The Jewish State

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he latest Israeli-Palestinian attempt at negotiating a solution to their conflict got derailed by U.S. diplomatic malpractice before it had an honest chance to fail of its own accord. But fail it would have, not least because over the past eighteen months a major new issue has been added to the agenda of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations (as if that agenda needed more challenge). Beyond the hearty perennials of borders, Jerusalem, refugees, water and security arrangements, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu asserted in a June 2009 speech that Palestinian recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” was now an Israeli requirement for agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

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he reaction to Netanyahu’s assertion was take-it-to-the-bank scale predictable. Most Israeli Jews and supporters of Israel worldwide applauded the innovation. Indeed, some claimed that its importance was so obviously crucial to any genuine settlement of the conflict that it was amazing that no previous Israeli government had ever raised it. Both Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, however, immediately rejected the new requirement, and most Palestinians, Arabs and their supporters cheered their so doing.

Palestinian Authority officials raised three explicit objections to Netanyahu’s demand: that it is not for Palestinians to determine the nature of the Israeli state; that Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state would jeopardize the position of the Israeli Arabs; and that if Israel did not demand recognition as a “Jewish state” in its peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, why do so now, unless the purpose was to erect artificial barriers to serious negotiations. Later, in October 2010, when Netanyahu tried to link a Palestinian declaration acknowledging Israel as a Jewish state with a continuation of the settlements construction freeze, it only confirmed to many Palestinians that his demand was not as high-minded as he and his supporters claimed.

Of what does that putative high-mindedness consist? Many observers, particularly those sympathetic to Israel, cite a fourth, unstated Palestinian objection to Netanyahu’s demand: It shines a bright light on the real reason for the conflict in the first place; namely, Arab and Palestinian rejection of the right of Jews to self-determination, which presupposes the right to self-definition. According to this view, it’s not Israel that is raising a new demand in order to avoid serious negotiations; it’s doing so to make serious negotiations with the Palestinians possible really for the first time. Specifically, it addresses directly Palestinian rejection of the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism (Zionism), achieved through an insistence that a Jew is defined by religion, not nationality or ethnicity. (Never mind for now that sometimes the same people insist instead, when it suits the purposes of the moment, that Jews are an ethnic group, hence supposedly rendering Zionism by definition racist; and also never mind that this view also contravenes that of Muslim prelates in the early centuries of Islam.)

The supposed religious as opposed to ethnic or national character of the Jews has led some Palestinians—some prominent ones, at that—to insist further that no Jewish historical connection to the land in question exists, for that is another way of denying anything remotely resembling national Jewish interests or rights there. Hence the bizarre claim by Yasir Arafat and others, contradicted by earlier centuries of Muslim historiography, that no Jewish Temple ever stood on what the Arabs call the Haram al-Sharaf, and the Jews call the Temple Mount.

It is precisely because of the Arab and Palestinian denial of the Jewish right to self-definition, many reason, that Netanyahu’s demand makes sense. If the Arabs accept Israel as a Jewish state, and acknowledge that state’s Jewish citizens’ historical ties to the Land of Israel, then it means they have finally made the psychological breakthrough that makes a genuine peace possible. And if they do not, then best to know about it now, so that there will be no illusions about what the peace process, so-called, can and cannot achieve. This same basic logic, in different form given the different context, underlies proposals that Israeli Arab citizens (and, in some versions, all immigrants, too) should be subjected to a loyalty oath.

By this reasoning, then, Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish State becomes not only necessary, but central to ending the conflict. As was not the case in negotiations with Egypt or Jordan, Israelis and Palestinians have been locked in an existential conflict in which the assertion of one people’s national aspirations seemed ipso facto to negate those of the other people. Only when both sides recognize the legitimacy of the other’s national aspirations can there be peace. Israeli leaders long ago accepted the existence of a distinct Palestinian people and its right to a state—formally so as part of the September 1993 Oslo Accords. Now, goes the argument, it’s the turn of the Palestinians to reciprocate. Said Netanyahu to a conference on the future of the Jewish people on October 22, 2010, “Only when our peace partners are willing to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state will they truly be prepared to end the conflict and make a lasting peace with Israel.”

