The Question of the Fifth Column- Israel's Arab Minority

There are approximately 8000 potential nations in the world

There are approximately 196 states in the world.

Accordingly there are still 7804 nations that are still deserving of their nation-state.

The numbers tell us that the majority of peoples don’t have a state of their own but are minorities in states. Is it then correct to speak of nation-states? Is there indeed a state which has a truly homogeneous make up, its people exclusively being from the same ‘nation’, or at least thinking so?

Iceland is arguably one of the top five homogeneous states in the world yet even Iceland suffers from a minority problem.

Clearly the solution to the mathematical problem above isn’t to create a world of homogeneous nation-states since this would be a never-ending project. Yet we have to appreciate that the current system of governance in much of the world can be seen as acting through a system of tyranny of the majority, the nature of the state being determined by its majority people. (South Africa was a notable case in which the white minority ruled over the black majority, the cause of much international condemnation.) Should the majority indeed be allowed to dictate the direction of the state and its cultural norms, if that is the will of the majority?

But what of the minorities? If all countries have minorities, some larger than others, how are we to guarantee their rights, freedoms, and cultural norms are protected, even celebrated. The French model presents an example of civic nationalism in which citizenship is celebrated, difference is not. Perhaps this is a convincing model that would ensure equal rights and treat everyone as citizens.

Lets take a look at Israel. Any option of making a joint Jewish Arab state would need to contemplate a power sharing model such as consociationalism as used in the Northern Ireland case.  However a bi-national state in which a power-sharing model is in place in my opinion would not work. The two peoples believe that the one land is theirs. Bi-nationalism would not be power sharing but would rather institutionalise the conflict and the deep rooted tensions that go with it. What is preferable then is a two state solution, self determination  for both peoples.

But lets say the Israeli’s and Palestinians do succeed in achieving a peace agreement. The state of Palestine is created alongside the state of Israel. Problem solved, right? Wrong. What of the minorities? Statistics show that over 20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinian, or as Israel refers to them as, Israeli Arab. What will their status be after a peace deal? Will they be shipped off to the newly created Palestinian state?
Some in the Israeli camp advocate land swaps in which areas with large blocs of Jews over the green line will be annexed into Israel proper and in exchange Palestinian villages in Israel will be annexed to the new Palestinian state. However the report from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government found that 77% of Arabs living in Israel would rather live in Israel than any other country in the world. Do they not have a right to live in Israel?

Jewish nationalists may argue no, the Jewish people need a strong Jewish state and an Arab minority is an existential threat. This, the argument goes, is especially so if the Palestinians have there own state, let the Palestinians go there!

But what about the Jews in America, U.K, France…you get my drift. The world is not made up of homogeneous nation-states and Israel is no exception with its Arab minority who hold Israeli citizenship. This will not change even with the creation of a Palestinian state. So what of their rights as a substantial minority in Israel. Is it right that a Jew cannot marry his fellow Arab Israeli as is currently the case? Is it right that buses do not run on the Sabbath which negatively effects the Arab minority citizens? Should the flag be changed taking away the Jewish symbol of the Star of David and replace it with something more democratic?

The examples of these types of questions are many and are challenging. They present to Israel the apparent inconsistency of being a Jewish Democratic state. Or is it a Jewish and Democratic state? Or even a Jewish state, which within the Jewish framework is democratic, and when the two conflicts Judaism comes out trumps.

Lets say the Jewish state is one, which does prioritise Judaism over democracy when the two collide. Is that necessarily bad? There is only one Jewish state in the world after all; surely every effort should be made to retain its Jewish character. But what of Israel’s pride of being the only true democracy in the Middle East? Surely the Jewish people’s memory isn’t as short term as to forget what it feels like to be a minority people?

I have no solution to this problem. There is no solution to this problem. Different countries deal with it in different ways. France bans the Burqa. In the UK Cameron pushes his ‘Big Society’, and National Citizenship Service for 16 year olds. In Israel those who feel threatened by the ‘fifth column’ perpetuate a feeling of ‘us and them’ with acts such as citizenship laws which stops Palestinians who marry Israelis from obtaining Israeli citizenship but granting citizenship to other non Jewish people from outside Israel who marry a Jew. Some see this as racism, others as protecting the Jewish state.

