Israel is Not Hungary

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Cenk Uygur, co-creator and host of The Young Turks, a popular progressive political show. A month or so ago, Cenk and I were interviewed together by Piers Morgan and while we agreed about the war in Iran and US policy towards Israel, I was uncomfortable with some of the ways he spoke about Israel’s supporters in the US. Some of his subsequent comments have added to my concern. We spoke privately and then agreed to hold a public conversation. I’m struggling these days to find the right way of speaking to, and about, people who rightly demand a change in US policy toward Israel but sometimes express themselves in ways I find troubling. I’m grateful to Cenk for being willing to publicly discuss my concerns— and, of course, I’m open to hearing his critiques of me. Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid join forces to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu, and pledge not to govern with Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), 23 Palestinians reflect on the impact of Israel’s genocide on their lives.

The disastrous legacy of Trump’s pullout from the Iran nuclear agreement.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Bard College Professor Ziad Abu-Rish about the roots of Israel’s aggression against Lebanon.

Appearances

On May 6, I’ll be speaking to the Joint Christian Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC.

On May 18, I’ll be speaking to Town Hall Seattle and Third Place Books in Seattle, Washington.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there’s been a big development in Israeli politics. Israel has elections that will be later this year, and in the effort to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu, two of his most prominent opponents, Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister, and Yair Lapid, the former Foreign Minister, have teamed up together. If you remember, they were in a short-lived kind of one-year-long government together as a kind of unity government, and they’ve joined up together in the election. And this is explicitly being billed as people coming together across the ideological spectrum to defeat Netanyahu and to save Israeli liberal democracy.

So, both Bennett and Lapid have cited what happened in Hungary, where the opposition forces kind of united in a broad tent to defeat Viktor Orban as a kind of model for defeating Netanyahu, and therefore kind of saving Israeli democracy through a coalition of the left and the right. Yair Lapid is conventionally described as a kind of figure of the center left. Bennett is a figure of the center-right, but Lapid described Bennett as, ‘a man of the right, but a man of the liberal, decent, law-abiding right.’

And you can see how this framing would apparently seem to make a lot of sense in a comparative perspective, right? There’s been this discourse for many years now about figures like Trump, and Orban, and Modi, and Bolsonaro, and Marine Le Pen in France, and all of these as kind of representing this illiberal ethno-nationalist force around the world. And the question has been: how do people who believe in liberal democracy come together across their different ideological divides, but consolidate the support of people who believe in the principle of liberal democracy? And so, this appears to be that same dynamic happening in Israel, and I suspect there will be a lot of coverage in the American press that looks at it in this way.

It’s fundamentally wrong. It fundamentally misunderstands Israeli politics and the nature of the Israeli state. It may be the case that Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid both want Israel to remain a democracy based on the rule of law for Israeli Jews, and that there is a significant contrast with Netanyahu, in his kind of Trump-like way, basically wants to weaken the checks on the power of the Prime Minister in Israel in a way that would essentially allow him to override the rights of Israeli Jews, and of institutions that protect the rights of Israeli Jews, like the Israeli Supreme Court.

But this is fundamentally different than what we’re talking about in Hungary or in the opposition to Trump in the United States, because Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid are not talking about preserving democracy and the rule of law for the 50% of the people who live under Israeli control who are Palestinian. Not at all, right? To understand Israeli politics, one has to always start with the recognition that there are about 7 million Jews and about 7 million Palestinians between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. All of the Jews have citizenship and the right to vote for the government that controls their lives.

Of the 7 million Palestinians, about 3 million live in the West Bank, under military law, without citizenship, without the right to vote for the Israeli government that has life and death power over them, and another 2 million in Gaza, similarly can’t become citizens of the Israeli state. The Israeli state has killed perhaps 100,000 of them, but there’s no voice they have over the Israeli government. And then you have 2 million of those 7 million Palestinians—a minority, less than a third—who are citizens of Israel, right?

And so, they could be said to be living within a democracy. But even they are not fully equal members of Israel’s political system. And if anyone had any doubt about how deep the consensus is in Israel that even the minority of Palestinians under Israeli control who hold citizenship, that they are not equal citizens, we only need to look to what Bennett and Lapid just said this week in coming together.

Bennett said, we—Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett—will create an Israeli government which includes only Zionist parties. What does that mean? That is a way of saying we will not allow any of the parties that get their votes primarily from Palestinian citizens of Israel. We will not allow them into our government coalition because they are not Zionist, right? This Zionist line is basically a code for Palestinian, right? Because actually, some of the ultra-Orthodox parties are not technically necessarily Zionists either, but they don’t have a problem with having them in the government.

The idea is that basically it has to be a government of Jews, and so even the minority of Palestinians who do have citizenship and the right to vote in Israel, even they cannot be part of this government, right, which is supposedly a government which is designed to protect Israeli democracy, right? But the entire discourse you see here of what democracy means is saturated with the underlying assumption that one is talking about democracy for Jews. It’s never even considered, right, that you might actually be talking about democracy for all people. After all, Naftali Bennett, one of the two figures who’s supposedly coming together to defend Israeli democracy is the former head of the Yesha Council, the former head of the settler movement in the West Bank. And Bennett also said that this new government would not concede one centimeter of land in the West Bank.

So, the idea of talking about this as if it’s the same as what happened in Hungary, or the same as a Democratic Party effort to defeat Donald Trump, or an effort to overturn the Hindu nationalism in India, is completely misguided, right? It misunderstands the fact that all of Israeli Jewish politics, essentially, takes place within an ethno-nationalist framework, in which the very language of democracy itself is really, largely confined to the idea of democracy for Jews. Democracy for Palestinians is almost not even a subject of conversation when people like Bennett and Lapid talk about the very idea of democracy because the idea of ethno-nationalism, of Jewish supremacy so saturates the Israeli discourse.

To understand Israeli politics, it really makes much more sense to think not about Israel as being similar to the US or Hungary, but to think about Israeli politics as being a bit like politics in the Jim Crow South, in which you could have fierce personal divisions between different political factions, and even different divisions about how they might govern as it related to white Southerners, right? But on the question of whether Black Southerners should have the right to vote, and should be considered part of the political process, that was simply off of the table. Because there was a very broad consensus up until the Civil Rights Movement that you had to maintain a system of white supremacy. So, even to talk, therefore, about democracy and maintaining and supporting democracy in Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia in the 1940s and 50s was understood to mean democracy for white people. That’s exactly the same way that Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid are talking about democracy in Israel today: democracy for Jews.

And the American politicians and American media, as they look towards this election season, should not fall into this trap. The differences between Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, and Benjamin Netanyahu, on certain issues, again, as it has to do with the relationship between religion and state for Jews in Israel, the role of the judiciary for Jews in Israel—because the Supreme Court in Israel overwhelmingly does not protect Palestinians, as many studies have shown—that distinction among how they might treat Jews is significant. But on the fundamental question of whether Israel would be a country that provides democracy for its Palestinian citizens, and provides them with equality under the law, this is no protection for democracy at all.

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