JAMES M. DORSEY:APR 17 2023;
In the case of Judaism, that has become more
evident. This is not just with the rise of the most far-right, ultra-nationalist,
and religiously ultra-conservative government in Israel's history.
It has
also become more evident in how Israel confronts the reality that a two-state
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has no shelf life and that a one-state
solution is all that remains on the table and is already a reality.
That
reality is unlikely to change. It is not temporary; it is permanent. So what
needs to be decided and what is at the core of today's struggle is what the
nature of that state should and will be.
Scholars
Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami argued in a
recent Foreign Affairs article entitled ‘Israel’s One-State Reality: It’s Time
to Give Up on the Two-State Solution’ that “a one-state arrangement is not a
future possibility; it already exists, no matter what anyone thinks. Between
the Mediterranean
Sea and
the Jordan
River,
one state controls the entry and exit of people and goods, oversees security,
and has the capacity to impose its decisions, laws, and policies on millions of
people without their consent.”
Israeli
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s vision of Israel may be grounded in militant
nationalism rather than militant religion. This is despite paying lip service
to a two-state solution and trying to project himself as the moderate voice in
the extremist government he heads.
Even so,
Mr. Netanyahu’s vision, at the very least, does not challenge militant
religious Jewish claims to Palestinian lands. “Israel is not a state of all its
citizens” but rather “of the Jewish people—and only it,” Mr. Netanyahu asserted
in 2019, a year after the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, passed a law to that
effect.
Moreover,
the likelihood of the one state’s permanence has been decided by Israel’s self-defeating creation of
facts on the ground, foremost among which Israeli Jewish settlements that make
sustainable and legitimate Palestinian carve-outs impossible and lay the
groundwork for the exercise of de facto Israeli sovereignty justified by an
ultra-religious, nationalist, and supremacist interpretation of religious law.
When it
comes to discriminatory and repressive policies towards the other, militant
religious Zionism’s interpretation of Jewish religious law resembles in many
ways the precepts of a militant Islamic state, even if it does not endorse or
advocate the extremes of the Islamic State group whose murderous brutality,
including beheadings and enforced slavery, shocked Jews and Muslims alike as
well as adherents of other faith groups.
The
religious Zionist concept of one state in Israel/Palestine is diametrically
opposed to traditional notions of either a bi-national state in Israel/Palestine
in which communities enjoy cultural autonomy or a civic state in which all have
equal rights irrespective of ethnicity, race, or religion.
The
religious Zionist approach to a one-state solution brings into sharp relief
problematic tenets of Jewish religious law, the Halakha.
In
effect, the emergence of a halachic approach reinforced by the rise of the
current Israeli government is also a reflection of the failure of Zionism to
create a state that caters to all Jews irrespective of their religiosity or
social, political, and religious views rather than a state populated by a
Jewish tribe that, perhaps necessarily, charts a course different from that of
the majority of Jews who are not part of the state.
The focus
on Jewish religious law further explains the seemingly arbitrary, humiliating,
and unnecessary brutality and harshness of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian
lands. This can only be understood by tracing its roots to religious Jewish
legal concepts.
Like
various forms of ultra-conservative Islam such as Wahhabism, jihadism in the
shape of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, and Hindu and Christian nationalism,
militant, supremacist expressions of Judaism represented by religious Zionism
in the way it is currently expressed demonstrate the risk of leaving unaltered
problematic tenets in religious law.
"Language
has weight. It matters," said Foundation for Middle East Peace president
Lara Friedman. Ms. Friedman countered arguments that the persecution of Jews
was exceptional rather than on par with the oppression of other religious and
ethnic communities, including the Palestinians.
Failure
to reform religious jurisprudence allows religious militants, irrespective of
faith, to justify their militancy, supremacy, and violence in theology and
religious law.
In a
seminar on religious law's role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mohammed
Abdelhafez Yousef Azzam, a Palestinian Sharia court judge, appeared to confirm
Ms. Friedman's assertion that words matter.
Applying
supremacist concepts, the judge, wearing a red-topped white felt hat of a
graduate of Al Azhar, the Cairo-based citadel of Islamic learning, argued that
Islamic law precluded concluding a peace deal with Israel.
“There is
no way to asserts there is something in Sunni doctrine to make peace,” Mr. Azzam
said.
