Comments (0)Why A Jewish State?
September 4, 2009Dr. Robert O. Freedman
Special to the Jewish Times
In his June 2009 Bar-Ilan University speech, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu asserted that Palestinian recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” was an Israeli requirement for agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Both Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat immediately rejected the call. However, this is necessary for a long-lasting peace between the State of Israel and a Palestinian state.
Palestinians have three official objections to the recognition and a fourth that they do not speak about openly. The first three are:
• Israelis, not Palestinians, should determine the nature of the Israeli state.
• Such recognition will jeopardize Israeli Arabs, who form 20 percent of Israel’s population.
• Israel did not demand this in its treaties with Egypt and Jordan.
The fourth objection — not openly asserted lest it destroy the chances for a peace treaty with Israel — is that many Palestinians simply reject the legitimacy of Jewish Nationalism (Zionism).
For them, and for many other Arabs, a Jew is defined by religion, not nationality or ethnicity. In addition, given the position of Jews as dhimmi, or second-class religious subjects in Muslim history, the Palestinians feel that Jews have no right to be rulers, let alone rule over what they consider Muslim territory.
This last attitude, partially latent during the heyday of the Oslo peace process (1993-2000), was reinforced by the Al-Aqsa intifada, which transformed a conflict between two peoples over one territory into a religious war between Muslims and Jews, and greatly strengthened Hamas in the process. Indeed, both Hamas and non-Hamas religious leaders stressed that the Palestinians were fighting the Jews, just as Muhammad had fought them when they allied with his enemies as he sought to unite the Arabian Peninsula under the banner of Islam.
The Palestinians — and other Arabs — fail to understand that Zionism arose as a national movement among European Jews in the 19th century, one very much influenced by the German and Italian national unification movements (as were the Arab nationalists of the time), as well as by the increasingly precarious position of the Jews in Eastern Europe, who were beset by pogroms in Czarist Russia.
Zionist thinkers such as Hess, Lilienblum and Herzl asserted that just as the French had France, the Germans had Germany and the Italians had Italy, the Jews too deserved a state of their own where they could lead a “normal, national life.” The ancient Jewish homeland of Israel, then occupied by the Ottoman Empire, was the chosen site of the future Jewish state.
To be sure, that land was already populated by Arabs. However, the Arabs living there did not develop a national identity until the 1922-1948 British mandate era. In the late 19th century, they primarily saw themselves as Muslims or Christians, or “Southern Syrians” or Ottoman subjects.
Thus, one can respond to the Palestinian reasons for not recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state” as such:
1: While the Israelis can and should define the nature of their state, when the state’s existential nature is central in the conflict (unlike, say, the French and German conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries), then such Palestinian recognition becomes central to ending the conflict.
2: The often negative treatment of many Middle East minorities — whether religious such as the Egyptian Copts, or national such as the Turkish Kurds — is linked to the nature of their country. They could be protected by treaty arrangements if they swear allegiance to the state. Indeed, a Palestinian state that recognizes a “Jewish state” could make it easier for Israeli Arabs to solve their identity problems, ones increasingly serious in recent years as some of their leaders have openly backed Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria against Israel.
3: While the Israeli treaties with Egypt and Jordan did not confirm Israel as a Jewish state, neither involved the existential conflict of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one where assertion of one people’s national aspirations can appear to negate those of the other. Thus, both sides must recognize the legitimacy of the other’s national aspirations.
4: Finally, the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state to replace the image of the Jew as dhimmi with that of the Jew as part of a national group exercising legitimate national rights, just as do the Palestinians.
Dr. Robert O. Freedman is a visiting professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches about the Arab-Israeli conflict and Russian foreign policy. Among his books are “Israel In The Begin Era,” “Israel Under Rabin,” “Israel’s First Fifty Years” and “Contemporary Israel.”