Shuaib Manjra
Choni Davidowitz wrote in this week’s SA Jewish Report “the removal of all Arabs who refuse to accept the exclusive, unquestioned Jewish sovereignty over all of Israel is not only logical and normal for any Jew with a modicum of self-preservation; it is also the Jewish halachic obligation.
The transfer of Arabs from Israel is not a political or personal view. It is a Jewish outlook based on Halacha. The Torah clearly commanded: ‘And you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the Land from before you... ’”.
Ominously this extreme view is supported by nearly half of Israelis according to a recent Pew survey.
Glen Heneck’s (Cape Times, March 24), call for Israel to be recognized as a Jewish State differs from Davidowitz only in nuance. Heneck attempts a more sophisticated argument – couching his views in liberal discourse and begging questions - but with the same refrain: an appeal to an essentialist and base identity politics coupled with a tired and predictable defence of Israel.
The outcome of both positions is unmitigated justification for discrimination against, and/or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Israel’s Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef endorses this when he decreed that Jewish law prohibits non-Jews from living in Israel and that non-Jews live to serve the Jewish population.
The idea of recognizing Israel as a Jewish State seems benign until one begins to deconstruct its meaning. Fundamentally it excludes non-Jews from nationhood and relegates them to second class citizenship. By its very definition it has to keep its populations separated in law so that it would reserve for itself the possibility of discriminating against a “sector” of the population on a quasi-religious-quasi-racial basis.
It also has to ensure a constant Jewish majority which can only be sustained by discriminating against minorities – through immigration, citizenship and land ownership laws or through ethnic cleansing by various means.
Fifty such laws which discriminate against non-Jews form part of Israel’s legal landscape. It explains why Israel claims to annex Palestinian East Jerusalem but does not grant its inhabitants Israeli citizenship.
Creating an ethnic state in an area historically inhabited by a majority indigenous population for centuries, may at a stretch be tolerated; however attempting to do so on colonised land with European settlers, as in South Africa, makes it egregious. Heneck accepts this colonial thesis when acknowledging Palestinian pain at land loss due to “European settlements”, but then forces Palestinians to accept not only a Jewish majority state but one defined by Jewishness and buttressed by force of law.
Needless to say this Jewish majority was achieved through violent ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians. The only difference between Davidowitz and Heneck is that one couches his racism in religious idiom and the other in its secular reincarnation.
Heneck has this message for those who have been ethnically cleansed and live in squalid refugee camps: ‘get over it’ and accept the Jewish State! Would one dare to say the same to Holocaust survivors?
The problem with identity politics, as supported by Heneck is that it is simplistic, parochial, undialectical and often racist, particularly when discriminating against others.
One can but only be surprised, or perhaps not, when a White South African asks why accepting eligibility for citizenship based on ethnicity is problematic?
The problem with Heneck and his ilk is that their connection to Zionism is grounded in identity politics that only elites like him, who live in comfort, can indulge in. When this identity is challenged by his colonial subjects his pretense to enlightenment and liberalism disappear much like Phil Och’s song ‘Love Me I’m a Liberal’:
But Heneck opens himself up to the tu quoque retort. He accepts that the ‘settlements are deeply problematic’, not to say illegal, at the same time denying that the IDF is ‘aggressive or expansionist’. How then does he explain Israel’s continuous confiscation of large chunks of Palestinian land? The occupation, settlements, land confiscations, apartheid wall, are all part of the strategy of territorial expansion under various guises, and gives lie to Israel’s so-called commitment to a peaceful settlement.
To disabuse him of the fallacy of Israel’s moral army I implore him to read reports from the Christian Peacemaker Teams who monitor the checkpoints and be outraged by the gratuitous daily humiliation of Palestinians; or of Breaking the Silence where ex-IDF soldiers confess about the systematic atrocities committed by the IDF.
Heneck’s discourse is a stark reflection of the utter failure of liberal Zionism to continue to justify the racial project. Its innovative distractions, hasbara echoes, and cognitive dissonance have become unsustainable in the face of a brutal reality of apartheid and Palestinian dispossession. In Heneck’s worldview as a privileged Jew and white South African he claims more rights to citizenship in Israel and to occupy a house in Jaffa than a Palestinian from a refugee camp who still holds the key to that house and who was ethnically cleansed at the barrel of a gun.
Manjra is from Open Shuhada Street, a Palestinian Advocacy Group