← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Otho_Isch
Thread ID: 12675 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2004-03-06
2004-03-06 01:48 | User Profile
The State of Israel now is in period of collective self-examination. Deep questions are topics of broad discussion: What does it mean that Israel is the Jewish State? Is the idea of a Jewish State compatible with the idea of democracy? Such inquiries come up in connection with Arab-Jewish issues and with controversies between religious and secular Jews in Israel.
Israel's Jewishness manifests itself in various ways: for example, the flag's Star of David, the legal right extended to non-Israeli Jews in the Law of Return, the different treatment of Jews and Arabs regarding duty in the military, Israel' s national holidays and Judaism's other influences on Israeli law. Some Israelis question whether such symbols, laws and practices are proper - whether they are democratic - in a country in which not everyone is Jewish, and in which the Jews themselves are far from uniform in their attitudes toward religion.
Israelis' qualms about their state's Jewishness have roots in Western intellectual history. They can be traced back at least two centuries to the arguments of European enlightenment liberals against what they denounced as religious and national prejudice.
First, a comment about terminology. Though "liberal" and "democratic" are commonly used as synonyms, scholars regularly distinguish between democracy and liberalism. The essence of democracy is self-government - that is, government by the people. Liberalism, on the other hand, makes a principle of the autonomy - the separate identity - of each individual and the equality of each before the law. Liberalism, in the words of Professor Ghia Nodia, is "that doctrine which holds individual human liberty to be the foremost political value."
Nationalism is the doctrine favoring the organization of states on ethnic or national lines.1 Nationalism exalts the principle of "self-determination," which history has shown to be a politically potent if highly subjective concept. Since the French enlightenment, universalist liberals (and their socialist cousins) have contended that the interests of peace, prosperity and individual liberty are best served by nations erasing sovereign divisions between themselves and combining in supranational communities. In The New Middle East, a book he published while foreign minister, Shimon Peres expresses his own preference for supranational institutions and criticizes nationalism as a source of disharmony and war. He says that nationalism precludes the regional cooperation needed for defense against the kinds of threats that face peace-loving people in today's world. When Peres advocates dismantling "walls" - his metaphor for Israeli national sovereignty - he is soldiering in the long-running battle of liberals and socialists against nationalism, a curious role for a leader of the Jewish State.
It is not my purpose here to enter specific disputes over policy. Rather, I wish to offer some reflections on how democracy, individual liberty, and nationalism relate to Zionist thought and to the Jewish people's singular character as both a religious and a national group.
The Dilemma of Citizenship and the Jewish Problem
The American and French revolutions required people to rethink their identities. Citizens in republics have different responsibilities from subjects of kings. Citizens participate in political decision-making, so they must identify with the community. When new democracies come into being, they must define their political communities, so they pose loyalty questions: Are you a member of our people or some other people? Such challenges were directed at Protestants in France, Catholics in Britain and Gypsies in many countries. With respect to the Jews, they brought into focus the unique feature of Jewishness: It defined both a person's religion and his national (or ethnic) identity.
Enlightened Jews set about producing a rational response to the citizenship dilemma. They reasoned that, if Judaism were "reformed" to eliminate its national elements - if it discarded references to Jewish peoplehood, to Zion, to the Messianic promise of the ingathering of the exiles, to the building of the Third Temple - then a Jewish identity would be no more than a religious affiliation and Jews could fit comfortably into Europe's newly democratic society. The term "Jew" had ineradicable connotations of peoplehood, so enlightened French Jews referred to themselves as "Frenchmen of the Mosaic persuasion." When Europe's first Reform house of prayer was inaugurated in Hamburg in 1818, the Jews who built it called it a "temple" rather than a synagogue. Their purpose was to renounce the traditional Jewish aspiration to return to Zion and rebuild the temple. They declared that "Hamburg is our Jerusalem and this synagogue is our temple." These Jews yearned not to redeem Zion but to assimilate in Germany.
Fitting in, however, entailed more than acquiring political rights and running synagogue services with prayer books that were de-nationalized and therefore quite thin. Benjamin Disraeli, in his 1847 novel Tancred, made fun of enlightened Jews who
felt persuaded that the Jews would not be so much disliked if they were better known; that all they had to do was to imitate as closely as possible the habits and customs of the nation among whom they chanced to live; and ... eventually, such was the progressive spirit of the age, a difference in religion would cease to be regarded, and that a respectable Hebrew, particularly if well dressed and well mannered, might be able to pass through society without being discovered, or at least noticed.
