Jerry Levine’s Response to LA Times Op-Ed on Israel’s Democracy
Jerry Levin is a former CNN Middle East reporter, who was kidnapped and held hostage by Hezbollah in 1984. He escaped after eleven and a half months in captivity due to the nonviolent behind the scene efforts of a group of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish friends and colleagues in the U.S. and Middle East, which was organized by his wife, Sis Levin. Since then, the Levins have been working for Palestinian absolute release from every aspect of Israeli domination, control, expropriation, and genocidal violence against noncombatants. Over the years they have worked with several violence reduction organizations in the West Bank (including CPT – Christian Peacemaker Teams) and Gaza, and with nonviolent peace and nonviolent justice organizations in the U.S. In April, at a ceremony in San Francisco, Mr. Levin and his wife were recognized by the Dali Lama as one of 2009’s “Unsung Heroes of Compassion.”
Ardent apologists for both the idea and the reality of a Jewish State of Israel have worked exhaustively for decades to perpetrate a politically pristine democratic identity for it that does not square with the facts. Specifically they have been astonishingly successful in creating an image of Israel as the “only democracy in the Middle East.” The truth is, however, there are no democracies in the Middle East.
Nevertheless they have been terrifically adept at making the case for the Jewish State’s faux democratic credentials in the U. S. by disingenuously using such powerful U. S. surrogates as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and a myriad of local Jewish federations to proudly propagate the truth that non Jews in its midst are citizens. But what their argument obscures is the demeaning fact that Jewish nationality counts for far more with respect to rights and privileges in the Jewish State than Israeli citizenship
In a nation where there is no constitution and no bill of rights, Jewish majority rule has mandated second class citizenship on Arabs living in their midst while reserving first class rights and perquisites for themselves. When it comes to civil rights, collective privileges such as the right to protest the treatment of their Palestinian neighbors in the West Bank and Gaza without fear of official reprisal, as well as unequal access to public funds for education, health, infrastructure maintenance and improvement, and the ability to live anywhere they want, Israel’s Arabs have a legal status vastly inferior to Israel’s Jews. Think South Africa before Mandela, or the United States before King. Yet Americans have been conditioned into accepting that contrary assessments such as this one are examples of anti-Semitic sour grapes.
Supporters of this geopolitical destabilizing status quo have found it amazingly easy to float the disingenuous notion inside the Beltway that it is in our national interest to support that mythical Jewish Camelot even though they know very well that Israel is only a pretend or at best limited democracy. As a result Israel’s military/industrial/political/theological establishment on both the left and the right have been able to persist in its discriminatory ethnically intolerant domestic and occupation policies. For generations U. S. economic and military support has allowed the Jewish State to put off coming to grips with the issue of reversing its abusive and predatory treatment of non Jews living inside Israel or its non Jewish subjects hanging on in the West Bank and Gaza.
To accept the self serving semantic fabrication that the Jewish State is a democracy in the Jeffersonian egalitarian inclusive inalienable rights sense means concurring with a diminished concept of “democracy.” But public recognition of the human and civil rights short comings of the Jewish State have been an elephant in the room that have been avoided in the United States for generations. Of course Christian and Muslim Palestinians and their supporters here have but with little effect.
It is true that militant Hamas leaders behind the reprehensible indiscriminate sometimes lethal rocket attacks on Israeli noncombatants seem to be calling for violent regime change, but most Palestinians including politically oriented Hamas leaders favor one achieved through peaceful internal reform. In fact, while trying to call into question the moral and ethical legitimacy of Israel’s current elitist Jewish political regime, Christian and Muslim Palestinians except that extremist fringe remain nonviolent. When they challenge “Israel’s right to exist“ or when they talk of the “destruction of Israel,” what they mean is benign but radical political reform from exclusion to inclusion, not the vindictive slaughter or expulsion of all of Israel’s Jews.
In addition there are Jews in the United States and Israel who support the modification of the exclusivist Jewish State to a truly democratic society that would not be prey to any sectarian, ethnic, gender, or racial interests. But they have no traction in Washington, not much in the academic arena or main street and very little in the largest media outlets. A notable exception was the Los Angeles Times editorial, “Israeli’s Identity Crisis,” February 14, 2009. [See directly following this essay]
Yet were they to be successful in helping to promote the establishment of a truly pluralist society in one state or two, it would be a monumental step in creating a political climate for stability in the Middle East that has been so tragically elusive until now. It certainly would be worthy of U.S. support and protection.
(The L.A. Times editorial mentioned above, unusual for such candor in a major daily, is copied directly below.)
LA Times Editorial
Israel’s identity crisis
Respecting, not rescinding, the rights of its Arab citizens is more likely to earn their loyalty
February 14, 2009
From 1948 on, the Arabs still living in Israel — those who didn’t flee or weren’t driven out when the state was established — were allowed to become citizens. They could vote in free elections, criticize the government and run for public office, privileges denied to many of their Arab brethren elsewhere in the region. An Arab was elected to the first Knesset in 1949, and today there are 12 serving in the 120-member body.But don’t conclude that life for Arabs in Israel has been easy. They’ve been second-class citizens from the start — a bit like African Americans before the civil rights movement. Today, 20% of Israel’s citizens are Arab (about 1.3 million people), but their roads generally aren’t paved as fast as those in Jewish neighborhoods, and their schools and healthcare institutions don’t get equal funding. Worse, they’ve faced impediments to their ability to buy property and limitations on where they can live. Not surprisingly, the number of Arabs living in poverty is triple that of Jews.