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ome Israelis and supporters of Israel at large, however, hold another view of Netanyahu’s demand. It’s not that anyone who wishes Israel well disputes the desirability of a Palestinian declaration of the kind Netanyahu demands. Palestinian acceptance of Israel’s Jewishness, even if only declaratory and less than wholly sincere, would be a good thing according the maxim that hypocrisy is often the advanced wave of a new truth. But from a strategic perspective, some reason, Israel would gain little and possibly lose much by giving this demand a high priority, a danger further magnified should Israeli make it a sine qua non of a successful negotiation.

As Alan Dowty of Notre Dame University has insightfully explained, recognition of one state by another in traditional international diplomacy generally depends on the recognized state having effective authority within its borders and showing a willingness to abide by international commitments and rules. Sometimes the recognizing state can impose additional criteria regarding the internal arrangements of the state being recognized, as when the United States and some other countries recognized Kosovo as an independent state. But it is hard to think of any cases in which the state being recognized has imposed additional conditions on others, even as part of a peace agreement. In putting such an unprecedented condition at the top of its agenda, Israel should therefore expect to find little understanding or support in the international community.

More important, making a verbal formula so central to a negotiation does not really address Israel’s core security concerns. Hans Morgenthau used to advise giving up the shadow of worthless rights for the substance of real advantage; or, as Fiorello LaGuardia once summed up the matter, “Tickertape ain’t spaghetti.”

The logic here is manifest on other fronts that Israel has faced and still faces. Thus, the vulnerability of Sinai to Israeli reconquest reinforces Egypt’s observance of the March 1979 peace treaty; the terms of peace that have caused that vulnerability to persist are far more important to the maintenance of peace than anything any Egyptian official ever said in public. Subtler but no less real for the absence of as contractual peace, Syria renews the UNEF mandate on the Golan Heights like clockwork every six months because it stands to lose more from not doing so given Israel’s military superiority. In any imaginable Israeli-Palestinian settlement, too, the concrete arrangements on the ground—demilitarization provisions, in particular; the placement of early-warning technologies in the Jordan Valley; and more besides—will be much more important to implementing and keeping the peace than any words extracted from the lips of the Palestinian leaders.

Morgenthau’s counsel still makes sense. Governments often make verbal commitments they have every intention of ignoring; what counts in a peace agreement are the concrete arrangements that give both sides an incentive to do what they have promised. Since Israel would have to give up something to get the Palestinians to say the magic words in the way the Netanyahu government insists on their being said, one has to wonder whether some other more concrete concession would not prove more valuable in a world where negotiating assets, and hence trading capital, are finite.

Beyond that, it is for any practical purpose pointless to contend with what others may believe in their heart of hearts, but one can ensure that they lack the means or opportunity to act on those beliefs. The acid test comes down to this: If the Palestinian Authority should come one day to grant all of Israel’s terms for an end-of-conflict peace accord except explicit recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state”, should the Israeli government of that day walk away from the deal? I would hope not.

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here are, alas, two additional problems with the Prime Minister’s approach, one mainly legal and one fairly abstract, but not inconsequential for so being.

First the legal. Asking the Palestinian Authority to accept Israel as a Jewish state borders on asking its permission for Jews to be who most of them say they are. Jews do not need permission from anyone to define themselves either as a people or as a nation, nor do they really need in so many words from the Palestinian Arabs what they already have from the (so-called) international community, namely, legal title to most, though not all, of Mandatory Palestine—final borders pending negotiations among the parties, of course, as stipulated by UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338.

What the current Israeli government, or any Israeli government, can and must demand is that Palestinians recognize the legal status of the State of Israel in international law. That status is clear: Let us remember that when the UN General Assembly voted on the question 63 years ago, it voted on “the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.” If the Palestinians recognize Israel, therefore, it subsumes Israel’s status as a Jewish state. This, presumably, is why earlier Israeli governments, including one led by Netanyahu himself, did not insist on a Palestinian declaration of the sort that Netanyahu now demands: It was understood that the legal framework that encompasses the conflict’s history and resolution glidepath presupposes such recognition.

