The traditional Jewish community, as it had existed in the Middle
Ages, later in Eastern Europe and the Moslem world, or today in
Israel itself in such enclaves as Bnei Brak and Meah She'arim, is
an outstanding example of a voluntary society which maintains
itself with only an external recourse to the state. It has
maintained its own educational system, its welfare and social
security institutions, its autonomous legal system and its interior
checks and balances while adhering to a unifying ideology totally
at variance with the ideologies of the host societies. Moreover, it
has developed, over the millennia, detailed and precise codes of
dealing with the host societies, from whose political institutions
it derived its statutory standing and powers.
Reliance On The Gentile State
Some historians even claimed that the Jewish community was "an
embryonic Jewish state". But this is a fallacious claim, as the
basic characteristic of the Jewish community is its shirking of
state responsibility. It relied on the "Gentile" state for its
defense, for the source of its authority, for most of its economic
and technological needs (like the food it did not grow, the
sciences which it forbade its children to study but benefitted from
their fruits, like transportation, communications, medicine,
engineering, etc.), and in exchange supplied the host societies
with certain services (like financial services, some handicrafts,
certain trades and commerce). This concentration in a few fields
permitted by tradition made possible both the existence of the
community and also its detachment from the surrounding world. A
state, on the contrary, is forced to face the full demands
presented by life and cannot afford such a seclusion. The behavior
of the orthodox communities in Israel, who are indifferent or even
hostile to the state and are in merely external contact with it, is
typical of their behavior also in the Diaspora.
The crisis of the East European Jewish community, which began
during the last century, with its secularizing processes and the
abolition of the statutory position of the Jewish communities as
mediators between the state and the Jewish individual, coupled with
the imposition of state law on all citizens equally, did not result
in the atomization of Jewish individuals and their assimilation
into the host societies, as often happened in the West. On the
contrary - these processes resulted in new forms of Jewish
organization, now divorced from the religious community: trade
unions, political parties, sports clubs, non-religious cultural
associations in Yiddish and Hebrew, journals and periodicals for a
Yiddish and Hebrew reading public (also Jewish publications in
Russian, Polish and German), as well as secular ideological
conflicts within a community which still regards itself as Jewish.
This community no longer considers itself divorced from the world
and indifferent to its events. It becomes integrated in the mosaic
of the awakening new secular nationalities of Eastern Europe and
forms alliances with some or the others. Thus, instead of the
religious-communal consciousness, for the first time a
secular-national consciousness is formed, one of the traits of
which is often an extreme hostility to the religious community's
tradition. This hostility is particularly apparent in the socialist
branches of the Jewish national movement, of which Zionism is only
one trend.
Voluntary Cohesion
With the development of the Zionist movement, from the 1880's on,
these patterns have been largely shifted to Palestine. Thus the
"New", national "Yishuv" or Jewish Community (as distinct from the
non-Zionist "old Yishuv") emerged as a highly organized, cohesive
entity, with a strong, essentially East European ethnic
consciousness and a well-defined collective ethos, with a strong
internal discipline subject to the guidance of the "National
Institutions". These were conceived as internal and organic to the
Yishuv, as against the "external" authority of the Mandatory
authorities - although it is questionable whether they would have
gained this status were it not for their recognition by the
Mandatory Power as representative. In some respects, then, this
system of relationships parallels that of the traditional Jewish
community, though the Yishuv's aim, in contradistinction to that of
the traditional Jewish community, was to achieve statehood. The
Yishuv's voluntary institutions, first and foremost the Histadrut,
the Labor Federation, were indeed meant to become national state
institutions, not communal ones. They already contained in
embryonic form the power structure of a state - the "Haganah" as a
future army, the Anglo-Palestine Bank as a future national bank,
the Histadrut Sick Fund as a future national health service,
etc.
This voluntary cohesion of the Yishuv, with the well-defined rules
of the political game within it, provided the state which inherited
it with its remarkable stability and with its political tradition.
