The Shrinking Space of Citizenship Ethnocratic Politics in Israel
Oren Yiftachel
(Oren Yiftachel teaches political geography at Ben Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel.)
On February 14, 2002, the Israeli government sent several light planes to spray 12,000 dunams of crops in the southern Negev region with poisonous chemicals. The destroyed fields had been cultivated for years by Bedouin Arabs, on ancestral lands they claim as their own. The minister responsible for land management, Avigdor Lieberman, explained:
We must stop their illegal invasion of state land by all means possible. The Bedouins have no regard for our laws; in the process we are losing the last resources of state lands. One of my main missions is to return to the power of the Land Authority in dealing with the non-Jewish threat to our lands.[1]
Lieberman's words clearly proposed a forceful separation of Palestinian-Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel. Expressions such as "our land," "our laws" and "their invasion" demarcate sharply the limits of identity and rights in the Jewish state. Not surprisingly, Lieberman (a West Bank settler, and thus, ironically, an "illegal invader" himself) failed to mention that the Bedouins are citizens of the state of Israel, and hence can, and should, receive state lands for their needs. The minister failed to explain why the state never attempted to enforce the law by legal means. Worse, he overlooked the ramifications of the aerial attack: a growing sense of alienation among Bedouins, once a community keen to integrate into Israeli society.
The destruction of the Negev crops was one of many recent attacks on Arab rights in Israel. The state's hardening ethnic policies and practices, coupled with increasingly confrontational Palestinian resistance, have pried open the conflict between the state's Jewish majority and the Palestinian Arabs who form 18 percent of the citizenry. The result has been to shrink the space for Palestinian citizenship....
A Not So Academic Debate
...Critical scholars...argued that Israel was more accurately described as an "ethnocracy," an "ethnic state" or an "imagined democracy," and exposed the range of structural impediments to the establishment of a stable democratic system.[3]
The wave of critical works highlighted the nature of Israel as not only a Jewish, but also a Judaizing state, with features at odds with the tenets of democratic citizenship, namely pervasive discrimination against Palestinian citizens, the political role of religion, the blurring of the state's geography and the ongoing military control and settlement of the Occupied Territories, whose Palestinian residents remain disenfranchised. These critical voices, however, encountered strong opposition from the intellectual mainstream.
Needless to say, scholarly positions on the nature of Israel are not purely academic, but function as professions of faith in a political system. Following the events of October 2000, in which 13 Arab citizens were killed by the Israeli police during mass demonstrations (where a Jewish citizen was also killed), and in the wake of the intifada which has claimed nearly 2,000 lives (mainly Palestinian, but also over 400 Israeli lives, including 120 settlers) over 20 months, it became clear that, despite mainstream scholarly claims, the Israeli system is neither democratic nor stable. On the contrary, Israel shows signs of fragmentation and chronic instability, resembling Northern Ireland, Serbia or Sri Lanka.
Israeli Jewish academia has thus played a major role in creating and maintaining an illusion of democracy. Scholars turned a blind eye to the 35 year-old occupation, the unresolved refugee problem, the ongoing Judaization of lands, Jewish-only immigration and the continuing roles of religion and world Jewry in the Israeli polity. The illusion of democracy has given internal and international legitimacy to Israel's expansionist policies and practices, and helped foster and preserve a system of unequal citizenship.
Despite these undemocratic features, several important (if insufficient) democratic bases do exist within the Israeli polity, including the important ability of minorities to mobilize and protest in the public arena. Israeli authorities have also taken several significant democratic steps in recent years, including the High Court ruling which prohibited discrimination against Arabs in the allocation of state lands, the near equalization of budgets for Arab local governments after decades of blatant discrimination, the first-ever appointment of an Arab minister to the Israeli government[4] and even the ultimately failed attempts by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak to end [sic] the occupation of the Palestinian territories. These are important steps, although in many respects they run against the grain of recent popular sentiments and policy agendas, which have taken Israel further down the ethnocratic path.
