“With this law Israel buys an exit ticket from the family of nations,” wrote Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea last week in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. “The proposed loyalty law . . . is really racist. It obliges non-Jews to declare that they would be loyal to the Jewish state but exempts Jews from this obligation.”
But Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s proposed new law is not racist, just short-sighted and nasty.
It is really about foreign policy: Netanyahu has also just demanded that the Palestinian Authority recognize Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.” Back in 1977, Prime Minister Menachem Begin said exactly the opposite: “We do not (demand that) our right to exist in the land of our fathers be recognized.”
“It is a different recognition which is required between us and our neighbours,” Begin continued: “Recognition of sovereignty and of the mutual need for a life of peace and understanding.”
Begin observed that principle in the peace treaty he signed with Egypt in 1979, and Yitzhak Rabin used the same language in the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan. In both treaties the parties recognise each other’s sovereignty, integrity, and independence, but there is not a word about Israel’s Jewishness.
Defining a country in ethnic and/or religious terms sounds racist to people who live in multicultural societies like Canada, the United States, India or South Africa, but it is actually quite common.
Few people object to the “blood and soil” definitions of nationality that prevail in Germany and Japan, or to states that proclaim themselves to be Islamic Republics. On one condition: that they do not treat their ethnic or religious minorities as second-class citizens.
Netanyahu’s predecessors avoided any mention of Israel’s “right to exist” or its Jewish character when they made peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, because real sovereign states do not negotiate these matters with other governments. A different approach was needed for the Palestinians in the occupied territories, because they didn’t have a state yet.
When Israel finally began talking to the Palestine Liberation Organization in the early 1990s, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin demanded that the PLO publicly recognize Israel’s right to exist. (It complied in 1993.) However, Rabin never asked the Palestinians to acknowledge the “Jewishness” of the Israeli state.
You can’t ask Palestinians whose parents or grandparents were driven from their homes during the 1948 war, and were not allowed to go home again after the fighting ended because that would undermine the “Jewishness” of the new state, to accept that definition as legitimate. All you can ask is that they accept the reality of the Israeli state.
So when Binyamin Netanyahu raised the ante last week by demanding that the Palestinians recognise Israel specifically as a Jewish state ( and not just a sovereign state), Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas replied: “Name yourself the Hebrew Socialist Republic — it is none of my business.”
So why would Netanyahu make such a demand if he wants the peace talks to succeed? He doesn’t. But he can’t say that, because it would infuriate Washington.
The United States is Israel’s vital ally, and President Barack Obama really does want a peace deal, so Netanyahu must wreck it without making it look like Israel’s fault. Something was needed to shift the blame for the collapse of peace talks decisively onto the shoulders of the Palestinians.
That something was Netanyahu’s declaration that he will renew the settlement freeze only if the Palestinians acknowledge Israel as a Jewish democratic state. He knew they couldn’t accept that offer, which is why he made it.
The proposed law requiring new citizens to swear allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” is just to divert the attention of foreigners, especially Americans, from his real strategy. It will badly hurt Israel’s image overseas, but it is not racist. It is just ugly and self-serving.
Gwynne Dyer is a freelance Canadian journalist living in London.