This, Disraeli exclaims, is the progressive Jew's idea of the "[c]onsummation of the destiny of the favourite people of the Creator of the universe!"2 Though a well-dressed and well-mannered convert to Christianity himself, Disraeli was no liberal rationalist. He mocked the progressives as people who have "mistaken comfort for civilization." But let us be clear: The syndrome known in the 19th century as the Jewish Problem was not a mere matter of social discomfiture. Jews as such were subject to exclusion from academic, professional and governmental positions, economic discrimination, physical persecution and even mass murder. And oppression of this kind was not confmed only to backward states like Czarist Russia.
Even in strongholds of progressive thought - France and Germany - anti-Jewish activity intensified rather than diminished with the progress of science and democracy. Throughout Europe, campaigns against the Jews became a salient feature of political life, a cause that found supporters not only among the poor and ignorant, but among Europe's leading academics, artists, clerics and other intellectuals.3 The ranks of anti-Jewish activists included prominent nationalists and anarchists, royalists and republicans, socialists and anti-socialists, churchmen and anti-clericalists. Each group had its own grounds for hatred of the Jews.
Political organizations arose in Germany, Austria, Russia and elsewhere that were organized specifically on anti-Jewish platforms. In France, for example, there were La Ligue Antisemitique Francaise, La Ligue Nationale Antisemitique de France, and La Ligue Antisemitique du Commerce Poitevin,4 which urged "the ladies of Poitiers" in 1896: "For the honour and the salvation of France, buy nothing from the Jews."5
A perspicacious French scholar, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, writing in the 1890s on the situation of the Jews in Russia, observed:
The Jews are at present treated as aliens; or, more correctly, they are treated as natives as regards obligations, as aliens as regards rights. ...[T]he law ...lays on the Jews all the same burdens as on the natives, comprising taxes and military service, but withholds from them the fullness of civic rights. The most elementary of liberties, that of coming and going, and electing a place of residence, is not for the Jew. ...Only one region is open to them ...The rest of the empire ... remains closed against them. Exceptions are made only in favor of a very small privileged minority . Within the narrow limits assigned to them, at least, do the Jews enjoy the same rights as their fellow subjects? By no means. ...[T]hey may not purchase lands. ...As the law stands now, [the Jew] can loan money to the peasants and farmers, but cannot take up a mortgage, so he has to charge higher interest. He can buy up crops, speculate on grain, but has not the right to foreclose. The law will let him be nothing but a middle-man ...6
Irrational Attachments, Nationalism and Antisemitism
Jews had invested hope in the French Revolution's promise of a new enlightened man, a rational man committed to liberty, equality and fraternity. But by the end of the 19th century, it was impossible to ignore that Europeans were not behaving according to the theories of the rationalists, liberals or socialists. So-called "irrational" factors - attachments to God, a community's language and ethnic culture, venerable institutions, the national soil - were not waning with the advance of science, democracy and personal liberty. As men became increasingly free to choose how they want to live, they were choosing to cherish such irrational attachments. Some of these attachments produced benign and even admirable sentiments, but some spawned malignancy and aggression. As the Europeans were forming new national, racial, class and other attachments, the Jews found themselves increasingly on the outs. An important figure in early Zionism, Leo Pinsker, a physician in Russia, wrote in 1881: "[F]or the natives [the Jew is] an alien and a vagrant, for property-holders a beggar, for the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, for patriots a man without a country , for all classes a hated rival."7 Fifteen years later, Theodor Herzl noted: "As workingmen, the Jews were hated by their Christian fellows for undercutting the wage standards. As business men, they were dubbed profiteers. Whether Jews were rich or poor or middle-class, they were hated just the same. They were criticized for enriching themselves, and they were criticized for spending money. They were neither to produce nor to consume. They were forced out of government posts. The law courts were prejudiced against them. They were humiliated everywhere in civil life. It became clear that, in the circumstances, they must either become the deadly enemies of a society that was so unjust to them, or to seek out a refuge for themselves."8
In their attempt to solve the Jewish Problem, enlightened Jews had started the 19 century by inventing Reform Judaism - a denationalized Jewish religion. At the end of that century , many enlightened Jews had come around to the view that the solution lay in the inverse proposition: a secular Jewish nationalism - that is, political Zionism.
