Israeli democracy?

The unstable state of Israel's party politics and its depressed economy in the light of the second Palestinian intifadeh started in September 2000 has led to early elections on January 28.

One cannot rely blindly on political forecasts in the media not just because both political leaders of the main blocks are new, but even more since it is practically impossible to forecast final results with umpteen political parties gaining Knesset seats. After all, the members of the two big parties went down from 84 in 1992, to 66 in 1996, and still lower in 1998... to just 45. What political spectrum will emerge now?

Seats are an important factor to remember since for two years Israel's military machine was unable to bring about peace, let alone security for all peoples living in the Holy Land. Doesn't peace with security based on historic justice for both peoples concerned need a very wide consensus from the plethora of groups in Israel's political spectrum? The overall problem is one: when will the Israeli democratic process yield the needed consensus to achieve a realistic peace-security justice package?

Readers have heard so long that Israel is the "only democracy" in the Middle East. In some ways it is quite right, but this isn't always so, despite the umpteen political groups competing for seats in the Knesset. Some people may be surprised at what goes on in Israel's democratic context, even if they never ask questions about the reality of Israeli democracy, nor find knowledgeable persons to distinguish facts from myths and fiction!

Past misjudgments

For 100 years or so, when the modern state of Israel was still the dream of many Jews, some dark spots appeared belying Israel's democracy. The early Zionist intellectual Asher Ginsberg, known also as Achad Ha-Am, feared the effects of a purely political Jewish entity and rejected the Zionist leaders' dream of Palestine as "the land without people for a people without land. He recognised even then the old Arab presence in Palestine and, in 1891 he attacked Herzl's "mere" political Zionism and warned against neglecting the Arabs. Misjudgments are always unfortunate, even more so when they breed fresh misjudgments turned, worse still, into mistakes, myths and mantras!

Once more, exactly in 1897, a second Zionist pioneer, Leo Motzkin, already realised an important human truth - that "the Arab population of Palestine could not be ignored". But again, due to poor judgment, Motzkin's views, like those of Ha-Am's, went totally unheeded... Motzkin was not allowed to air his views at the world Zionist Congress.

British promises

One needn't delve deeply into Britain's contradictory promises to both Jews and Arabs in the Great War as they are widely known. Britain's Mandate in Palestine (1917-48) showed increasingly how peaceful co-existence of two peoples on that small land was under growing strains. Both started to arm themselves, the British caught in between them and suffered many casualties. The newly set up United Nations could not disregard such an ugly situation, set up a study group and by Resolution 181 accepted the majority view to split Palestine in three parts for Jews, for Arabs and for Jerusalem.

Unfortunately the 1947 partition plan became more complex for the UN wanted Britain to oversee its implementation, but Britain refused to enforce it on the Arabs and even announced that it will end its UN Mandate on May 15, 1948. That British stance might have looked like sabotaging the UN plan. All this and the pro-Zionist stance of both the US and Soviet Russia strengthened the views of both Arabs and Jews that they could achieve their separate national objectives without compromise.

As a result, the world community today remains saddled with a big problem much older than the UN because it goes back to its predecessor, the League of Nations, and even beyond.

Many then construed the UN partition plan as an US ploy, but in the last analysis it succeeded probably since Jews were perceived mainly pro-Western, and not Eastern like Arabs. Besides, the 56 states then UN members - now there are 190 - were mostly Western, with their sense of guilt and shame for inaction on behalf of the Jews suffering under Nazism: through the UN the West felt that it could do something for the Jews. A push also came from Catholics in Latin America and Europe who liked the UN's special status for Jerusalem, but the UN soon found it impossible to enforce it. Today after 55 years, is there some hope for the UN unshackled by lack of strength to enforce plans?

Grabbing land

In 1948 Jews had a higher sense of national identity, were better armed and organised than their Arab neighbours, to hold their own. They even got wind of Britain's departure plans to take Haifa and Jaffa before the British Mandate ended. Fighting desperately Israel survived by defeating all invading Arab forces.

When the first war's fighting ended in January 1949, Israel had also gained more Palestinian land, i.e. 78 per cent of all Palestine, with the rest - 22 per cent - occupied in the third war in 1967. This second occupation soon became the topic of UN Resolutions 242 and 338, but very unfortunately that occupation still goes on today, at great cost, 35 years later!

Those well worded resolutions spell out clearly the best formula for a truly just and lasting peace. Why should they, passed by a large majority in the UN General Assembly, remain now "empty words"?

A good look now beyond the land to see the peoples living there. Most of Israel's overwhelming Arab superiority disappeared by 1948 and a huge refugee problem was immediately born that ballooned by involving some 726,000 or about 70 per cent of the Arab population, when the Arabs in Israel in 1948 went down from 750,000 to the 165,000 who stayed there. Who could foresee then that after 54 years those Arabs will now reach one million and elect 10 of their own to sit among the 120 members of Israel's Knesset?

1948 saw also some bouts of what is now called ethnic cleansing like the Daleth Plan, but better known is the more notorious massacre at Deir Yassin.

If Jews today can never forget the Shoah or Holocaust, so Arabs on the other hand, especially Palestinians, go on remembering al Naqba or 'catastrophe' that befell them in 1948, and more of it in 1967. The second occupation gave rise to the illegal building of some 160 settlements, while third generation Palestinian refugees are still living today in some Arab countries. UN records state there are still 3.7 million refugees, including about 1.2 million in 59 camps, many still clutching "keys to former homes in Israel!

Non-Jews discriminated

In 1948 when Israel became independent, Jews owned only eight per cent of all Palestine though they were 30 per cent of all the population, all the rest - Arabs - owned 92 per cent of the land. More precisely, Israel's part allotted to it by the UN had some 600,000 people who occupied 54 per cent of all Palestine, but in fact 50.5 per cent of this population were Arabs!