At the end of the day over 20% of Israelis are Arab. Israel still needs to find a way of going beyond being technically democratic but actually suspicious of its minority. Should this be with compulsory national service in place of army service for the Arab citizens? Should it be by changing the Israeli national anthem which many of the left propose?

Let the people decide… or can we? 

Why Gingrich and Sand are both wrong

Last Friday Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich told The Jewish Channel -a little known cable television channel in the U.S- how he sees the Palestinian people as invented and that they are really Arabs part of the wider Arab community. Cries of outrage followed and many called on Gingrich to look at Shlomo Sand’s book ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’. However the request is fairly dubious; is it to prove that it is not the Palestinians but the Jews who are an invented people, or is it to show how the Jews are also an invented people.

There are a myriad of opinions of how to define what a nation is. Claiming that one people constitute a nation and the other not can be problematic.

For example, Modernist thinkers claim that all nations are invented, products of modernity originating in the late 18^th Century and the result of urbanisation, the printing press, industrialization together with other factors. Within this argument, each nation is as invented as the other and one national claim is no stronger than another’s. Sand’s argument that the Jews are an invented people is based on such modernist arguments. Sand is open about this fact drawing his main arguments from such modernist thinkers as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson amongst others. If this were so then Sand’s claim that the Jewish people are ‘invented’ would be no big discovery since it would be the natural conclusion of Modernist scholars that this is so.

The fact that Sand picks out the Jewish case to question whether it has ancient roots is in itself antithetical. On the one hand, by rejecting the Jewish case as a legitimate example of a primordial nation, he is assuming that nations can be primordial (with ancient roots).  On the other hand, by using modernist claims to show the Jewish nation is invented, he is acknowledging that all nations are invented not just the Jewish one. This is a tactic that seems to prove that the Jews are an invented people, but blurs modernist and primordialist arguments making it seem that the Jewish case specifically is invented, rather than all cases of nations were invented.  It would be more fitting to call his book ‘The invention of peoples’ rather than the ‘The invention of the Jewish people’.

This brings me on to the second flawed claim, that of Newt Gingrich arguing that Palestinians are an invented people. Firstly I would love to ask the Republican candidate about the origins of the nation of the United States? The fact is, the U.S is as an invented nation as they come and the strong sense of national identity comes more from its focus on civic bonding through the excessive pledges of allegiance, prominence of the national flag and of course the continuous sense of the ‘other’. When Gingrich calls Palestinians an invented nation, what he is assuming is that there are such things as non-invented nations, or primordial nations. However by referring to the Palestinians as part of a wider Arab community, what he is in fact doing is claiming that nations should rather be regarded as part of their status before nations existed, in a world of civilizations. This thought process is similar to that of Samuel Huntington who splits up the world into civilizations based on culture, in which it is a civilization’s culture that is the most important contributor of identity, and thus the defining factor within the world order. If this were so it would be more correct to see Israel as part of ‘the West’ and the Palestinians part of the ‘Arab population’. Doing so denies Israel as much as Palestine with the status of ‘nation’. To argue that one is a nation and independent of civilization and the other not is an inconsistent logic.

Both Sand and Gingrich’s arguments are based on flawed logics that manipulate theories of nations and nationalism to support their political views. For Sand this became clear to me when I heard him speak in SOAS last year on the topic. At the conclusion of his lecture he ended not by saying ‘that is why claims of a Jewish people in antiquity are flawed’ but rather appealed; ‘and so you should all try and boycott Israel’. Sand is no Jewish historian, he is a critic of the modern state of Israel and his book is an attempt to justify his political criticisms with claims that the Jewish people are in fact not a people, and thus have no real claim to nationhood. He projects his political beliefs back into history in order to support his views today.

Gingrich too in his effort to secure Jewish votes, makes a stark claim that questions the Palestinians as a nation. I doubt whether Gingrich has considered what constitutes a nation and whether the Palestinians are any less a nation than that of the American case, for example. Like Sand, in order to further his political aspirations, Gingrich makes a claim that is empty and invalid. This point is even starker when in supporting his claim at the GOP primary debate he asserted, “These people are terrorists.” His claim that the Palestinian people are not a nation is not a historical argument, but a politically loaded outburst that is void of any substance.

The fact is, is that there are two nations staking a claim in one land. Maximalist claims denying the existence of either of these nations are dangerous and unhelpful. Maximalist claims frame the conflict as a zero-sum game and will only continue to damage both nations, or invented nations, depending on whom you ask.