What if the USA was the state of Anglo-Saxon Protestants round the world?
By Philip Weiss on December 2, 2014
Mondoweiss
You’re surely been reading about the controversy over the Israeli government’s new initiative to declare the country the nation state of the Jewish people. The Israeli government might fall over the issue. American Zionists are up in arms
over the proposal, because it would end their beloved Jewish democracy.
But here are two important voices saying that there is already no
democracy for non-Jews in Israel.
First Omar Barghouti points out in a remarkably-long letter to the New York Times that
rights have always been sharply curtailed for Israel’s Palestinian
residents, this law is just the final nail in the coffin. Full letter at
the link.
Your
editorial about Israel’s new nation-state law says the Arab minority is
granted “full rights” under current laws “on paper, at least.” Not even
theoretically are Palestinian citizens of Israel given full rights,
with or without this new law.
Israel
already has more than 50 laws that discriminate against its Palestinian
Arab citizens in every domain, according to the human rights
organization Adalah. The United States Department of State has
criticized Israel for its system of “institutional, legal and societal
discrimination” against them.
The
fact that the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel
mentions “equality” for all citizens carries no legal weight. Only the
Basic Laws of Israel carry real power, and those omit — deliberately, I
would argue — any mention of “equality” and, on the contrary, privilege
Jews worldwide over non-Jewish citizens of the state in entitlement to
basic rights and access to most of the land controlled by the state.
(Barghouti will speaking at Columbia tonight.)
Next, Shlomo Sand lately published a marvelous little book called How I Stopped Being a Jew.
The book came out weeks before the latest Israeli initiative, but it
includes the following passage about Israel’s discriminatory definition
of citizenship, which has always been there, didn’t just get proposed
last month. Sand says that Israel has manipulated Jewish identity to
extract maximal political advantage from calling itself the state of the
Jews.
Why
not belong to a ‘world people’ that had produced so many Nobel
laureates, so many scientists, so many film-makers? A local Israeli or
Hebrew identity has lost much of its past prestige, and gradually given
way to an insistent and hypertrophied Jewish self-identity….
If the United States of America decided tomorrow
that it was not the state of all American citizens, but rather the
state of those persons around the whole world who identified as
Anglo-Saxon Protestants, it would bear a striking resemblance to the
Jewish State of Israel. African American, Latin Americans or Jewish
Americans would still have the right to take part in elections to the
House of Representatives and the Senate, but the representatives of
those chambers would have to understand and make known quite clearly
that the American state must remain eternally Anglo-Saxon…
Imagine
that in France it was suddenly decided to change the constitution and
establish that the country was to be defined as a Gallo-Catholic state,
and that 80 percent of its territory could be sold only to
Gallo-Catholics, while its Protestant, Muslim or Jewish citizens would
continue to enjoy the right to vote and be elected. The tribalist,
anti-democratic current would soon extend across Europe. In Germany
difficulties would arise, bearing on the stigmata of the past, in
connection with the official rehabilitation of the earlier ethnocentric
principles, yet the Bundestage would successfully overcome the obstacles
and decree that foreign immigrants who had already obtained citizenship
and taken part in political life could not marry Germans of Aryan
Christian origin, with a view to preserving the German ethnos for
another thousand years. Great Britain would solemnly proclaim that it
no longer belonged to any of its British subjects — the Scots, the
Welsh, the citizens descended from immigrants from the former colonies–
but was henceforth the state only of the English, those born to an
English mother. Spain would cause problems by tearing off the veil of
national hypocrisy and declaring that it was no longer the property of
all Spaniards but an explicitly Castilian-democratic state which
generously granted its Catalan, Andalusian and Basque minorities a
limited autonomy.
Were
historical changes like these to become a reality, Israel would finally
accomplish its destiny of being a ‘light among the nations’. It would
feel far more at ease in the world, and clearly less isolated, in its
exclusive identitarian policy. But there is a shadow in this picture:
measures of this kind are unacceptable in the context of a ‘normal’
democratic state based on Republican principles. Liberal democracy has
never been solely an instrument for the regulation of relations between
classes; it has also been as an object of identification for all its
citizens, who are supposed to believe that they have a property title to
it and in this way directly express their sovereignty…
A policy like that of Israel’s toward its minority groups who do not belong to the dominant ethnos
is rarely found today outside the post-Communist countries of Eastern
Europe, where there exists a nationalist right wing that is significant
if not hegemonic.
According
to the spirit of its laws, the State of Israel belongs more to
non-Israelis than it does to its citizens who live there. It claims to
be the national inheritance more of the world’s ‘new Jews’ (for
instance, Paul Wolfowitz)… than of the 20 percent of its citizens
identified as Arabs, whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents
were born within its territory. Various nabobs of Jewish origin from
around the world thus feel the right to intervene in Israeli life…
Intellectuals
who know well that the state of the Jews is their own also figure among
the ranks of the new Jews. Bernard-Henri Levy, Alan Dershowitz, …Howard
Jacobson, David Horowitz… and numerous other champions of Zionism,
active in various fields of the mass media, are quite clear about their
political preferences… Jerusalem really is their property…. It is enough
to make a short visit to Israel, readily obtain an identity card, and
acquire a secondary residence there before returning immediately to
their national culture and their mother tongue, while remaining in
perpetuity a co-proprietor of the Jewish state– and all this simply for
having been lucky enough to be born to a Jewish mother.
The
Arab inhabitants of Israel, on the other hand, if they marry a
Palestinian of the opposite sex in the occupied territories, do not have
the right to bring their spouses to live in Israel, for fear that they
will become citizens and thereby increase the number of non-Jews in the
Promised Land.
One
point on Sand’s argument. Notice how influential he says such an
identitarian policy would be if it were adopted by France. The
“tribalist, anti-democratic current would soon extend across Europe.”
Ah, so the continent’s political culture is so fragile it is subject to
viruses. Fair enough. But this goes to the negative influence of Zionism
across that “bad neighborhood” we call the Middle East. Injecting a
Jewish state into the region in 1948– what were the effects on the
political culture? Jewish nationalism has played a role in the rise of
radical Islam.
- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2014/12/
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