It also made possible the absorption of an immigration which more
than quadrupled the Jewish population in the early years of the
state without this causing too severe a social shock. This is
particularly remarkable in view of the fact that most of the
newcomers were foreign to East European traditions. But the very
strength of the Yishuv's cohesion generated a clash with the
concept of the state which succeeded it.
Defining Identity
As mentioned before, Mandatory law was indifferent towards a
citizen's ethnic or religious identity. Nobody obliged all Jews to
belong to "Knesset Yisrael", the corporative body of the Jewish
community, and such an omission in no way infringed on the status
of the citizen. Neither did the law require any Moslem or Christian
to belong to his religious-communal framework. Also, the question
"who is a Jew" was never raised at the time and no investigations
were made into a person's background to clarify it. The assumption
was that anyone declaring his Jewishness must obviously be
one.
But, once the Yishuv became a state, the definition of membership
in the "organized Yishuv" ipso facto became a definition of
citizenship, instead of being part of a broader definition of
citizenship. Whereas in the Mandatory passport a person would be
classed as a member of the Jewish community, in Israel this became
a definition of nationality, according to the conception that
Israel is the state of the Jewish nation. The corollary is that
Israel is not the state of any non-Jew living in it, even when he
is a citizen born in the country and serving in its army (like the
Bedouins and the Druzes) and paying its taxes. Any Jew in the
world, whatever his nationality, has rights in the state which no
non-Jewish citizen has in it.
Furthermore, once the voluntary membership becomes an official
definition which in practice determines civic rights, another
problem looms: what, after all, defines the Jew as such? Or what
qualifications must one meet to be considered Jewish by the law of
the state?
The usual definitions of nationality are complex enough: a common
language, a common culture, a common ethnic origin, a common
history, sojourn in the national territory, or a combination of
some of these traits. But Jews in the world have no common
language, no common culture, no common ethnic - or genetic -
ancestry, no common territory, and each Jewish community has its
own history and fate. The only thing common to all Jews is the
religious civilization that they have an affinity to, whether
active and immediate (as among the orthodox), or vague and distant,
or even rejected (as among most secular Jews). At any rate, whoever
withdraws from the community and converts into another religion, is
not considered any more as Jewish, despite the shopworn argument
that Jews are essentially a nation not a religion.
A Recipe for Fragmentation
This legal definition in effect dooms any non-Jew to second-class
citizenship in all respects - civic, political, social and
economic. Non-Jews are not entitled to enjoy the aid and services
of the Jewish Agency, which essentially is a state body. Their
educational system is starved by the state in comparison with the
Jewish one. The governments are always trying to base themselves on
"a Jewish majority" in the Knesset, in order to avoid a dependence
on non-Jewish citizens, a development which would introduce them
into the "inner", "legitimate" circle of Israeli politics, thus
shattering the invisible limits of the corporation state. Jewish
society, even the secular one, does not easily admit non-Jews,
particularly those of Arab origin. Only a few of them penetrate
academia, the media, diplomacy and culture. Above all: only Jews
(and a few others, namely Druzes and Bedouins) are permitted to
serve in the army (although non-Jews are never allowed to rise
above the medium levels of command). But the army and the defense
field in general are among the main avenues for social, political
and economic advancement in Israel. Not only does the officer corps
enjoy a preferred position in society, but it is also relatively
easy to pass from the senior levels of command to senior positions
in the economy or in politics. Furthermore, the whole field of
defense-related industries, which in practice covers all the hi-tec
and most remunerative enterprises in the country, is virtually
closed to non-Jews. An Arab graduate in electronics,
computer-science, metallurgy or mechanics has hardly a chance of
finding employment in his chosen field, and the same applies to the
field of big finance and banking.
