Historical Inevitability

Back when it was funny in the 1980s, Spitting Image had a song called I've Never Met a Nice South African. What was unstated in the title and lyrics was the adjective "white", a point emphasised by the one named exception, the exiled writer Breyten Breytenbach. Though presumably unintentional, this elision gave the impression that black and coloured South Africans were not part of the nation: that South Africa was at best a melting pot of the English ("arrogant bastards who hate black people") and Dutch Boers ("talentless murderers who smell like baboons"). Ironically, this was the very essence of apartheid, the spurious claim of distinct nations or cultures that simply stood proxy for an equally spurious taxonomy of race. I raise this example of a telling absence because it offers a useful way of thinking about what is going on in Israel at the moment. 

The protests against the current government's plans to limit judicial powers and allow supreme court decisions to be over-turned by a simple Knesset majority have been impeccably liberal in their rhetoric and decorum, pitting a civil society with placards against an arrogant government that seeks to undermine the constitution of the state. But they have also been distinguished by the protestors reluctance to find common cause with Palestinians and the distrust of Israeli Arabs, all against the backdrop of escalating settler violence on the West Bank. Abroad, liberal opinion has decided that Israeli Arabs have to be brought into the argument, but only as voters who will help preserve the status quo and then meekly exit stage left. In the case of Jonathan Freedland this intrumentality has even led him to issue veiled threats: "the losers of the changes now afoot will include dissenting Israeli Jews, to be sure, but among those to suffer most directly will, inevitably, be Palestinians." 

However the key absence here is not that of the Palestinians themselves, nor is their marginalisation as electoral spear-carriers a direct parallel with the thoughtless marginalisation of black South Africans in British satire of the 1980s. The absence is the constitution: Israel doesn't have one. In its place are the various basic laws, originally intended as the building blocks of a constitutional framework but which have failed to cohere as such, leading to the development of a state system that has been deliberately ambiguous both in its geographical scope and in its attitude towards the rights of minorities within its jurisdiction. The latest  basic law (the thirteenth), passed in 2018 by a previous government, states that Israel is the Nation State of the Jewish People, rather than the state of all its citizens. It was on the back of this blunt admission that much of international opinion finally conceded that Israel is an apartheid state.

Liberals reluctant to use that word have been obliged to present recent developments as exceptional, when they are anything but. Simon Schama has spoken of Israel's shift to the far right and the danger of it becoming a nationalist theocracy. But this ignores both that the rightward shift of Israeli politics started over 50 years ago following the occupation of the West Bank in 1967, and that it has been a nationalist state with an ethnic and religious particularity since 1948. He gets round the absence of the constitution by elevating the declaration of independence of that year: "a noble document, which promised equal civil rights to all religious and ethnic groups". It also promised a constitution. Schama's focus on the nobility of the declaration ignores that it was little more than a propaganda tool at the time (one that the right today are happy to interpret as justification for a nationalist theocracy) and that there was a deliberate policy, led by David Ben Gurion, to avoid enshrining its pious hopes in a formal constitution. That policy was motivated by the need to avoid granting equal rights to the 700,000 Palestinians evicted or otherwise displaced in the 1948 war (the Nakba, or disaster, in Arabic). 

The demand to defend Israeli democracy is essentially a demand to defend the partiality of the institutions of the state, which have consistently enabled settler encroachment on the West Bank and curtailed the rights of Israeli Arabs as second-class citizens. As Reuven Ziegler, quoted in the Schama article, says: "The demonstrations are a very patriotic act because they are an attempt to save Israel from making substantive mistakes that would ultimately change its character. They are anything but hostile to the Israeli state." In other words, this is a conservative movement that seeks to defend the status quo and thus the existing religious and ethnic hierarchies of the state. It should be no surprise then that the liberal media have framed the government's actions in terms of populism and extremism, even going so far as to talk about Netanyahu's "assault from the top", personalising the politics in the way seen with Trump, Orban and Putin. The new government has offended liberal Israeli and disapora opinion by going too far and by appearing ugly on the world stage. 

As Dahlia Scheindlin guilelessly puts it elsewhere: "Earlier rightwing governments merely wanted to expand settlements or annex parts of the West Bank, deepen the hold of Jewish religious law over Israeli public and private life, harangue and intimidate Israel’s Palestinian-Arab citizens ... The new government is no longer testing the illiberal waters; it is going for the jugular in its assault on the institutions of democratic governance." You have to wonder what the point of these institutions was if they could not prevent those previous acts of dispossession and intimidation. The myth of Israeli democracy, much like the myth of socialist or liberal Zionism, which retained its grip until the undeniable reality of settler colonialism buried the romance of the kibbutzim, has obscured that the state was imbued with a theocratic nationalism from its foundation. The "shift" has simply been the gradual dropping of the pretence of secular democracy and it's clear that the right's offence in liberal eyes is to have embarrassed the country before world opinion.

Central to this longstanding liberal pretence has been the promise of a two-state solution, which, like the constitution, has been long talked about but never gets any closer to realisation. This produces regret rather than a frank admission of its impossibility, which only serves to preserve the ideal. For example, Margaret Hodge tells us that: "I have always supported the untrammelled right of Israel to exist and, like many others, have advocated for a two-state solution, ensuring a stable and secure home for Palestinians and Israelis alike. But the two-state solution seems a fantasy at this moment, with little prospect of it developing into a political reality." The key word here is "untrammelled". This is not simply the usual "Do you deny the right of Israel to exist?" gambit. Rather it is an insistence that the state of Israel as currently constituted must be accepted, warts and all. This means supporting a theocratic nationalism that precludes the possibility of a two-state solution. The fantasy here is the idea that keeping the state within the bounds of liberal propriety will eventually deliver justice to both sides.

Hodge is unable to contain her anxiety: "Netanyahu secured his mandate in democratic elections, so many might question the right of others to comment, let alone intervene. But this is a very dangerous moment for Israel that could easily tip into a third intifada." In other words, by exposing the reality of the state the Israeli right risks delegitimising it in the eyes of the West and so encouraging an uprising by Palestinians. Accusations of apartheid from the left and international NGOs can be dismissed as hyperbole or even antisemitism, but only so long as the fictions of the state - from the legal equality of minorities to the future resuscitation of a two-state solution - can be maintained. Thus Hodge can close with the claim: "A two-state solution seems politically impossible for now, but I believe it is historically inevitable". The only thing that was historically inevitable was that the nature of the state of Israel would become more apparent over time as settler colonialism expanded and the liberal conception of civil rights was mocked by legislative apartheid.

The reason I raise this as a topic is not to berate Jewish liberals for their naivety or hypocrisy but because the state of Israel is unusual but not unique. In its refusal to enact a formal constitution, while insisting that one exists informally, it shares the characteristics of a much more antique polity, namely the United Kingdom. The cognitive dissonance of Margaret Hodge, in which the state of Israel must remain untrammeled but a two-state solution is historically inevitable, is easy to maintain if you have grown up in a political tradition that imagines monarchy and equality to be complementary. What this suggests is that the UK will probably be the last country to criticise Israel's apartheid, much as it was one of the last to accept the need for sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s. The assumption that the US is Israel's staunchest ally misunderstands the instrumental nature of American imperialism (the "permanent interests" of the hegemon, in Palmerston's phrase). It is the former mandate power in Palestine that instinctively sympathises with a state that obscures it's nature behind myth and depends upon selective liberal blindness.