Rethinking Citizenship
In Israel, systematically stratified citizenship has developed from the combination of Judaization policies and religious-legal control. Several types of citizenship have emerged, differentiated by the combination of legal and informal rights and capabilities. Each category, especially among religious groups, is also divided internally on gender lines, with men enjoying a superior position. The groups include: a) "mainstream" Jewish citizens, b) ultra-Orthodox Jews, c) "pseudo-Jews" (mainly Russian immigrants recognized as Jews under the Israeli law of return, but not recognized as such by the religious establishment), d) Druze, f) Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship, g) Bedouins, h) East Jerusalem and Golan Arabs, i) Palestinians in the rest of the West Bank and Gaza and j) immigrant labor.
Over 2001, as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pursued aggressive anti-Palestinian policies, the thin illusory layer of equal citizenship continued to erode. Ethnocentric rhetoric from leaders and politicians, both Jewish and Arab, heightened. Such escalating rhetoric led to the indictment of MK Azmi Bishara, who is now facing charges of "supporting a terror organization," "inciting violence" and "endangering state security." The charges followed his well-publicized June 2001 appearance at a memorial service for the late Syrian president Hafiz al-Asad where he claimed:
The Sharon government is distinguished by the fact that it came into power after the victory of the Lebanese resistance, which benefited from the enlarged realm that Syria has continuously fostered between accepting Israeli dictates regarding a so-called comprehensive and enduring peace, and the military option. This space nourished the determination and heroic persistence of the leadership and membership of the Lebanese resistance. But following the victory of this resistance, and following the Geneva summit and the failure of Camp David, an Israeli government came into power determined to shrink the realm of resistance, by putting forth an ultimatum: either accept Israel's dictates, or face full-scale war. Thus, it is not possible to continue with a third way -- that of resistance -- without expanding this realm once again so that the people can struggle and resist. Nor is it possible to expand this realm without a unified and internationally effective Arab political position.[5]
Bishara's appearance at the ceremony, where he was seated close to some of Israel's most notorious adversaries, irked the authorities and Jewish public. Their anger was exacerbated by other statements made by Bishara about the "sweet taste" of Hizballah's victory, and by his defiance in the face of criticism, including his declaration: "I am not an Israeli patriot." The state's attorney general moved to indict Bishara -- marking the first time a Knesset member was put up for trial on non-criminal grounds, and the first time parliamentarian immunity was stripped on the basis of political views.[6]
The discriminatory treatment of Arab leaders became conspicuous when the same attorney general declined to press charges against Jewish leaders who expressed more inciting statements. For example, MK Michael Kleiner claimed that leaders such as Bishara who speak against their state "are routinely put in front of a firing squad in most countries."[7] Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader and political authority of the large Orthodox Shas movement, declared in July 2001 that Israel should "bomb the Arabs with missiles, through and through," and on another occasion that "most people know the Arabs are snakes...and snakes should be dealt with like snakes."[8]
These leaders, as well as other Jewish politicians, such as the ministers Avigdor Lieberman and Efraim Eitam or deputy minister Gideon Ezra, who all made inciting public comments about Israel's Palestinian citizens, but remained untouched by state authorities. In contrast, from the end of 2001 to the beginning of 2002, three other Arab MKs were charged with incitement, following statements supporting the violent Palestinian intifada or the resistance of Palestinian Arabs in Israel to oppressive policies. The chasm between Jewish and Arab political space has thus widened significantly in the recent past, seriously shrinking the ability of Palestinian Arab citizens to mobilize within the confines of Jewish tolerance and Israeli law.
Judaizing the Jewish State
Following the 1992 constitutional changes, the notion that Israel is a "Jewish and democratic" state has become a near consensus among the Jewish public, to the degree that the terms "Jewish and democratic" are constructed as inseparable. The result has been a further shrinking of the political space available to non-Jews, because any activity against the Jewish nature of the state can be interpreted as an "attack on democracy." For example, Sharon justified the charges against Bishara by claiming that "democracy has to defend itself," though Bishara did not criticize Israel's democratic features, but rather sought to strengthen them. Similarly, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said in February 2001: "territorial compromise is absolutely necessary for maintaining a firm Jewish majority and hence a democracy in Israel. The only other option is a binational state, and the loss of our proud democratic tradition."
