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YNet News reported today that the United States has backed Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand for recognition by the Palestinians as a “Jewish state” — even though Israelis themselves heatedly dispute the meaning of the term.
State Department spokesman Philip Crowley backed the new Israeli demand, saying, “I’m not making any news here. […] It is a state for the Jewish people. […] What Prime Minister Netanyahu said yesterday is, in essence a core demand of the Israeli government, which we support.”
In siding with Netanyahu, the US move puts Abbas in an impossible position, but it also ignores the fact that Israel is actually more religiously diverse than the United States.
Israel’s population of 7.64 million is 75% Jewish and 25% non-Jewish. The Jewish population may in fact be lower than the official numbers because of Eastern Europeans who are not halachically Jewish and Druze and Bedouin populations may be higher because some have never been counted. In comparison, the population of the United States is 86% Christian and 14% non-Christian, yet sensible Americans do not define the United States as a Christian state.
Of Israel’s 5.77 million Jews, 42% or 2.44 million are secular. The number of people in the Jewish state who actually want to preserve a Jewish ethnocracy could well be a minority. And yet the State Department feels compelled to butt into a discussion of the character of another state.
When Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat, there was no question he had a Jewish state in mind, although the monarchy he proposed governing a nation of transplanted Europeans, which had purchased (not stolen) the land of natives who then conveniently disappeared, bears almost no resemblance to Israel. But since the first Zionist congresses and even Ben Gurion’s time the nature of the “Jewish state” is something that has deliberately remained a bit vague. Zionism, as a nationalistic movement, promised to offer something for everyone [except of course the native people who did not go as willingly as Herzl had hoped], but the intractable tension between secular and religious Jews has existed since the founding of Israel.
On the one hand, seen from a purely Jewish perspective, the nature of Israel is a Zionist question which Israeli Jews (and perhaps friendly Diaspora Jews) have to dispute. But in this discussion Phillip Crowley and Hillary Clinton don’t get a vote.
On the other hand, seen from a democratic perspective, the nature of Israel as a country with substantial religious minorities is one the minorities should also have a vote on. Unfortunately, the 25% of the non-Jewish population is represented in only 9% of the Knesset and not at all in the governing coalition. And then their remaining democratic rights are to be scrutinized and be subject to loyalty oaths.
Not surprisingly, the Jewish and democratic perspectives do not align at all.
If the United States feels compelled to speak out for something, it should be human and civil rights for all of Israel’s citizens and the subjects of its half century occupation. It is disappointing that the State Department continually demonstrates contempt for the principles of freedom or justice — such as by not intervening on behalf of Abdallah Abu Rahmah or taking an interest in the American citizen killed in the Mavi Marmara flotilla attack. It is shocking and sickening that the Obama administration is backing the religious nature of a state jammed down the throats of its victims — something even inimical to our own constitution — and that this new Israeli precondition is actually a new obstacle to peace.
If anyone doubts the unsuitability of the United States as an “honest broker” in this conflict, this is just one more example.
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