This is deplorable, of course. Yet the news of recent weeks suggests that the situation may be moving backward rather than forward.First, there was a vote by Israel’s Central Elections Committee in January to disqualify the two biggest Arab parties from this week’s elections because of their alleged support for terrorism and refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Fortunately, that decision was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.
Then, Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, campaigned on a platform of “no loyalty, no citizenship,” arguing that Arabs in Israel should be required to sign loyalty oaths and accept its flag and national anthem. If they refused, he said, they should be stripped of their citizenship. Lieberman also wants to transfer Israel’s Arabs into the jurisdiction of a future Palestinian state, and has proposed the death penalty for Arab politicians who talk with Hamas. In Tuesday’s election, Yisrael Beiteinu became the third-largest party in the Knesset and a likely member of the next governing coalition.
These developments present very basic and very obvious civil rights concerns. But they also raise a deeper, fundamental question that Israelis generally prefer to avoid: Is it possible to be both a Jewish state and a democratic state? Or, put another way: Can a nation founded as a Jewish homeland — with a “right of return” for diaspora Jews but no one else, a Star of David on the flag and a national anthem that evokes the “yearning” of Jews for Zion — ever treat non-Jews as true, equal citizens?Israel has tried to balance these conflicting ideas since the state was created. Its Declaration of Statehood, issued on May 14, 1948, asserted the “right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate … in their own sovereign state,” while also promising “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” But today, although Israel has a vibrant democracy in many ways, that tension remains, especially as the Arab population grows faster than the Jewish population. What would happen to the Jewish state, Israeli leaders worry, if Arabs outnumbered Jews?
These are complicated questions that go to the heart of Israel’s very identity, and we don’t pretend to have all the answers. Nor are we naive: We realize that Arabs in Israel are growing more radical, more identified with the Palestinian national movement, and that many are more sympathetic to Hamas than in the past. But weakening the country’s democracy is not the solution. A better approach, we believe, would be fewer restrictions, more equality and the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, which would ease the pressure between Jews and Arabs everywhere.
No one ever said democracy was easy, especially not for a country facing existential challenges and internal disaffection, but history suggests that Israel may be moving in an unhelpful direction. The United States was wrong in 1940 when, fearing left-wing subversion, it declared it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the government. And it was wrong again when, fearing a fifth column in its midst, it interned American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. Israel should expand, not rescind, the basic democratic rights of its Arab minority if it wants to ensure loyalty and good citizenship.
Time Magazine Reports on Israeli War Crimes
“Standing with his grieving wife, Khaled Abed Rabu insists on showing the old report cards of his 7-year-old daughter Suwad as if the fact that she was an excellent student makes her death any more unfair or inexplicable. He reads out the teacher’s comments in a faltering voice. “See?” he says. “She was the best student in her class.”
You can measure the destruction in Gaza by the number of bombs dropped or buildings flattened or the price to rebuild it all, but the real cost lies within people like Abed Rabu, whose pain and sense of loss are apparent from the moment you meet him. ” Click Here to Read More …
Bob Simon Interview on Charlie Rose Show
Bob Simon lived in Tel Aviv for ten years. This was a brutally honest evaluation of the situation there with Bob Simon stating that he believes a two state solution is now impossible becuase of the Israeli settlements. (Click here to watch the show.)
Oren, Historian Armed
by Tony Caron www.rootlesscosmopolitan.orgAn unremarkable op ed in the LA Times that trots out Israel’s boilerplate arguments that bombing the crap out of Gaza is actually an attack on Iran, was penned by Yossi Klein Halevy and Michael Oren. What is remarkable, though, is that Oren, AIPAC’s favorite historian, is listed simply as “a distinguished fellow at the Shalem Center and a professor at the foreign service school of Georgetown University.” What they forgot to note, of course, is that Oren is currently in Gaza, in the uniform of the Israeli Defense Force, in which he is a reserve officer whose current duty is as a media officer working to shape perceptions of the Gaza operation. I’d have thought that should have been made clear.
We Will Not Go Down Tonight – The Gaza Song
Week Two in Gaza (Monday Update): “Publish it not in the streets of As’kelon”
by James M. Wall
wallwritings
Bill Kristol was in the New York Times Monday, channeling George C. Scott as General Patton, gleefully rubbing his hands together as he predicts that Gaza will not repeat the failure of the Lebanese 2006 invasion. This time, promises Kristol, “our boys will give the enemy what for”, or words to that effect.
Why? Because the terrain is flat, the enemy is isolated, and boy, do we have the superior war machine. And, of course, “our” cause is just. This is the best the nation’s newspaper of record can offer? (To continue reading, click here. . .)
