Israeli-Palestinian army, immigration and the long run

I wanted to address some of the points Larry made in response to my previous post. After summing up where we are in agreement, Larry makes three arguments and a proposition. He suggests that  “while Israel hasn’t yet offered equality to Israeli Arabs, it can, within the outlines of a Jewish state, come pretty damn close to doing so;”  “while Israel hasn’t yet offered full sovereignty to the Palestinians, it can do that, too, without endangering itself;” and finally, that he doesn’t see how Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in a Palestinian state can live in stability, security and mutually supportive interdependence unless there is partition into two state. Two of these arguments can be described as hinging on the conditional time (“yet”) and another as hinging on temporal negation (never). I would like to reverse the balance here, and argue that Israel can never come close to offering full equality for its Arab citizens; it can never abide with a fully sovereign Palestinian state; but while Jews, Israeli Palestinian and OPT Palestinians can’t yet live in mutually supportive interdependence, they may yet reach the place where they can.

As Larry himself demonstrates in his proposal for an improved Jewish and democratic state, Israel cannot offer its Arab citizens access to two out of five key areas of influence in the 21st century statehood: Army and immigration (the other being finances, elected government and judiciary). Regarding military service, Larry insists:

I don’t think Arab citizens want to be drafted into the Israeli army like Jewish citizens, and I know that Jews, myself include, don’t want Arabs to be drafted, and the reason is that it’s morally wrong, dangerous and finally impossible to force them to fight Israel’s likely enemies, who are, after all, Muslims and Arabs, including Palestinians. Nothing’s going to change that, and until the day Israel (or just about any other state) can live without an army, military service is one responsibility that Israeli Arabs can’t be forced to shoulder. Yet under any arrangement other than a Jewish state, Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs would naturally have equal military responsibilities – and because of history, geography, politics and everything else, that is simply unworkable.

Curiously enough, there were two massive attempts to enlist Palestinians into the IDF, the 1950′s. In 1954, then-defense minister Yitzhak Lavon sent out draft orders to 24,000 (!) Muslim youths. There response was so overwhelmingly positive the orders were cancelled and negative influence from the “elders” of the community (themselves appointed and promoted by the Israeli government) was blamed. Throughout the early 1950′s, the father of Palestinian legislators in the Knesset, communistTaufiq Tubi campaigned for Palestinian enlistment, but it came to naught; all this was very soot after the Nakba and before any of Israel’s major wars.

There are two reasons why there was such support for joining the military: Practical and political. Practically, the army always was, and (sadly) will remain for the foreseeable future the primary engine of upward social mobility in Israel. Army provides training – not just in combat, but in organisational skills, self discipline, languages, sciences, medicine and so on. More importantly, it’s a hub of networking, with horizontal (peers and colleagues) and vertical (commanders and subordinates) relationships providing an invaluable grid of connections extremely useful in later life; one can have a commercial career in high tech, non-human-rights law and other financially rewarding fields without having gone through elite intelligence and/or combat units in the IDF, but it’s so much easier for those who did.

The other reason is that put simply,  access to violence and privilege to exercise it form the most fundamental tenet of present-day society and state. Since violence is omni-present in the relationship of the state and the individual (even if its mostly implied, not exercised), any person and certainly any group would naturally desire a share in the privilege; because if neither you nor someone you trust are on the side that mets out violence, this can only mean that you will forever be on the end that receives it; and so long as Arabs are banned from the army and the army is all-Jewish, the real relationship between Jews and Arabs will be that of armed dominion by the former over the latter (again, even if the violence is merely implied, not practiced), and any pretence of equality will be a sham. As for the argument Larry poses regarding the ability/willingness of Arab recruits to kill fellow Arabs – writing this will leave a bad taste in my mouth (since I usually don’t like to cast the ability to kill and mutilate fellow human beings to anyone’s advantage), but I think the history of the modern Middle East, the event of the last year, and, finally, the longstanding presence of Palestinian Bedouin, Druze and other Palestinian forces  in the IDF  all show that any qualms Arabs would feel about killing Arabs are as wishful a thinking as about Jews killing fellow Jews (see: Altalena), or of Americans killing other Americans (see: Civil War, Timothy McVeigh), or people killing other people they have something in common with, like humanity, in general

