Can Israel Be Both Jewish and Democratic?

Ruth Gavison Can Israel be Both Jewish and Democratic? Or: Israel Between Jewishness and Democracy ‏Adaptation of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State: Tensions and Prospects Van Leer and Hakibutz Hameuhad, 1999 Heb I thank The Israel Democracy Institute and the Rabin Center for Support which made this book possible. I also thank the Shalem Center for allowing me to use materials prepared and published in the Bernstein Lecture 2001 on: The Jewish state, Its Nature and Justification ‏2 ‏ Copyright Ruth Gavison. Do not publish or disseminate without written author’s permission 2004 ‏3 ‏ Table of Contents Foreword 3 Chapter 1: The Compatibility and Principled Justification of a Jewish and Democratic State 18 Chapter 2: Some Central Arrangements 60 Chapter 3: Challenges and Directions 121 Chapter 4: A Tentative conclusion 234 ‏4 ‏ Foreword This book is based on three lectures delivered in Jerusalem in June 1996, just after the elections that have brought Benjamin Netanyahu to power, a bare half year after the traumatic assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The issues discussed in this book seemed then to be at the center of the quest for Israel’s future. But the Oslo process seemed to be heading towards a Palestinian state next to Israel, with both nation states struggling to form their identity. Five years later, in June 2001, the issues seem even more central than they had been then. The Oslo process has all but collapsed. Some say this outcome has always been written on the walls. Others say that the agreement was an historic gamble, that failed because of the behavior of both parties. Whatever the case may be, the process did not end the way its protagonists had hoped it would. The prospects of the Jewish state, and the possibility of justifying it, seem more complex and fragile now than they seemed to many in 1996. It is quite clear that the forces and hopes driving the founders of Israel included a strong wish to establish a democratic country, but that the prime mover of the movement was the dream of a Jewish state. The founder of the state did not want to establish yet another state like all others, that will provide its population with democracy and justice. They wanted to establish a Jewish state, that will be democratic and just. As we shall see, there have always been those who argued that this dream was, in principle, both impossible and immoral. But even those who challenge this position must show that Israel in fact succeeds in maintaining an acceptable balance ‏5 ‏ between its democratic nature and its Jewishness, and that it has the structures that may guarantee that it maintains a stable existence as a country, which is both Jewish and democratic in the future. I believe that the Zionist dream of a state that is both Jewish and democratic is conceptually possible and justifiable in principle. I also believe we must think seriously about the implications of the wish to maintain Israel as a just and democratic state which is also Jewish, to examine whether these conditions are in fact met in contemporary Israel, and to study what needs to be done in order that they are. What I do in this book is to sketch the way in which Jewishness and democracy may be combined within Israel in principle, and to examine the way this compatibility can be concretized for some of the central controversies in Israel’s public life. I believe strongly that these issues are at the heart of the Zionist enterprise. I do not present a systematic, comprehensive theory; I do not mean my words to be the end of a normative quest. My hope is that this small book will make a contribution towards a more serious and deeper public debate of these issues. Such a debate is essential if Israel is to continue to exist as state that is Jewish and democratic. This is not a subject that one is likely to write about from ‘nowhere’, looking at the facts with impersonal detachment. All such writing will be ‘biased’. Instead of denying the effects of this emotional bias, I prefer to concede it at the outset. This book is a part of my attempt to make sense of, and support, the fulfillment of the wish of Jews to exercise their right to political self-determination in their homeland. I want Israel to provide a stable and fair home to its population, irrespective of its ‏6 ‏ ethnic or religious affiliation. Naturally, this wish is alien, maybe even unworthy and illegitimate, to those who reject it and would like it frustrated. This book is unlikely to be meaningful to them. It is addressed mainly to those who share the wish that Israel stays, in some sense, a Jewish state. At least, the readers must accept this possibility as legitimate. Once this condition is met, I expect the book to be relevant to readers whose conceptions of democracy, the Jewish people, the conditions necessary for its survival, and the features of a just society, are very different than mine. I write this book as a secular Jewish woman, with a firm commitment to humanism and human rights, who is also a Zionist. By ‘Zionist” here I mean only the belief that the Jewish people has a right to political self-determination, and that this right is now exercised in Israel. There are tensions between parts of this identity, but I do not see them as contradictory. These ingredients of my identity are not the result of laziness, inertia or convenience. They are a choice I have made. And I expect they are also the choice of a large part of the Israeli Jewish population. I also expect that other parts of the Israeli population – orthodox and haredim among the Jews, and Arabs and other non-Jews, will not disappear, and continue to form important parts of Israeli population. I come from a family that lived in this country for many generations, living here alongside Arabs and members of other nations. We did not lose family members of Europe. My maternal grandfather and uncle were sepharadi rabbis. They spoke Ladino and Hebrew. My father’s family was traditional, not orthodox, with a strong commitment to Hebrew, and with familiarity with Arabic. My father and his siblings ‏7 ‏ all had the rich, nuanced Hebrew in which the differences between letters are clearly noticed. In my home we did not observe, but the house was full of traditions, prayers, songs. There was no process of ‘secularization’, a revolt against religion, the religious way of life, or its prophets and teachers. My parents grew in a multicultural society. They knew many languages, travelled to many places. Life was, at one and the same time, very Jewish and communal, but very open and responsive to a non-Jewish society and its charms. Background alone does not decide the ‘voice’ or the ‘tone’ in which a book is written. I started thinking about the tensions between Jewishness and democracy not as the center of the existential problems of my country, but as a result of the fact that Israel was defined as “Jewish and democratic’ in the basic laws enacted in 1992. I started, therefore, with the legal meaning of the term, and with the implications the enactment had for the role of law and the judiciary in Israel’s public life. Very soon it became clear that the legal-professional dimension was but the tip of the iceberg. Today it has become fashionable to talk about all the issues in Israel in terms of the tension between democracy and Jewishness. So much so, that the invocation of the tensions between the two has become misleading. Many real issues in Israel are not related to either democracy or Jewishness or their combination. But many other real issues in Israel are either generated by, or at least intensified by, these tensions. And many of these tensions are generated by the fact that various groups in israel’s population see democracy and Jewishness in very different ways; and that the dreams and hopes of one group are often the fears and the threats of the other. ‏8 ‏ For this reason, the prescriptions I discuss in these pages for ways to combine Jewishness and democracy are not the description of my ideal state, the state that might have been possible if all people in Israel shared my identity, opinions, beliefs and emotions. I do not take for granted the continued stable existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Such an existence seems to me a huge challenge, whose prospects are not self-evident. My purpose is to identify courses of action that will improve these prospects, against the background of a diversity of groups, which will persist and even increase. This kind of an attitude, which builds into itself an awareness of the wishes and needs of others, may involve giving up some consistency and coherence. Taking into consideration, as part of one’s own analysis, the perceptions and aspirations of others, even when these are inconsistent with one’s own, is necessary in order to sketch possible compromises between these views, so that their holders can live together without the need to be victorious. To me, this is the true meaning of liberalism – creating the political conditions, which permit the coexistence of different groups, without requiring them to lose their distinctness. But the adoption of a position of compromise in one’s own analysis may entail costs – personal, theoretical and political. The personal costs result from the fact that a strong willingness to be attentive to the needs and perceptions of others may blur one’s own place and identity.

Load more