The judge
was criticising the title of the seminar, ‘Building Peace Between Palestine and
Israel, on the Basis of Sunni Islamic Jurisprudence for a Global Civilization (fiqh
al-hadara ahl al-sunnah wa'l-jamaa'ah) and Jewish Law (Halakhah)’, because of
its reference to Sunni Muslim jurisprudence as a basis for peace.
Mr. Azzam
quoted Verse 4 of the Al-Isra Sura, also known as Bani Israel, of the Qur’an,
viewed by Muslims as the word of God, which says: "You will surely cause
corruption on the earth twice, and you will surely reach (a degree) of great
haughtiness."
The verse
may refer to Jewish exceptionalism but prominent scholars interpreted it in
starker terms.
Syed Abul
A'la al-Maududi, a prominent 20th-century Islamist scholar, defined the Sura’s
significance as admonishing disbelievers “to take a lesson from the miserable
end of the Israelites and other communities and mend their ways within the
period of respite given by Allah, which was about to expire….
"The
Israelites…were warned, ‘Take advantage of the Prophethood of Muhammad (Allah's
peace be upon him) because that is the last opportunity which is being given to
you. If even now you behave as you have been behaving, you shall meet with a
painful torment," Mr. Maududi said.
Like in
the case of Mr. Azzam, whose views reflected problematic tenets of Islamic law,
elements of the influence of equally problematic Jewish legal concepts were
embedded in Zionist and Israeli attitudes towards Palestinians from day one. They
also were entrenched in long-standing notions of Jewish identity.
“The
Jewish people was always ethnocentric. It believes in the supremacy of its
ethnic collective over other nations. This is a blatantly hierarchical conception,
according to which the Jew is superior to the non-Jew. But throughout history,
this was a supremacy that lacked the force of a state and an apparatus for
wielding control over non-Jews,” said political scientist Menahem Klein.
Mr. Klein
is one of several scholars who have charted the emergence of contemporary
expressions of militant Judaism. Mr. Klein labels it Jewish messianism and
categorises it as “a new Judaism.”
Mr. Klein
argued that “this new Judaism was not shaped in the beit midrash (study hall of
the Torah) as classical Judaism was, but within the framework of a dominant
Israeli regime in general and rule over the Palestinians in particular. The
ethnocentrism evolved from a form of self-awareness into a modus operandi, from
a universal mission into oppression and occupation.”
“Jewish
messianism has undergone a transformation. Classic Jewish literature depicted
the advent of a messianic age following a catastrophe or great crisis, the
birth pangs of the Messiah, a war of Gog and Magog. All those elements are part
of the messianic transition from the realm of history into one that transcends
history,” Mr. Klein said.
“In
contrast, the new Jewish messianism is a product of historical success, the
achievement of Jewish sovereignty, and the wielding of power over non-Jewish
surroundings,” the political scientist went on to say.
Israeli-born
sociologist Gideon Shafir has charted what he describes as an evolution from a
perceived secular Jewish privilege that justified a claim to Palestine based on religion, ethnicity, and/or
race to notions of Jewish supremacy rooted in Jewish religious law as
articulated by members of Israel’s current government and
proponents of militant religious Zionism.
Both
scholars' research is significant as religion and religious law take centre
stage in Israeli claims to all of Palestine. The territorial claims and
treatment of Palestinians shine a spotlight on Jewish religious legal precepts,
much like the 9/11 attacks did with Islam.
For now,
religious Zionism informs Israel’s militant nationalist, ultra-religious,
and settler communities. The degree to which that reflects sentiments among a
majority of the Israeli public remains unclear. This is even if recent mass
protests against Prime Minister Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul failed to take
into account Palestinian concerns.
A recent
Israeli television Channel 13 opinion poll suggested that if elections were
held today, Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party would lose 12 of its 32 seats in
parliament. Seventy-one percent of those polled said Mr. Netanyahu performed
poorly as prime minister.
Ultra-nationalist
and ultra-religious parties would fare better, losing only five of their 25
seats in parliament. In other words, they represent a committed minority of 20
per cent of the Israeli primarily Jewish public, a substantial minority but a
minority.
Even so,
according to the polls, Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition would not emerge from new
elections with a parliamentary majority.
The
numbers are significant beyond the perspective they cast on the trajectory of
Israeli policies hardening on the occupied West Bank and Israel’s borders with Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.