I entertain no illusions that this will be one of the two greatest challenges on way to interdependence (the other being a fistful of identity issues); when, in my more optimistic moments, I put my estimate of wide-reaching positive change happening in Israel-Palestine at 20 to 40 years, the issue of armed forces is one of the ones likely to pose the greatest danger and delay – and the anxiety of the Israeli Jews on this account should not be discounted by any means, but rather worked through constructively. It’s also true history has very few examples of opposing armed forces/communities being integrated into a shared one (the unification of Germany and the slow integration of the Northern Ireland Police Service are the only ones I can think of, although both have vast differences making only select elements relevant for the desired process). But necessity is the mother of invention, as the cliche goes; if there is sufficient determination to achieve equality and interdependence in all other aspect, a way to integrate the armed forces in a manner that would provide security to both communities and to the country in the regional context will be found. How? In the optimist scenario, we’ll see the outlines in the coming decades).

Although I’m encouraged by Larry’s considerably more open than usual approach to the Law of Return, I would rather address the issue of immigration in our upcoming debate regarding the law and the rights of return in general. I will say, however, of the overall issue of equality ,that the main issue of rights here isn’t one of individual rights (of which, but not only of which, military service and immigration are two aspects.) The main gap of rights in any Jewish and democratic state is that of collective rights. When the state is dedicated entirely to preserving and developing the collective rights of its Jewish citizens, but completely ignores or significantly disadvantages the collective rights of everybody else, then it’s not damn close at all to equality – it’s really, really far away.

Regarding the issue why can’t Israel survive next to a fully armed, fully sovereign Palestinian state – in lab conditions, ignoring the political shockwaves and backlashes likely to result from a mass eviction of settlers, it probably can. Objectively. But politics are not about objectivity, and what matters here is that there is a 90 or so percent consensus in Israeli society, army and government that it cannot. Fears cannot be reasoned away, certainly not a mass scale. Whatever the objective truth, the proximity of the Palestinian state to nearly every populated point in Israel, the fiercely denied but equally fiercely remembered link between the “lands”, “people” and “events” of 1967 and 1948, and finally the long-standing fear of retaliation – we can forgive those who wronged us, but we can very rarely forgive those we have wronged – all mean that Israel will never allow or make peace with a sovereign, independent armed Palestinian entity, and will spare no effort to ensure no such entity will ever arise.

At the end of his post, Larry foresees the immersion of a non-Zionist state in the Arab Middle East, and states, with commendable candour:

 ”I don’t want that. I don’t want to live in a Middle Eastern Arab country. I’m happy to live with an Arab minority, but not a majority and not an Arab minority that has the wherewithal to take away the ability of Jews to ensure that they remain the majority here.”

I think Larry conflates here nationality, culture, regional identity with political ills: The corruption, cronyism, underdevelopment, underemployment and conservatism that have been the unhappy lot of many of our neighbouring countries (as testified, decried and protested so often by the intellectuals, revolutionaries, educators and opposition leaders in the countries themselves, not by the West).  I would argue this has nothing to do these countries being Arab, but with wide-reaching local and geo-political circumstances and events. We are privileged to be living in an age when we can see the dawn breaking after a long dark night across the region – and the light is being brought not by Western colonial educators, but by young Arab activists and patriots themselves.

We do not know yet how this will end; none of this means that the new leaderships of the Arab world will have any great love for Israel in its current form (nor should they; Israel frankly hasn’t earned it by a longshot). But it does make the Middle East a considerably more interesting, fascinating and hope-inspiring place to be. As some readers may know, I’m weeks away from leaving abroad on an MSc program. As with I always planned to return, seeing my studies there a brief respite from active duty, seeing coming back here as more of a moral and political responsibility than anything else. But in the past six months this has been changing. This is the first time in my life I’m actually eager to come back and be part of what we – in every country of the region – can make an entirely new era for the Middle East, even if the work is likely to take decades. I’m sure that if Israelis let go from the edge of the pool and begin to think of their rights and security in Israel-Palestine and in the Middle East in terms other than complete and violent hegemony, there not only a perfectly rightful place for us in the region – but a big and constructive part to play.

Now, is such optimism a sufficient response to the very real fears and scars of Israeli Jews? It is not. But as I said earlier, my chief contention with Larry’s post was his allocation of “yet” and “never.” I  maintain Israel-Palestine may yet see a cohesive, secure, mutually supportive and interdependent society – and in the meantime, we must never stop working to arrive there.