To some extent, too, the Palestinians have already acknowledged that Israel is and will remain a Jewish state. Back in 1994 Yasir Arafat, during an interview with the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, was asked if he understood that Israel had to remain a Jewish state, and he answered “definitely.” Earlier, in its 1988 Declaration of Independence, the PLO somewhat grudgingly recognized, but recognized all the same, the applicability of UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 which, its Declaration stated, “partitioned Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish.”

This history of what we might call the sideswiping Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is what has led some Palestinian officials, like Mohammed Shtayyeh, to declare that “the issue of recognition is settled, it is done.” It has also led others to reason that Netanyahu’s demand that it now be explicitly repeated amounts to negotiating in bad faith, with the aim of either foiling the chances for agreement or of using the additional demand to get a deal more favorable to Israel. And, taken together with the aforementioned practical matter of what Israel might have to trade to get its wish, this is what is leading some Israeli officials, including Labor Party Defense Minister Ehud Barak, to distance himself from the Prime Minister’s position. “Of course we are a Jewish state,” Barak has said, “but we have to make sure we do not get on a slippery slope where our justifiable demands become prohibitive obstacles” to a deal.

Second the more abstract problem. To ask for a Palestinian intellectual consensus on Israel as a “Jewish state” begs an esoteric point in the philosophy of Jewish history, and that is asking too much. It is asking too much because, even if they do not like to admit it in mixed company, Jews themselves do not agree fully on what the phrase “Jewish state” actually means.

There are at least three ways to mean the adjective “Jewish” as attached to the noun “state”: Jewish as an ethnic description, Jewish as a religious (in the narrow Western definition) description, and Jewish as a cultural description that includes part of both. These correspond to Jews as a nation, as a faith community, and as a people. These definitions can and do overlap in practice, which is to say that they are conveniently muddled to cover over their mutual incompatibility.

One can get a sense of this incompatibility by referring to the history of Zionism, which has never entirely come to terms with this definitional ambiguity. In its original essence, political Zionism—the Zionism of Theodore Herzl and especially that of the secular socialists who assumed the movement’s leadership after his death in 1904—is a form of nationalism. Jews are defined as a nation qua ethnic group, in perfectly acceptable late-19^th century parlance. But that never quite worked for all purposes at hand, not least because conversion into Judaism as a faith community over the centuries had by then created a Jewish population that significantly transcended an ethnic group, or “nation”, as such. Hence the far more common use of the more expansive cultural term “Jewish people”, a rabbinically endorsed concept from a very long time ago meant to describe all those who throw in their lot together as Jews.

Broader than nation and less restrictive than faith community, peoplehood remains the most historically accurate and inclusive way to define Jews today, but it is a definition that does not satisfy all Jews. Some insist that faith has nothing to do with Jewishness; others insist that nationality has nothing to do with it. Both points of view are represented in Israel today by Israeli citizens. Outside of Israel, too, there are Jews who have Jewish ancestry but no interest in a faith community as well as those joined to the faith community who lack Jewish ancestry. There are both secular and religious Jews who are Zionist and secular and religious Jews who are not Zionist (if not to say anti-Zionist). Today one can thus affirm Jewish peoplehood “ni Moises, ni Herzl”, to paraphrase a well-known French locution by Jean-Francoise Revel that had originally to do with Jesus and Marx, and one can deny “peoplehood” by affirming exclusive reliance on ethnicity or religious belief.

One therefore shudders to think what might happen if the Palestinian leadership were shrewd enough to respond to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s request with a question: “What exactly do you mean by ‘Jewish state’?” One Arab citizen of Israel, at least, has come close to doing so: Mohammed Darwishe, the co-director of the Abraham Fund Initiatives, pointed to the loyalty oath proposal mooted by current Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman of the Israel Betaynu Party and asked, “The Jewish State is what? A Lieberman state?”

In due course, a more general formulation of that question could turn out to be far more trouble to answer than it’s worth. After all, disaster has befallen the Jewish people in the past, one could plausibly argue, not principally because of what its enemies were able to do, but because of radical dissension within its own ranks. Netanyahu’s innovation, for all of its well-intentioned purposes, could in due course unleash demons the Jewish people can well do without. Isn’t that just like politics, though—that domain of human affairs whose sole purpose for being, I sometimes think, is to prove the law of unintended consequences?