The American Spectator

Special Report

Recognizing Israel

By Daniel Mandel on 5.15.08 @ 12:08AM

(Page 2 of 2)

Perhaps, with so much conflict, internal and external in origin, Israel's great achievement is the resilience of its democratic life. By temperament, Israelis are the most democratic of peoples. They have a low threshold of tolerance for any pretense of social superiority. Informality is the norm. Some people think this goes a little far. As any visitor knows, graceful manners are in short supply. The army is the most respected national institution for obvious reasons, yet has almost no chivalric tradition. Generals and privates wear the same uniforms. There is no ceremonial dress uniform and an economy of military and civilian honors, which makes military ceremony on national occasions all the more haunting for its accessibility and austerity.

This tremendous achievement, too, cannot be celebrated with abandon. Israel's judiciary is fiercely independent, yet its Supreme Court's radically activist orientation and virtually self-selecting confirmation process places it almost outside parliamentary purview, perhaps beyond the point of recall. Court judges are not appointed by the government or the Knesset, Israel's parliament, but by a panel in which unelected judges and lawyers are the majority. This has entrenched an activist orthodoxy, unmitigated by the changes of administrations and Congresses that serve to achieve judicial diversity in the United States.

Vigorous debate and parliamentary procedures are alive and well, but proportional representation in the Knesset has balkanized politics, impeded resolute central government, defied the requirements of stability, and held majorities hostage to capricious minorities. As a result, Knesset members hold office courtesy of party lists, not electors' votes, and are beholden to party whips, not to constituencies. This has engendered at once fluid loyalties, lack of accountability, and public cynicism. Worsening matters still further is Israeli bureaucracy which, in its untroubled inefficiency, is typically Mediterranean. Press freedom somewhat mitigates the picture, since Israeli journalists are not inclined to self-censorship. Foreign correspondents congregate in the country, free to report without fear or favor, and often show little but disfavor. Corruption scandals -- including one with current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as its subject -- are far from rare, though the country's president, Shimon Peres, recently offered a consoling thought -- "Better a democracy with scandals than an authoritarian system without scandals."

The Israeli Arabs -- a minority of approximately 20% -- have been an increasing special challenge to the country. Most of the Arab sector spent Israel's first years under military rule before participating normally in Israel life. Trade union membership followed in 1960. Political representation has always been a feature of Israeli Arab life, with Arab Knesset members sitting in governing coalitions; one, Raleb Majadele, is currently a minister in the government of Ehud Olmert (though he refuses to sing the national anthem, Hatikvah). Arabs represent Israel abroad in the diplomatic service, the staunchly loyal Druze population has enjoyed a harmonious relationship to the state, its youth even serving in elite units of the armed forces. Knowing the limits of the human condition, Israel has not imposed army service on its Arabs (though volunteers are taken), just as the U.S. did not deploy Japanese Americans in the Pacific theater of operations during the Second World War. One result of this, however, has been that, in a country in which national service is often a prerequisite for good employment and economic opportunities, Arabs have lagged behind.

The Israeli Arab impetus for integration, such as it was, has eroded dangerously in recent years, perhaps the worst long-term consequence of the Oslo process. One need only consult the position papers of various Arab advocacy groups to see in print rejection of the Jewish character and symbols of the country and demands for binationalism. Israeli Arab Knesset members have visited neighboring states still at war with Israel, praised terror groups murdering their fellow citizens and even advised them on ways to further harm Israel in both war and peace. How Israel deals with these dangers remains to be seen. Oslo advocates used to speak of decommissioning the conflict and thereby easing its attendant home front tensions. In reality, the opposite has occurred.

IT IS IN THESE circumstances that Israel enters its seventh decade. Its oldest citizens are the last alive who can maturely recall the pre-state days, the early privations, the flush of vision and pre-sovereign innocence. With their passing, the last link to Israel's youth will be lost forever, probably over the next ten years. (Yossi Harel, commander of the refugee ship, Exodus, and inspiration for the protagonist in Leon Uris's eponymous novel, died at 90 less than a month ago.) Revisiting the national record has been constant with Israeli historians, now boasting a discrete group of revisionists keen to debunk alleged nationalist orthodoxies. As often happens in historical writing, revisionists, keen to dislodge old orthodoxies, end up creating a new one. It is not uncommon today to see or hear of Israeli academics lambasting their country's defense and rationalizing Arab aggression. Some of the revisionists are also at the forefront of a campaign to efface national particularity, a phenomenon termed "post-Zionism," a peculiarly heedless conception that confuses political normalization with regional assimilation.

But post-Zionism, so popular abroad, is in retreat at home. Seven years on from Arafat's so-called second intifadah, Israelis are largely recovered from the shock of terror and scorching hostility to which they awoke in 2000, like a cancer patient in remission experiencing a returning malignancy. Polls consistently show Israelis to be more sober of Palestinian intentions and skeptical of diplomatic designs, whether drawn up at home, Washington or elsewhere. The fusillade of rockets from Gaza permit few beyond the far left to pretend that the Gaza unilateral withdrawal was successful or that negotiated retreats would prove more so. The current government that mismanaged the 2006 Lebanon war -- itself the product of an earlier, unilateral withdrawal -- continues to preside, insulated from electoral pressures for the moment.

But then winning the war for Israel's acceptance, like nation-building itself, is not the work of a couple of generations. I very much like an anecdote about the veteran leader of Zionism, Chaim Weizmann. In giving testimony to the Peel Royal Commission in 1937, convened to seek a solution to the conflict in the land then under British tutelage, Weizmann was asked by one of the Commissioners, Sir Horace Rumbold, if he could ever envisage a fully formed Jewish state. He replied "never." Astonished, Rumbold queried why Weizmann could not foresee the completion of Zionism's work. Weizmann replied that, just as Britain had been evolved over centuries so that it was impossible to determine when it had been fully formed, so too, it would be impossible to know when the Jewish state was built up and the task at an end.

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