For now,
the numbers suggest that religious ultra-conservatism has made significant
inroads in reshaping religious Zionism but has yet to secure buy-in from Israel’s majority secular and
traditional electorate.
It may
also have yet to secure acceptance among more moderate religious Zionists. This
is even though religious Zionists agree, in the words of Israeli religious
Zionist writer Ehud Neor that “Israel is not a nation-state in Western
terms. It's a fulfilment of Biblical prophecy that Jewish people were always
meant to be in the Holy Land and to follow the Holy Torah, and by doing so, they would be a light
unto the world."
Speaking
to the author, Mr. Neor went on to say that “there is a global mission to
Judaism. We've been forced to think of it that way because of the exile and the
trauma of 2000 years of persecution. The idea is that there is an ideology
behind this religious belief. It's a religious approach that is also a
political ideology.”
Nevertheless,
the emergence of religiously anchored concepts of Jewish supremacy has
potentially far-reaching consequences for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, particularly as the fiction of a possible two-state solution sinks in
and Israelis and Palestinians accept that they are condemned to live in one
state.
The
question is what impact that realization will have on Israeli public opinion
and, more importantly, what kind of state it will imagine.
“In the 21st
century, the expansion of the settlements and the transformation of the
Palestinian Authority into a subcontractor of Israel has resulted in a single regime
between the Jordan
River
and the Mediterranean
Sea. The
settlements are not built ‘there,’ far away; they are ‘here.’ This is, in
effect, a regime of Jewish supremacy. The number of Jews living under that
system is roughly equal to or slightly less than the number of Palestinians,” Mr.
Klein noted.
“Jewish
supremacy is also the response to the challenge posed by Palestinians who are
Israeli citizens. Their increasing integration into the Jewish-controlled
public domain and labor market, even as they emphasize their indigenous
Palestinian identity, and their collaboration with Jewish civil society
organizations, are giving rise to a hybrid reality for them as well. This is an
ethnic-civil hybridity,” Mr. Klein went on to say.
“Although
these Palestinians are discriminated against, their citizenship is secure and
thus threatens the ethnic underpinnings of the regime,” he added.
Men like
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel
Smotrich envision a religious Jewish state grounded in Jewish religious law
where, ideally, Palestinians would disappear but, more realistically, be
discriminated against, politically repressed, second-class citizens.
In
hindsight, the evolution from secularism toward religiously justified Jewish
supremacy may have been inevitable.
An
evolving emphasis on different religious texts characterizes the evolution. The
secular Labour movement and the left, which initially dominated Israel for its first several decades,
sought religious grounding in the Talmud, the primary rabbinical source of
religious law and theology.
In
contrast to the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible, the Talmud focuses less on the history
of Jewish life in the Land of Israel in Antiquity. The Hebrew Bible’s
focus makes it more of a guiding text for religious Zionists and ultra-nationalists
like Messrs. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.
“A
sovereign state with a large Jewish majority could not have existed without the
ethnic cleansing carried out in the 1948 war and its aftermath. Back then, a
new form of Judaism had already started to take on form and substance. That
process was accelerated after 1967 with the establishment of the settlements. In
school textbooks, the Books of Joshua, Judges, and Kings supplanted those of
the prophets who had preached social justice and a moral regime – Isaiah,
Jeremiah, and Amos,” Mr. Klein noted.
The transition
from privilege to supremacy, described by Mr. Shafir, the sociologist, was
fuelled by Israel’s 1967 conquest of Arab lands and
the rise a decade later of right-wing leader Menahem Begin who envisioned the
occupied West
Bank as
the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria rather than the building blocks
of a future Palestinian state.
The
transition raised tricky legal questions for religious Zionist rabbis and
scholars. While the harsh commandments of conquest codified in Maimonides’s 12th
century Mishne Torah barred a return to Arab sovereignty of occupied land, the
status of the territories’ inhabitants needed to be defined, according to Mr. Shafir.
Did they
qualify as ger toshav, resident aliens, and on what conditions? Were they
idolaters, or did they observe the seven commandments of the Sons of Noah that
constitute principles imposed on non-Jews? Did residents need to recognise
Jewish supremacy? If so, was it still necessary to make them ‘wretched and
humiliated’ following Maimondes’ commandments, and how does one do that? What
is the fate of the residents if they did not qualify as ger toshav and
therefore had no right to remain on the territory?