Such positions have been reinforced by a public discourse increasingly concerned with the "Arab demographic danger," and the increasingly combative stance of Palestinian citizens vis-à-vis the state's Zionist agendas. Against this background, the further Judaization of Israel has become a major concern for the state. New bills attempting to "anchor" (by special majority laws) Israel's character as a Jewish state, and as the state of the Jewish people, have been proposed in the Knesset by prominent MKs Limor Livnat (Likudnik minister of education), Tommy Lapid (head of the centrist Shinui Party) and Ophir Pinhess (parliamentary leader of the Labor Party). None has passed into law as yet, but the efforts are continuing.
However, two other bills did pass into law in May 2002, restricting Palestinian Arab political activity. The first amends Israel's electoral law by prohibiting the candidacy of any party or individual who "supports (in action or speech) the armed struggle of enemy states or terror organizations." The second is the "law against incitement for violence," which specifies harsh measures, including five-year prison sentences, for supporting anti-Israel violence. Explicitly justified as measures to halt "subversive" political activity, these laws makes it far easier to disqualify Palestinian Arab (and critical Jewish) politicians from running for the Israeli parliament, especially on the basis of supporting (internationally sanctioned) resistance against the Israeli occupation....
"Transfer" and Ethnocratic Logic
Israel's geographic borders have never been demarcated clearly, facilitating the Judaization of lands outside the internationally recognized (pre-1967) sovereign area, chiefly in the Palestinian West Bank. Spatial Judaization has also been a prominent feature of Israel's policies inside the Green Line, enabling massive expropriation of Arab lands, the establishment of over 700 Jewish localities, the imposition of near total Jewish municipal control (stretching over 94 percent of the state) and the harsh neglect of dozens of Bedouin villages regarded by the state as "unrecognized."...
Fault Lines
...While less prominent on the public agenda, issues pertaining to planning, land and development have pushed the state's ethnocratic agenda further over the last 20 months. For example, after a lull of several years, the state has initiated more large-scale Jewish settlement projects within the Green Line. In early 2002, 68 new settlements were in the process of approval, and 18 began construction.[17] These are added to the 920 Jewish settlements already existing in Israel-Palestine, and to the ongoing expansion of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories.
In the meantime, four new Arab localities were also approved, but these are mainly aimed at concentrating Negev Bedouins into planned towns. The plight of the Bedouin community in the southern Negev continues to demonstrate the dark side of the Judaization program, which works persistently to de-Arabize land wherever possible. Dozens of Bedouin villages -- some in existence before 1948, and others built as a result of state-organized transfers in the early 1950s -- are now regarded as "unrecognized." Residents are denied basic services, and pressured to move to planned towns, in order to shift further lands to state control. The resistance of the Bedouin has created a stalemate, and a precarious atmosphere of inflammable conflict.
The future tenure of state lands, which cover 76 percent of Israel's territory,[18] has received wide coverage in the media. State policy has aimed mainly to increase incrementally Jewish rights to state lands, while maintaining a meager allocation for Arab localities. But the main fault line in debates over state land tenure has not been Arab-Jewish, but has run between a pro-privatization coalition of Jewish farmers and developers and a group of anti-privatization social organizations headed by the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow.[19] Palestinian citizens have been totally excluded from this debate, despite their justified claim for a fairer share of state lands, much of which were originally confiscated from Palestinian refugees. Arab local governments cover only 2.5 percent of Israel, and the allocation of state lands to Arab localities over the last two decades amounted to less than one percent. Most Jewish organizations have simply ignored Arab claims and needs in the debate over the future of state lands....
[The full text of the article is available at <http://www.merip.org/mer/mer223/223_yiftachel.html>.] *****
Oren Yiftachel: <http://www.bgu.ac.il/geog/members/yiftachel/>.
Excerpt from _Ethnocracy and Its Discontents: Minorities, Protests, and the Israeli Polity_ by Oren Yiftachel: <http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/v26/v26n4.yiftachel.html>.
Oren Yiftachel, "Democracy or Ethnocracy: Territory and Settler Politics in Israel/Palestine": <http://www.merip.org/mer/mer207/yift.htm>. -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>