Stop With the Nonsense That Palestinians Are a Minority in Israel
You can’t argue that the Palestinians aren’t an integral part of greater Israel; occupied and dispossessed, but integral.
Gideon Levy
Israel is already a binational state, and has been for a long time
• The single-state solution is already here
• Is this not apartheid?
A
delusion under which most Israelis live lets them invent vacuous
excuses based on the virtual reality they’ve built for themselves.
According to this fallacy, the State of Israel only controls its own
citizens, most of them Jewish of course, but nobody counts the millions
of other subjects who fall under its control at least as much, maybe
more. They’re invisible.
That’s
the only way one can argue comfortably and learnedly about whether
Israel is a Jewish and democratic state. The discussion is a fascinating
intellectual one, with only one problem: It has long since lost
relevance. A country where about half the subjects aren't Jewish can't
be Jewish. If it
insists on being Jewish by force, it isn’t democratic.
A
state where half the subjects are denied rights can't be democratic. In
a state that doesn't intend to change its borders or the nature of its
rule, this discussion is merely part of the delusion of perpetually
parading around naked but feeling fully clothed.
Two
peoples equal in size live under Israeli rule: about 6.3 million Jews
and 6.3 million Arabs. Half and half. That’s the outcome of 50 years of
life in a binational state, not Jewish and not democratic. To the 1.8
million Arab citizens, you have to add the 2.7 million Palestinians
living under direct Israeli rule in the West Bank, and about 1.8 million
living under indirect Israeli rule in Gaza.
The
fate of all these subjects, from registration at birth to the currency
they use and most of their rights, is set in Israel. They are subject to
its rule; they are part of the state.
Israel
tries to shake off its Palestinian subjects when it finds it
convenient. At night it invades their homes, and by day it claims they
aren’t under its control. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t
argue that the Palestinians aren’t an integral part of greater Israel;
occupied and dispossessed, but integral.
The
fact that this reality was forced on them by the military and that they
aren’t part of Israel’s partial democracy doesn’t mean they don’t
belong. The Jewish settlers in the West Bank are part of Israel and
their Palestinian neighbors aren’t? That can’t be, even if most of
Israel’s Jews prefer it.
In a
piece this month in Haaretz’s Hebrew edition, when Gadi Taub applauds
Jewish democratic Israel, he bases his argument on the Arabs being a
“minority” and the enlightened state treating them based on the EU
treaty for protecting minorities. It sounds lovely, but it’s completely
unreal.
Minorities? Finland’s 5.5
percent Swedish minority, Muslims in France and Australia’s 450,000
aborigines are minorities. But half the population isn’t a “minority.”
The
Arabs are only a minority based on false presentations ignoring the
existence of most of them. Just as Israeli TV viewing habits are only
measured in Jewish households because that’s convenient for the Jews,
Taub only counts a small part of the minority because it’s convenient
for him. The Palestinians aren’t a minority, they’re half the
population. They’re not migrants, they’re locals.
In
Haaretz’s Hebrew edition earlier this month, Tzvia Greenfield counts
them as Taub does and therefore can sing her praises of Jewish
democracy. But Roni Schocken, in his piece, lifts the veneer that covers
the state’s contents, which are not Jewish and not democratic.
As
the era of the two-state solution draws to a close, and on the eve of
the debate’s diversion to the real issue – rights in the binational
state that has been in existence for quite some time – it’s time to stop
talking about the Palestinians as a minority.
Anyone
who wants them to be a minority should have withdrawn from the West
Bank long ago. But anyone who wants to keep the West Bank should
withdraw from talking about a Jewish majority. There’s no way around
that, not even with the help of a thousand articles discussing the
wonders of this delusion of Jewish democracy.
Gideon Levy
Haaretz Correspondent
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