Israelis
evaded answering these questions before the capture in 1967 of the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. They were effectively fudged as Israel tried to figure out how to deal
with a non-Jewish minority within its legal borders. The willingness and
ability to continue to do so post-1967 was fundamentally altered by the
demographics of the conquest of land that held great significance for religious
nationalists.
Fudging
issues was no longer an option. Instead, the conquest set off a process in
Judaism not unlike the impact of Muslim religious forces’ political and social
involvement in the search for a social order in Muslim-majority lands that
accommodated both Islam and modernity with similar outcomes.
Militant
religious Zionism's halakhic state is not that different from concepts of an
Islamic state's notions of the caliphate, and political Islamic and jihadist
thinking, regarding what it means for the majority of the population as well as
minorities.
The
process of building support for notions of a Jewish or an Islamic theocracy
involved ensuring that a politicized religion played an ever more important
role in identity.
Much like
in the Islamic State, politicization involved territorial ambition. In militant
religious Zionist views of a Jewish state grounded in the Halakha, this meant
an Israel that controlled the land of ancient Israel in which there would be no
place, indeed no equitable place, for non-Jews.
Opportunity and necessity beckoned militant
religious Zionism with the 1967 war conquests because control was no longer a
theoretical issue. The commandment to inherit and settle the land of Israel could no longer be shoved to the
sidelines.
As a
result, it became the battering ram in what was a struggle between religious
Zionism’s halakhic notions of the Land of Israel versus the secular Zionist
concepts of a State of Israel.
It was a
battle that was fought, unlike discussions in Islam about the nature of an
Islamic state, in which legal debate about the rules that govern statecraft,
warfare, and policies towards minorities had stagnated for more than a
millennium because they were of no relevance to a community that did not
control a state and land of its own and was a minority in its own right.
“There is
no precedent in Jewish history for the existence of a Jewish state that
constitutes a regional power and rules another people. Never before has the
Jewish people possessed a combination like this of sovereignty, power, and
control, which are being exploited to oppress another people,” said Mr. Klein,
the political scientist.
American
Rabbi Brant Rosen, a co-founder of the Jewish Voices for Peace Rabbinical
Council and former president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association,
noted that “Judaism was always a Diaspora-focussed religion. Jews have always
lived throughout the Diaspora… The question is, how do we ensure Jewish safety?
Is it through nationalism, through ethnic nationalism?... Jewish safety at the
expense of safety of other people is not safety at all."
Religious
Zionists had little, if anything, to help them come to grips with the immense
changes in the structure and legitimacy of the state since Maimonides codified
Jewish law in the 12th century.
The
codification represented a worldview that did not bode well for Jews or non-Jews,
certainly not in a 21st-century world. Yet, Maimonides' 14-volume magnus opus
constituted legal ground zero for them.
Maimonides
codified Jewish concepts that influenced Muslim legal thinking and have been
retained in Judaism and Islam even though they were no longer appropriate or
fit for purpose.
The
halakhic notion of the ger toshav was not all that different from the notion of
the dhimmi but suddenly had taken on a relevance it had not had for a thousand
years.
Like the
dhimmi, the ger toshav was expected to pay tribute. Also, like the dhimmi, the
ger toshav did not enjoy equal rights.
Maimonides
argued in favor of the subjugation of the ger toshav that needed to be “demeaning
and humiliating.” Residents were not allowed to lift their heads against Israel or be offered preferential
treatment.
The
modern-day religious Zionist interpretation of these principles means that the
Israeli government must demand that ger toshav or residents recognise Jewish
sovereignty and Israel as a Jewish state. Refusal to do
so would deprive them of the right to reside on the land, a principle creeping
into Israeli policies.
The
Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a zero-sum game; it's ‘us against them.’
A one-state solution with equal treatment and protection for all is no longer
feasible if militant religious Zionism gets its way.
Common
wisdom says what is needed is pressure on Israel, particularly from the United States and Europe. No doubt, pressure helps, but
much like Nahdlatul Ulama has taken the lead in tackling head-on legal,
ideological, and religious issues that make Islam part of the problem rather
than the solution, Jews will have to do the same for Judaism.
9/11 put
Islam’s problems on the front burner. Israel and Jews could face a similar
situation as circumstances in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, as a result of Israeli policies
spin out of control.
