[D66] Israel’s Nation-State Law and the dead end of Zionism

[A.O.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/07/21/pers-j21.html

Israel’s Nation-State Law and the dead end of Zionism
21 July 2018

The passage on Thursday by the Israeli Knesset of the “Nation-State Law”
enshrining Jewish supremacy as the legal foundation of the state marks a
new stage in the crisis wracking Israel. It puts paid to the already
discredited claim that Israel is “the only democracy” in the Middle
East. With the enactment of this openly racist “basic law,” the legal
foundation of the state is brought into alignment with the reality of a
garrison state based on the brutal oppression of an entire people, the
Palestinians.

The law declares that “The right to exercise national self-determination
in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” It proclaims
Jerusalem “complete and united” as Israel’s capital.

It sanctions state-supported segregation and the exclusion of Arabs from
exclusively Jewish communities, declaring, “The state views the
development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to
encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” This is a
green light for an explosion of ethnic cleansing and the dispossession
of Palestinians within the borders of Israel itself.

The law makes no mention of non-Jewish citizens of Israel, who comprise
over 20 percent of the population, nor of democracy and equality.

In the name of the supposed unity of the Jewish people, it removes
Arabic as an official state language, granting this status to Hebrew
alone. And it gives official and exclusive standing to Jewish symbols,
including by declaring “Hatikva” the national anthem.

The attempt to assert Jewish national unity by elevating the Hebrew
language and “Hatikva” only highlights the forced and artificial
character of the entire Zionist project. Hatikva is the product of the
reworking of an Italian folk song by the Bohemian composer Bedrich
Smetna. Similarly, Hebrew, the supposed national language of the Jews,
represents the resurrection of a dead liturgical language on a people
whose actual native tongue was Yiddish.

There is widespread opposition to the enactment of the new law among
Jews both within Israel and without. This opposition, however, could
find no expression in the Knesset due to the cowardice and complicity of
the opposition Labour Party.

Reflecting the stunned anger of large sections of workers, youth and
intellectuals, Bradley Burston wrote in Haaretz: “Look around. The
country looks the same. But it doesn’t feel the same. Not even close.”

This week, he continued, “marks the week that this country, as we have
known it, effectively ended… Gone is any mention of equality. In its
place, directives that veer Israel toward genuine apartheid, including a
downgrading of the status of the Arabic language and therefore of Arab
citizens of Israel.”

Several thousand Israelis marched in the streets of Tel Aviv to protest
the law. A group of 14 American Jewish organizations declared deep
concerns about the bill, saying it would eliminate “the defining
characteristic of a modern democracy—protecting rights for all.”

The European Union expressed “concern” over the law’s impact on the
effectively moribund “two-state” solution to the crisis—which would
condemn the Palestinians to an impoverished and militarily surrounded
Bantustan-like mini-state. The EU stopped short of issuing an outright
condemnation or suggesting any measure in retaliation.

It was impossible find any response on the website of the US State
Department. However, the Trump administration, with the support of both
major parties, paved the way for the law by moving the US embassy to
Jerusalem in May and supporting the murder and wounding of thousands of
unarmed Palestinian protesters at the Gaza-Israel border by the Israel
Defense Forces.

The American corporate media signaled its tacit support by relegating
the story to the back pages in most major newspapers and barely
reporting it on the television news programs.

The New York Times ran a front-page story in its Friday print edition
that sought to present the new law in the most favorable possible light,
choosing as its headline “Israel Enshrines Rights For Jews.” This
exercise in Orwellian newspeak was followed by a sympathetic account of
the dilemma posed to the Israeli ruling class by the demographics of a
growing Arab population in Israel and the occupied territories, which
will soon outstrip the size of the Jewish population.

The Times wrote: “Proponents of the new law cite continuing demographic
threats. Some in Israel’s Arab minority are demanding collective rights
and already form a majority in the northern Galilee district.”

The Israeli Nation-State Law is part of, and will further encourage, the
rise of extreme nationalist governments and parties that promote the
myths of nationality based on “race and blood.” The Netanyahu regime in
Israel is allied with such forces in Eastern Europe and beyond.

The same day as the passage of the new law in the Knesset, Hungarian
Prime Minister Viktor Orban paid a friendly visit to Netanyahu, where he
faced popular protests against his embrace of the World War II dictator
Admiral Milos Horthy, who collaborated with the Nazis in the
extermination of Hungarian Jews.

Israel’s open turn to such politics will increase the precarious
position of Jews outside of Israel. What is to prevent the same
rationale that Israel uses against the Palestinians from being turned
against Jews, who have been traditionally baited by fascists and extreme
nationalists as “outsiders” and “cosmopolitans?”

Internally, the stepped-up attack on Palestinians will be accompanied by
increased attacks on the social and democratic rights of all workers,
Jewish and Palestinian alike. Netanyahu is already cracking down on
oppositional media and seeking to criminalize political dissent.

For all the talk of Jewish unity, Israel is bitterly divided along class
lines. A major factor in the passage of the Nation-State Law, along with
Israel’s push for a military confrontation against Iran, in alliance
with Saudi Arabia and the US, is the growth of working class opposition
within the country. Israel is one of the most economically unequal
countries in the world, with a poverty rate above 21 percent, the
highest in the developed world. Recent months have seen a rise in
working class protests and strikes, and the regime is seeking to contain
this movement and channel it behind a policy of anti-Arab racism and
Jewish chauvinism.

The open turn to racist policies is the product of two major factors:
the acute crisis of the Zionist state and the logic of Zionism itself.

Zionism is a cruel mockery of the progressive and enlightened
conceptions that have historically characterized the best elements of
the Jewish population. Because of their persecution and enforced
isolation, Jews typically strove to be accepted as full citizens on a
par with Christians. They were inspired by the great achievements of
European culture and its promotion of the universal and democratic. This
drove them to make up a disproportionate section of the socialist movement.

Isaac Deutscher, in his “Message of the Non-Jewish Jew”, wrote: “The
Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition … They
all went beyond the boundaries of Jewry. They all—Spinoza, Heine, Marx,
Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and Freud—found Jewry too narrow, too archaic,
and too constricting. They all looked for ideals and fulfillment beyond
it, and they represent the sum and substance of much that is greatest in
modern thought, the sum and substance of the most profound upheavals
that have taken place in philosophy, sociology, economics and politics
in the last three centuries…

“They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their
respective nations. They were each in society and yet not in it, of it
and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought
above their societies, above their nations, above their times and
generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far
into the future.”

Israel is the result of the appropriation of a 19th century
ethno-nationalist ideology based on exclusivist conceptions of racial,
religious and linguistic hegemony to justify the establishment of a
Jewish state through the violent dispossession of the indigenous Arab
population. The tragic irony contained in the very origins of Israel is
that the horrors of the Holocaust became the rationale for the
oppression of another people.

The Nation-State Law marks the historic bankruptcy and reactionary
culmination of the Zionist project and all such nationalist programs.

A new upsurge of the working class is beginning, pointing the way
forward for the masses of Jewish and Arab workers alike in the form of a
united struggle to overthrow and replace the Zionist state and the
various Arab bourgeois regimes and forge the United Socialist States of
the Middle East. This is the perspective of permanent revolution fought
for by the International Committee of the Fourth International. Sections
of the ICFI must be built in Israel and across the Middle East to
provide the leadership necessary to conduct this struggle.

Barry Grey