There are numerous complaints about the discrimination against Jews
of oriental origins. But even if such discrimination exists, it is
largely unintended. It is basically caused by the relative
backwardness of people of oriental origin in modem technology and
science and not the result of policy. In the main it is nothing but
another manifestation of the sociological fact that recent
immigrants are generally on a lower income and occupational level
than the established population, as we see in the case of the
recent immigration from the CIS countries, who despite their levels
of education and training which in most cases are not inferior to
those of "veteran Ashkenazim", are in fact much weaker economically
and politically than the orientals.
Under such conditions, when the state is defined on the level of
the corporation, members of other corporations, whose citizenship
is secondary and merely tolerated, become a divisive and
potentially hostile factor. The state fails to become, as Hegel
conceived it, the universal entity which transcends the
particularistic interests of civil society, but on the contrary
¬it perpetuates and aggravates them. The true situation in
such a state is one of suppressed civil war, with the
underprivileged groups just waiting for the weakening of the
preferred group in order to dissociate themselves from a state
whose very definition excludes them. In short: this is a sure
recipe for the fragmentation of the state. A true state creates an
egalitarian superstructure, within which each individual and group
can realize their freedom, as the state was defined in the French
Revolution.
This situation derived from the existential conflict with the Arab
World in which the Yishuv, then the state, was engaged since its
inception about a century ago. This conflict gave the political
leadership the opportunity to translate the political-military
siege laid by the Arab world, motivated by purely political causes,
into the terms of the ancient fears of the Jewish caste-community
from the hostility of its Gentile environment and pretend that this
is the selfsame hostility. The religious circles of the Yishuv,
whose world-view remained that of the closed-in Diaspora Jewish
community, are even conceptually incapable of conceiving the Arab
siege in any other terms. The relations with the Arab world are not
seen by them as a system of power conflicts between states, but as
that of the threatened Jewish community versus "the hatred of the
'Goyim''', accompanied by the whole baggage of concepts copied from
the relations of "Jews and Goyim" in the Diaspora and adopted
bodily by the ultra-nationalist Right, which has failed to carry
out the mental transformation from a religious caste-community into
a modem national society. So we encounter bizarre terms like
"self-abnegation before the 'Goy'", "Jewish pride", "pogroms",
etc., etc.
Toward a True State
Against this background, it appears that the speed with which a
growing segment of the Jewish Israeli public began to support the
peace agreement with the PLO shows that a process of political
"normalization" is taking place within the general public,
including the oriental communities, and it is more and more
prepared to view the conflict in the realistic terms of power
politics, not in the eschatological terminology of "Jews vs. Goyim"
and "Messianic redemption". Hence one can deduce an intense
longing, which until now was repressed due to the political
demagoguery of the Right and the religious circles, for liberation
from the stifling communal-religious atmosphere and the development
of a full national life, including open relations with the Arab
world. The reaction of the various religious circles to this
development is also understandable: it threatens to reverse the
process of absorption of the nation within the caste, to open the
horizons of society towards full contact with the surrounding world
in which non-Jews would not be considered as "Goyim" (an
untranslatable term, combining a loathing of the unclean,
apprehension of the alien, and an inclusion of the whole of
humanity but orthodox Jews in an indiscriminate, inferior mass) but
as equal human beings. If and when the peace agreements are
achieved with all of our neighbors, a central element of the
conception of the Jewish community in Israel of its own nature will
collapse, which will undermine in turn the status of organized
religion in the state as definant of the nation.
The Knesset vote on the agreement with the PLO carries a further
significance: essentially, it was achieved thanks to the vote of
the Arab bloc of Knesset members, which also provides Labor with
its majority. Although it is clear that the Labor party was not
happy to rely on these votes, it did not refrain from doing so.
Thus a taboo existing since the days of David Ben-Gurion was
broken. The attempts of the Right to discredit this vote with the
argument that it was not the vote of "the Jewish majority" only
bring out the Right's essentially anti-state character. Thus the
Arab vote is emerging as a counterweight to the power of the
religious bloc as a spoiler, and as a beginning of the admission of
the Arabs into the inner circle of Israeli politics. Such an
admission is one guarantee of Israel's development into a true
state, according to the Hegelian concept of the state.
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