Jews had for nearly 2000 years thought of themselves not just as members of a religious sect, but as a people with a national history, tongue, culture and mutual affinity and a vivid though metaphysical attachment to the national territory: the Land of Israel. Disraeli, convert though he was, understood the power of Jewish peoplehood and the people's attachment to Zion: "A race that persist in celebrating their vintage, although they have no fruits to gather, will regain their vineyards." The effort to dilute Jewish identity and pass as "Frenchmen (or Germans or whatever) of the Mosaic persuasion" had proven vain.
Zionism
The Zionists set out to win international recognition of the Jews as nation and endorsement of the reestablishment of a state of their own in their ancient homeland. They contended that a Jewish state would serve as a refuge and a center of national culture where Jews, composing the majority, could build a whole society on Jewish principles, employing Hebrew as the vernacular, respecting Jewish holidays, creating a Hebrew theater, producing new Hebrew literature and sustaining the full range of Jewish social and educational institutions.
Such a state, the Zionists said, would benefit not only to its citizens, but also Jews and non-Jews outside the state. Jews would take pride in the Jewish state, even if they lived abroad. The answer to the denunciations of Jews as aliens, parasites and cowards would be that the Jews can defend themselves, as others do, can rule themselves and can host others. This, Zionist writers contended, would make it easier for Jews to live with self-respect as "guests" elsewhere - in the sense that minority peoples are "guests," even if citizens, in states all over the world. Recognition of the Jewish people as a nation among the nations, rather than a homeless people who are aliens everywhere would, Zionists believed, help mitigate anti-Jewish feeling in Europe and elsewhere to the benefit of the world at large.
These arguments appealed to Lloyd George, Balfour, Churchill and others in Britain who came to control the fate of Palestine and the rest of the Middle East as a result of the Great War. British pro-Zionists did not think of Zionism as inherently at odds with Arab nationalism. The victorious allies planned for the Arabs to enjoy independence - self-determination - in the vast territories of Syria (including Lebanon), Iraq and Arabia, which the allies had liberated from the Turks. They deemed this not only fair but generous given that the Arabs, by and large, fought against the allies in the war. Balfour said that, under these circumstances, the Arabs should not "grudge" the Jews that "small notch of land" called Palestine.
The drafters of the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate envisioned the Arabs of Palestine living as a minority in a state that would, in time, have a Jewish majority. It was not thought to be a grievous hardship for people to live as a minority in a country, so long as one's civil and religious rights were respected and one own's people had the opportunity for self-determination somewhere themselves. The Arabs of Palestine as such asserted no claim to separate peoplehood. They identified themselves as Arabs. If they claimed a more specific designation, they were Syrian Arabs. By 1922, the British banned Jewish settlement from Eastern Palestine (known today as the Kingdom of Jordan), which was put under Arab administration. No one, least of all the Arabs themselves, ever claimed that the Arabs of Western Palestine were a separate nationality entitled to self-determination as such. On the contrary, Arab nationalists declared in formal communications with British officials that all the lines drawn by the European powers to divide Syria from Palestine from Mesopotamia from Arabia were artificial and violated Arab unity and the dignity of the Arab people.
Many British officials - and Zionist Jews too, for that matter - sympathized with the Arabs of Palestine who did not want to live in a Jewish state. This was viewed as a personal misfortune for those Arabs, however, not as an Arab national grievance. If the Arabs, who would in time have numerous states of their own, could insist successfully that their people not live as a minority in Palestine, then the Jews would have to continue to live as a minority everywhere. It was understood that Jews who did not want to live as a minority in society could move to the Land of Israel. And Arabs there who did not want to live as a minority could move a far shorter distance and live with their people across the border.
Zionist theorists and political leaders in general supported strongly the Arab nationalists' movement to obtain self-determination for the Arab people. They viewed the Arab and Jewish nationalist movements as complementary.
Democracy and the Ethnic State
Let us return now to the question of whether it is possible to reconcile the idea of a state organized on the basis of ethnic or national ties with the idea of democracy and, in turn, with the aim of securing individual liberty. It is self-evident that self-government requires citizens who think of themselves as a community. Shared values, the sine qua non of community cohesiveness, often (perhaps only) come from common memories, language and customs --the kind of traits that define an ethnic or national group. As Nodia points out, "Democracy has always emerged in distinct communities; there is no record anywhere of free, unconnected, and calculated individuals coming together spontaneously to form a democratic social contract ex nihilo. Whether we like it or not, nationalism is the historical force that has provided the political units for democratic government."10
Among states generally recognized to be democratic, the degree of self-government varies. But there are two traits that I deem essential to democracy: Election of political leaders and legal limitations on the government's authority - its power to control its citizens' lives. Regarding elections, the broader the group entitled to vote - the closer one gets to universal adult suffrage - the more democratic the country. Denying citizens suffrage on grounds of race, religion, ethnicity or the like counts as a grossly undemocratic practice.
