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The Israeli media is
full of articles, interviews and reports concerning “the Bishara affair.” No
one, however, is allowed to tell the readers what this is all about, and
rumors, guesses and the Israeli security officials’ leaks are replacing real
information.
At least one thing is
crystal clear: the young and charismatic Palestinian leader and Knesset member
from the National Democratic Alliance (Balad), is the target of an orchestrated
campaign of de-legitimation, which may lead to his indictment for…for what?
Most of the journalists are insisting that Bishara is too clever to act
outside the borders of the law, and that during all the years he has been
careful not to cross the lines. If the leader of Balad has not committed an
illegal act, the only things that remain are his political opinions. And today,
Azmi Bishara is being targeted for his strong opposition to the war in Lebanon and his
public support for the Lebanese national resistance, including the Hezbollah.
No doubt, Azmi Bishara
is one of the best products of the new generation of political leaders among
the Palestinian minority of Israel.
A generation that demands its civil rights and refuses to beg for these rights;
a generation which takes the Israeli self-definition of being a democratic
state very seriously. “Israel
should be a state of all its citizens” is the main demand of Balad. As
columnist B. Michael explains in Yediot Aharonot on 13 April 2007: “The
wise readers should try to find in their memory one single democracy in the
world which is not ‘a state of all its citizens.’ […] Whoever speaks about a
state that it is not a state of all its citizens, is like someone who claims
that a mother is not the mother of all her children. […] A state for all its
citizens is merely a tautology.”
These obvious words,
however, are not shared by the majority of the Israeli public opinion makers.
In the same issue of Yediot Aharonot, senior political analyst Alex
Fishman writes: “Already in 1996, Bishara was speaking about ‘a state of all
its citizens.’ This is, in fact, a codeword for the ideological motto of the radical
current among the Israeli Arabs, since the fifties.” The crime of Azmi Bishara
is in fact to demand that Israel’s
state institutions, structures, laws, regulations, practices and official
ideology fit its self definition as a democratic state. The hysterical campaign
against him confirms how far the Israeli state is from a democratic state, even
though, unlike apartheid South
Africa, the Palestinian minority is granted
civic rights.
The tautological
dimension of a democratic state for all its citizens is so obvious, that,
following Balad, the Israeli Communist Party and Meretz left-Zionist party felt
obliged, several years ago, to add to their program “Israel as a State for all
its citizens.”
In fact, what Balad
(and before Balad, the anti-Zionist Matzpen group) is claiming, and attacked
for, is as simple as that: as long as a state does not see itself as a state for
all its citizens, and acts accordingly, it is not a democracy, even if all the
citizens participate in the electoral process.
If Israel is not a
state for all its citizens, what is it? One doesn’t have to make academic
analysis in order to define the real character of the State of Israel; its own
self-definition (in the Declaration of Independence, e.g.) provides us the
answer: Israel
is the state of the Jewish people (all over the world). Such a definition has a
double implication: while a Jew from Brooklyn, has, as a Jew, “a share” in the
State, the Palestinian citizen of Tarshiha in the Galilee is no more than a
dweller, a kind of tolerated resident, a guest, a kind of immigrant in his/her
own country.
Exaggerated? Not at all. Which democratic country has had so many
laws proposed (all rejected until now) that speak of canceling citizenship for
this or that reason, its non-majority ethnic citizens? Which (even
non-democratic) country, except Israel, denies the right of its citizens to
have family reunification with her/his spouse, if they are not Jews, and de
facto obliges them, by law, to emigrate if they want to live as a family?
The “citizenship” of
the non-Jewish Israeli population is not a basic right resulting from being a
citizen, but “provided” by the (Jewish) sovereign, and therefore, conditioned,
shaky, provisory. As a “Jewish Democratic State,” the sovereign in Israel are not
all the citizens, but “the Jewish people.” The basic, obvious, tautological
democratic demand for an Israeli
State as a State for all
its citizens is in fact the demand that the sovereign shall be the collectivity
of all citizens, and not a specific ethnic group.
In that sense, Israeli
scholars Oren Yiftachel and Yoav Peled definition of Israel as an ethnocracy and not a
democracy is extremely pertinent.
MK Azmi Bishara is
attacked today for challenging the non-democratic character of Israel as an ethnic state with all his talent and strong democratic sensitivity, and for
putting a mirror in the face of the fake Israeli liberals—a mirror which doesn’t
lie and shows the deformed face of Israeli democratic pretensions.
However, the Bishara
affair cannot be limited to an attack against a brilliant critic of the Israeli
regime, and must be integrated into its broader context. For Azmi Bishara is
not the first one to challenge the oxymoron of “Jewish Democratic State,” and
definitely not the most extremist in this criticism. Moreover, such criticism was
a real fashion among Israeli critical
scholars and intellectuals between the mid-eighties and late nineties. However,
we are not in the eighties, but in 2007, and that makes all the difference.
In October 2000, the
Israeli ruling elite initiated a radical “counterreformation” concerning the
place and rights of the Palestinian citizenry of Israel. After a couple decades of
partial liberalization of the whole Israeli system—following three decades of a
quasi-totalitarian society—including a real improvement of the status of the
Palestinian minority, especially during Rabin’s era, Ehud Barak, the most
racist among the Israeli PMs ever, decided to put a stop to what was perceived
as an erosion of the “Jewish character” of Israel.
The murder of twelve
peaceful Palestinian demonstrators was a bloody indication that the party is
over, and the Palestinian citizens should remember that they are merely tolerated
by the Jewish majority, not equal in the sovereign citizen body. Following the
massacre, a series of severe verbal attacks and threats against Palestinian
MKs, and more generally, a old-new policy of an iron-fist against the whole
Arab population, and the social and political gains of the last two decades.
The Palestinian
population, however, didn’t return to its “natural” place, as a tolerated
minority, and continued to fight for true equality: last year, several
representative Palestinian institutions produced four working papers in which
were formulated demands for true equality and citizenship, challenging in
different ways, the Jewish non-democratic nature of the State. To a large
extent, the leadership of the Palestinian community of Israel refused
to get the message, and answered Barak’s old-new discourse by strengthening
their demand for rights and equality.
Following the
publication of these working papers, the head of the Israeli Intelligence
described the entire Palestinian population as “a strategic threat” to Israel. Indeed,
this was a return to the discourse of the 1950s, and an indication of what the
security and political establishment has in mind!
There should be no
mistake: the campaign against Azmi Bishara is definitely part and parcel of a
much broader offensive, one that concerns each and every Palestinian citizen of
Israel.
Those Palestinian leaders who are trying to single out Azmi, to shout with the
wolfs of the Israeli establishment and media in charging Bishara’s “extremism,”
to publicly criticize its “negative role towards Jewish public opinion,” hoping
by that to save themselves from future attacks, are dead wrong. They refuse to
understand the broader context of the global counterreformation, one that need
be the concern of every Israeli.
To unite behind Azmi
Bishara is not only a basic democratic duty, but also the only way to protect
civil liberties in Israel,
and to initiate a strong popular reaction to that counterreformation that is
threatening every Israeli citizen.
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