If Jews and Arabs alike had the right to practise their religions - or none at all - violence and hatred would be curbed
To ask "Should Israel be a Jewish State?" is like asking if the Pope must be a Catholic. But champions of individual rights do raise this question, frequently using arguments similar to those raised by their counterparts in Britain and many other countries, who argue that unless national identity is greatly attenuated, minorities will not feel at home and will turn into fertile fodder for terrorists. These arguments ignore the nurturing that is provided by the national community, by the core values and identity it provides, and the normative glue that prevents nations falling apart.
In Israel the argument for minority and individual rights is made in two parts. The relatively easy one points out that a continued occupation of the West Bank forces Israel either to persist as a colonial power or to give up on its Jewish identity by turning into a bi-national state. Withdrawing to the 1967 borders, following some redrawing, is considered vital not merely to end the evils of occupation and its corrosive effect on Israel's soul, but also to maintain a demographic basis essential for a Jewish, democratic state.
The more difficult challenge is posed by the second part of the rights advocates' thesis, which also raises issues faced by other nations. The advocates hold that Israel, secure behind its 1967 borders, should be multiculturalised; and that Israel should give up its core of Jewish values and become a culturally neutral state to make the more than a million Arab-Israeli citizens (approximately a fifth of all Israelis) feel at home. Furthermore, such state neutrality would free secular Jews of what rights advocates consider to be an oppressive Rabbinical regime. At present, one cannot get married, divorced or buried in Israel without involving a Jewish, Muslim or some other religious authority - somewhat along the lines of what the Archbishop of Canterbury suggested for British Muslims.
All this ignores that nations, even those as large as the US or China, have some of the attributes of communities: bonds of affinity, a core of shared values, history and identity. If transformed into neutral states, such nations would lose the nurturing roles communities play in people's lives. These roles can be quite intense, as in the case of individuals who are willing to die for their nations or who feel insulted when it is belittled, or who are simply proud when its members succeed, say at an international song-fest or the Olympics. Rights advocates argue that the shared Israeli-Jewish values have thinned out anyway, and that other nations have merely vague notions of their shared culture. In the UK, critics scoff at the notion of Britishness and suggest derisively that it is limited to an infatuation with warm beer and cricket. Actually, nations that have weak value cores tend to face secessionist pressures and find it difficult to formulate national policies that require sacrifices for the common good.
Moreover, every viable nation has some cultural tilt. One can scoff all one wants at Chirac's claims that Europe is a Christian continent, but the fact is that Sunday continues to have a special status, compared to the Jewish Sabbath and Muslims' Friday, as do Christian national/religious holidays; and Christian values are transmitted in history books and social studies in schools, and in numerous public rituals.
To undo these national cultures would result in a great loss. Indeed, the fear of such a loss is already driving people towards anti-migration political parties in Europe and feeding anti-Palestinian sentiments in Israel.
The way out is an approach that pursues diversity within unity, in which each nation charts that which must be shared by all, and those matters in which various communities are welcome to follow their own traditions. In Britain/UK, instead of trying to integrate all ethnic groups into one amalgam, as has been recently suggested, these groups would be fully accepted - as long as they do not agitate against the shared national values and institutions. In Israel, it would entail not only respecting the rights of Jews and of Arabs to practise their own religion, but also to practise none at all. At the same time, preaching and teaching hate, and above all violence, would not be condoned. It would mean that Israel would cease to discriminate against Arab Israelis and secular Jews when various benefits and privileges are allotted by the state, for instance stipends for students.
The crucial sociological observation is that societies are complex beings that serve multiple needs and values, and cannot be designed to maximise any single concern without severely undermining others. One cannot go the whole hog in the service of the sensibilities of various minorities without undermining the essential national sense of community. Trying to either fully assimilate minorities by eradicating their separate cultures, or to wash out the national ethos by eradicating the shared culture, will only heighten conflicts and tensions. Instead, all would benefit if the dialogue focused on where to properly draw the line between the elements of diversity and the core values that all are expected to embrace.
* Amitai Etzioni is professor of sociology at the George Washington University and is the author of The New Golden Rule comnet@gwu.edu
By Johann Hari
How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago end up throwing filth at cowering Palestinians?
When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover.
She will look in the mirror and think – I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I'm still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer's, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes.
She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality.
But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.
Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: "Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time..." He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.
Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting "the wrong way", the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing "a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions"
So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be "a light unto the nations" end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?
The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened 60 years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the twentieth century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons.
They convinced themselves that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land". I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews.
When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else's country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937: "The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war."
So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was – as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it – "a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centres". In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins. The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the 30m stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled? Wouldn't we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London? Would it take us only 40 years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 per cent of what we had?
If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal – even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders – tends to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: if we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: if we don't have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe)
It seemed like an intractable problem – until, two years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora's desires. They found that only 10 per cent – around 300,000 people – want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain. But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a 14-year-old girl.
Perhaps Hamas' proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the 1967 borders; but isn't it a good idea to find out? Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.
Two-state solution to Middle East conflict is 60 years overdue
Sir: Johann Hari (Opinion, 28 April) is right to be outraged by Israel's vicious colonial policies in the West Bank but wrong to trace their origins to the creation of the state in 1948. The past four decades of occupation, land-grabbing, checkpoints and military raids are a world away from the 1948 conflict.
The civil war between Palestinians and Jews (November 1947-April 1948) and international war between Arab states and Israel (May-December 1948) would not have been necessary had the Palestinians and Arab states accepted the UN plan for a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine.
Nor should we accept, as Hari does, Ilan Pappe's inaccurate version of events. It is true that Israeli armed forces did engage in the forced removal of civilian populations, but it is also the case that Palestinian and Arab forces did the same. Indeed, the General Secretary of the Arab League [Azzam] promised a "war of extermination"
The Jewish and Israeli conduct in the wars has to be seen in the context of a struggle for survival. A just solution of the Palestinian-
While you cannot look at 1948 through the lens of the 1967 occupation, it is time that the 1947 policy, of creating two states in Palestine, was implemented.
John Strawson
Reader in Law, University of East London
Sir: There are currently about one million Arabs living in Israel and no one is killing or evicting them.
David Kravitz
Netanya, Israel
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