The remaining "Arab" part of Palestine had twice as many people, of whom 98.7 per cent were Arabs. It is still very interesting to note that even then, way back in 1947, the UN planned that Jerusalem should remain an international city in which 51.4 per cent of its people were Arabs! Though the Arabs were clearly the majority in all three parts of partitioned Palestine, eventually they turned down that partition plan for they saw it violating the very principle of self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter.

Israeli-Arabs, who in recent years call themselves Palestinians in Israel, after 1948 had to endure military administration for 18 years. Though its abolition in 1966 eased some of the pressures on them, it failed to protect them from all kinds of discrimination, but this ideal clearly works in practice quite otherwise, as the following facts and statistics show.

The Knesset disowned Arabs of all legal land ownership and increased Jewish owned land from eight per cent in 1948 to 93 per cent, a legal "recovery" of land enacted by passing a series of 36 laws and regulations, based in the 1950 law on absentees where "absentees" mean all the Palestin-ians who left Israel in 1948, even if they returned to their villages.

State land is run by a public body obliged by law not to discriminate against citizens, but this body is controlled by Zionist organs! The legal "Fiction" whereby "Israeli-Arabs" are citizens like anyone else held for many years, but it changed in October 2000 when Israeli-Arabs demonstrated to support their kinsmen of the second intifadeh in the occupied territories. This support was ruthlessly put down by the Israeli army which used snipers and finished it off with 13 dead and over 700 wounded in one week.

Infant mortality for Israel in 1999 was almost twice as high among Arabs as among Jews: 9.3 per 1,000 live births as against 4.9. This difference was marked even more in the post-neonatal period when infant mortality is highly preventable.

Another discriminatory measure came in June as part of an austerity plan hitting child benefits which lowered them four per cent when parents had served in the army, and 24 per cent for the rest who had not; these are mostly Israeli-Arabs who are not taken into the army! This means that military service has become the "legal" basis for ethnic discrimination.

Future worries

The Knesset, recently dissolved prematurely to make way for new general elections, had drafted some laws aimed at curbing Israeli-Arab rights to buy state land, vote in general elections and enjoy normal Israeli citizenship. Don't such measures remind readers of what was called the apartheid regime swept away some ten years ago? In its rightful demise even South African Jews played a prominent part.

Bigger worries may indeed come from an army showing more and more clout vis-a-vis elected politicians. Moshe Ya'alon, its chief of staff who took over from Mofaz in July, openly advocates moving on to "the second part of 1948".

This only can mean placing Israeli-Arabs under Palestinian sovereignty - this to date doesn't even exist - and have them transferred to the territories occupied since 1967, i.e. the West Bank and Gaza! Such a move seems still more radical than the Knesset draft laws, for it only means more "ethnic cleansing" as in the 1948 Daleth Plan.

Undoubtedly, all this is soon bound to raise further pertinent questions about Israeli democracy in practice. Many recent occasions have shown the army's takeover of the news media. Thus it isn't surprising that almost the whole Israeli people have got to swallow the myth that they now face, after 35 years of occupation, not a spontaneous popular uprising, but a terrorist plan programmed by Arafat to wipe out Israel. Can one imagine how he can do so with his offices and Palestinian Authority security services shattered?

News media report atrocities carried by Hamas and Jihad. But do readers remember that before the Oslo accords it was illegal for Israelis to talk to PLO officials, and some Israelis did spend time in prison for so doing? Were not those years when Israel's legal anti-PLO ban that hatched both Islamic movements? Did Israeli leaders then hope to divide and rule the Palestinian people or to find, perhaps, more amenable leaders?

Critical

Israel for 54 years survived many a crisis, but it is now facing a huge new one indeed, more profound than any past or present political or economic situations. This involves its very democratic soul and stature since the financial independence of newspapers, as Ha'aretz and Yediot Ahronot that maintain a forum of free speech, is now menaced by new laws to curb dissenting voices. How can Israel maintain a truly "Jewish and democratic state", as its declaration of independence puts it, when 19 per cent of its people are non-Jewish and, according to demographic projections, increasingly so?

Isn't it next to impossible to wage a war on one's doorstep against a liberation movement without damaging Israeli democracy? Never before had Israel 509 soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories, despite weeks in prison. Has lasting peace ever grown out of barrels of tank guns, demolished houses or targeted leaders? Israel's friends, in it or outside, do not serve the cause of peace by blindly repeating the mantra that Israel is "the only democracy in the Middle East".

Israel needs an army, but it shouldn't leave much to trigger-happy generals. Civilian leaders are having trouble standing up to the military demands for using excessively greater force against the Palestinians. Should not Israeli democracy, as it rightly proclaims to be, have elected leaders fully exercising firmer control over its military?

Israel has a tradition of army subordination to civilian authority, but in recent years the military leadership assumed extra prominence in policy-making with their more dominant role. In the first intifadeh (1987-93) the military leaders concluded that there was no military solution. Is such a solution possible in the second intifadeh? On the contrary, must one not say that strong military actions only provoked stronger, more innovative and unexpected Palestinian escalation and resistance? Isn't it indeed a pity that the age-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows on both sides many "missed opportunities"? With this assessment the late Israeli statesman Abba Eban would certainly agree.

Friends of both Israel and the Palestinians sincerely hope that the coming elections will produce a more balanced Knesset and government, with a clear separation of powers between military and civilian authority and better political oversight over the army, while all citizens, Jews and non-Jews, have their civic and political rights fully guaranteed. For the sake of its democracy, Israel should put its generals where they belong.