of a sovereign state for Jews in distress after the Nazi genocide, and therefore Zionism had to be racist. (This vision even led the atheist David Ben Gurion to give religious Jews the monopoly of marriage and divorce, in order to prevent, in paradise, badimilation with non-Jews.) Now that this sovereignty has been consolidated, they will say, there is no justification for continuing this policy.
Thus, to strengthen the country, we must strive to move towards a secular and egalitarian democracy that will promote the welfare of all its citizens, not just Jews. The current law of the nation-state, which is the legitimate offspring of the Zionist tradition, prevents this process of Israeliization.
This logical liberal argument could have been significant if Israel had not occupied the territories conquered in 1967. The occupation imposed Jewish sovereignty not only on the Old City of Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and Hebron , the city of our ancestors, but also on additional mbades of natives, who today count about five million. Given this demographic mbad, the Judeo-Zionist identity again felt the need to protect and separate, not only through concrete walls and barbed wire, but also by reinforcing the national character of the city. 39; State.
Here, however, a question arises: If Israel wants to maintain itself as a Jewish state, why does not it try to free itself from "Judea and Samaria"?
Israel can not abandon the territories for too many reasons to list them here, so I will mention only two. First, the Palestinians will not concede sovereignty over Al-Aqsa, but I can not imagine any Israeli leader who would dare concede the Temple Mount, or even someone who would be able to uproot the Jewish settlement of Hebron. . The colonization campaign pushed the dream of the Zionist Left of two states, Israeli and Palestinian – or even a state and a half – of the agenda.
Second, it must be said the truth: the establishment of a Palestinian state in the 1967 lines would not solve the cardinal problem that the Zionist left has been trying to ignore for years. Establishing a Palestinian nation-state alongside Israel, which insists on seeing itself as the nation-state of the Jewish people, would be a guaranteed incentive to irredentism (a political ideology that seeks to make identical political boundaries to national borders) among Palestinian Israelis.
Palestinian Israelis make up 21% of the population of Israel, and despite the intensive Judaisation of Galilee, they are still in the majority. If Israel continues to claim that it is the state of a people scattered throughout the world, rather than a mere state of its citizens, why should the natives of Galilee not decide, at one time or another, to separate from Israel? what remains of their lands to their own nation-state? Will the crumbs of the material benefits thrown at them satisfy them in the long run?
The solution now emerging on the horizon is to extend the apartheid regime that has existed in the territories for 50 years and to apply it, if the conflict escalates. , to the whole of the state of Israel. Obviously, this will also include collaborating Bantustan culture and maintaining the existence of the last reserve for hostile natives to the south.
And if that does not happen, there is always the alternative of the transfer; it has been tried in the past and has proved very successful. But for that, a major war would be needed, and my imagination is not fertile enough even to guess how one could start, let alone how it will end.
Shlomo Sand is a historian and professor emeritus of the Tel Aviv University.
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