I talk of limits on the power of government, because elections are not sufficient for the concept of self-government. If a government has authority to regulate all aspects of its citizen's lives - if it recognizes no line between the public and the private sphere; if it denies freedom of conscience, the free exercise of religion, the right to own property, the right to emigrate or other basic rights of the individual - then its people cannot be said to enjoy self-government - they cannot be said to enjoy democracy - even if the state's political leaders are elected.
Hence, in my view, a degree of liberalism - a degree of respect for individual autonomy - is built into the concept of democracy. It is possible, in theory, that a state can be liberal without being democratic - an unelected, absolute monarch could, if he chose, allow his subjects complete personal liberty. But a democratic state, by definition, cannot be completely illiberal - that is, it cannot be democratic and yet deny its citizens basic personal liberty.
Democratic countries exist on a spectrum from the more ethnic to the more liberal. In other words, some democracies - those I label "ethnic" - have been organized for the purpose of affording self-determination to a particular people. Others have created communities that define membership exclusively in political rather than ethnic terms. At the ethnic end of the spectrum are the states that afford more political recognition to ethnic groups as such. Israelis often discuss democracy as if the only two countries in the world were Israel and the United States. Many Israelis compare their state to America as the standard of democracy. The United States, however, is not a country organized for the purpose of protecting a particular people and preserving and promoting their culture. "Melting pot" states such as the United States and Canada - "lands of new settlement," as Francis Fukuyama calls them - are not the rule, but the exception among democracies.
Most democracies, however, like most states in general, are organized primarily on the basis of linguistic, cultural and ethnic communities. This is true of older nation-states, such as Britain, France and Germany and of newer nations, such as those that have arisen on the territory of the former Soviet Union.
Democracies in ethnically-based states often have institutions that deviate from liberal principles. Some - Belgium, Japan and Spain, for example - retain monarchies. Some have severe restrictions on political activities; the Federal Republic of Germany, for example, has since World War II banned political parties that espouse Nazism or Communism. Democracies commonly afford special recognition to group identities, often favoring the predominant (or traditionally predominant) ethnic or religious group. For example: Britain and several Scandinavian countries maintain established churches. Throughout Europe democratic states teach ethnic history in their schools, restrict government business to an official language ( or two) and use ethnic or religious symbols on their flags (a number of national flags in Europe (Britain, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland) have a Christian Cross motif), despite the presence therein of citizens belonging to minority ethnic groups. Moreover, democracies commonly have immigration laws that take account of the national origin of potential entrants.
The point of these several examples - many more are possible - is that it is not inconsistent with the theory or practice of democracy for a state to recognize group rights, to have an ethnic foundation or to dedicate itself to the preservation and development of a particular culture. Whether such a state is democratic is a matter of how it treats members of minority groups: Do they have the right to vote, to hold elective and other governmental offices, to practice their religion, to use their language, to receive equal treatment in law courts and generally to enjoy personal civil liberties? Israel is by no means the only democratic state wrestling with difficult issues of nationalism, ethnicity, democracy and minority rights. France is agonizing over how to limit large-scale Moslem immigration. The newly independent Baltic states - bent twigs (to use Isaiah Berlin's metaphor) snapping back with assertive national pride after a long history of Russian domination - view their ethnic Russian communities with suspicion as they work to secure self-government for themselves as Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. There is fear that their Russian minorities might someday join with Russia to destroy (again) the Baltic states’ independence. Similar problems confront budding democracies in Central Europe and the trans-Caucasus. Romania has a large Hungarian minority. Bulgaria has a Turkish minority. Azerbaijan has a Armenian minority. And so on.
Professor Nodia, who is a Georgian, teaching in Tblisi, writes: "It is hard to find even an island nation that has not had some sort of territorial dispute with its neighbors. The typical means of resolving such conflicts is war. Many nations must deal with ethnic minorities who are distrusted as potential traitors and who in turn view the majority as would-be oppressors.... Only rarely can solutions be reached without pain and violence, which is why so many supporters of modern democracy devoutly wish to avoid the nationalist principle. Wishes, however, cannot dictate reality."11 He then adds: "Once democracies feel stable and secure within their own borders, national feeling may gradually begin to decline in intensity and significance. One may argue whether or not something like this is happening in Western Europe today..."12
Finally, a word on the issue of injecting religious beliefs into civil legislation. This is an especially sore spot in the Israeli body politic today. It may help ameliorate the situation to observe that Israel is not by any means the only democracy that must grapple with this issue. Even as secular and liberal a state as the United States finds it hard to draw the line between a proper regulation of conduct and an undue intrusion of religion into law. The issue comes up in connection with many statutes, for example, those regulating gambling, drug or alcohol use, school prayer and, most prominently, abortion. When I was a child, many states had Sabbath laws - known as blue laws - that prohibited movie theaters or restaurants from operating on Sunday. The religious convictions of legislators provide motivation for all such legislation, as they undoubtedly do for our legislation on other topics, such as protecting the environment. Does this mean that the United States is not democratic?
It is inescapable in a heterogeneous democracy that legislators are going to make laws on the basis of religious beliefs that not everyone shares. It is in the nature of legislation that judgments are promulgated about good conduct and bad conduct. The legislators, after all, are human and human beings are prone to distinguish between good and bad on the basis of religious convictions they may have acquired in their lives.
Arguments can be made in favor of more government regulation of conduct or less - my personal sympathies on such matters are often with the libertarians - but it is inaccurate to assert that democratic countries keep religion out of their laws. It is a matter of degree. No country can keep religion out of legislation altogether. Different states strike the balance differently and states changes their judgment as to the appropriate balance ftom time to time. Israelis may think that they uniquely are afflicted by controversy over this issue, but they are not.
I began my talk by noting that liberalism emphasizes two concepts: the autonomy or separate character of individuals, on the one hand, and the equality or same treatment of individuals, on the other. There is inherent in liberalism a tension between these two concepts. Excessive emphasis on equal treatment will not do justice to the separateness or diversity of individuals. This helps explain the paradoxical manner in which liberalism - with its emphasis on individual liberty - became a way station for the journey of some 19 century progressives toward socialism - which obliterated individual liberty in the interest of uniformity .
For liberalism to thrive in practice, balancing of its two elements is required. There is a lesson in this for those Israelis who, intent on comparing their country with the United States, contend that Israel like America should not be an ethnic state - a Jewish state - but rather a "state of its citizens." Such Israelis advance a logic that would make all states in the world "states of their citizens," a classic, liberal universalist view, but one that, as we have seen, ignores the reality that human beings cherish their ethnic identities and, given free choice, will often prefer to live in an ethnic state in which their own people is the majority.
If one gives due emphasis to the first element of liberalism - autonomy or the right of human beings to enjoy what distinguishes them from others - one should recognize that there is a place in the world for non-ethnic nations and there is a place for ethnic nations. Human freedom is best served when people have a choice of the type of democratic state in which they wish to reside.
FOOTNOTES
1 "We use ethnicity ... to refer to a highly inclusive (and relatively large-scale) group identity based on some notion of common origin, recruited primarily through kinship, and typically manifesting some measure of cultural distinctiveness. 'So conceived, ethnicity easily embraces groups differentiated by color, language, and religion; it covers "tribes," "races," "nationalities," and castes."' Diamond and Plattner, eds., Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Democracy, p. xvii, quoting Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 53.
2 Tancred, p. 383.
3 See Wilson, Ideology and Experience, pp. 509-83 ("Chapter XIV: Religious Antisemitism: 'Among the Catholics"'), pp. 606-7 (re: leading writers, artists and academics who supported antisemitism); see also Linda Nochlin, "Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: A Portrait of the Artist as an Anti-Semite" in Norman L. Kleeblatt, ed., The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 96-116.
4 Quoted in Wilson, Ideology and Experience, p. 171.
5 Quoted in Wilson, Ideology and Experience, p. 116. Other anti-Jewish French national political organizations were La Jeunesse Antisemite et Nationaliste ( originally La Ligue Antisemite des Etudiants, founded in 1894), and Federation Nationale Antijuive (originally Le Comite National Antijuij; founded in 1901).
6 The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians (G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1896), 3 vols., vol. III. pp. 557-9, 561.
7 Avineri, The Making of Modem Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, p. 77. [OBTAIN PRIMARY SOURCE CITE]
8 Quoted in Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, pp. 93-4. [OBTAIN PRIMARY SOURCE CITE]
9 Tancred, p. 388.
10 NED book, p. 7.
11 Nodia, p. 8.
12 Nodia, p. 9.
2005-02-04 01:08 | User Profile
Bump.