By Leon Cohen
Is it generally wrong for any society to accord special privileges to a group because of that group’s race, religion or ethnicity? Yes.
Is it generally wrong for any society to deny a minority group full citizenship rights and privileges because of that group’s race, religion, ethnicity? Yes.
Therefore, Israel should cease being a Jewish state, with automatic citizenship and other special rights and privileges for Jews, and should become a state of all its citizens in every sense of the word, including Israeli Arabs, right?
Wrong. But this is not an easy conclusion to justify, not only to others, but even to myself. It is a cruel dilemma, both for us diaspora Jews who support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and for the Israeli Arabs who live there. Just how cruel was displayed in an incident last month reported in the New York Times and elsewhere.
On Sept. 18, Israeli Arab Rami Mahamid, 17, saw a suspicious-looking Arab man standing at a bus stop and concluded the man might be a suicide bomber. With both an exemplary moral sense and amazing courage, this teenager borrowed the man’s cell phone, called Israeli police, then kept the man talking until two police officers arrived.
The terrorist then detonated his bomb, killing one of the officers and himself. Mahamid was seriously wounded and passed out.
When he awoke after surgery, not only was he in a hospital bed in Afula, but he also was tied to the bed because Israeli police automatically suspected him of being the terrorist’s accomplice. He was kept that way for some days, until the police realized what his true role had been. On Sept. 25, the police gave him a certificate lauding his courage and “good citizenship.”
If ever a human being deserved to be a full citizen of a country, it is Rami Mahamid. He risked his life and endured serious injury to save the lives of his fellow citizens.
However, although he may do things in Israel that he couldn’t in any Arab-ruled country in the region — like vote, run for office, express political opinions without being jailed, tortured or murdered — he still may never feel that his country truly belongs to him.
His country’s national anthem sings about “the Jewish soul yearning.” Its flag bears a Star of David and is reminiscent of a Jewish prayer shawl. Its national holidays either come from the Jewish religious calendar or mark the defeat of his own people. He is exempt from military service, which is both a basic obligation of full citizenship in a country under siege and a key network for economic, social and political success in Israeli society.
And he probably will endure discrimination, both as an individual and in his community in the areas of employment and government spending on social services. Indeed, he already has experienced discrimination.
Moreover, if he has Arab relatives outside of Israel descended from those who fled in 1948, they do not have the right to automatic Israeli citizenship, while diaspora Jews whose ancestors came from European, American or Middle Eastern countries do. And all this solely because he and his relatives are not Jews.
In an American context, this situation appears as unjust as unjust can be. In fact, it is exactly the sort of situation so many of us or our immigrant ancestors escaped from. Moreover, we are quick to criticize other countries for not finding ways for different ethnic and religious groups to live together according to the American model.
And this whole business does leave us open to the charges of hypocrisy and of Israeli being a “racist” and “imperialistic” society that haters of Jews, Judaism and Israel trumpet with satanic glee — and that too many “progressives” are so willing to find plausible.
But they are wrong. There are real and just reasons that Israel exists and has to continue to exist for the primary benefit of Jews — and these reasons have nothing whatever to do with real racism and imperialism, except in so far as these come at rather than from Jews.
Israel was not created by a bunch of greedy whites seeking to exploit helpless non-white native populations for profit. It was created by a tiny minority of the human community that has endured hostility and threats to its very existence for 2,000 years — and continues to endure such threats. That group has returned to a place to which it feels ties that are historic, national and religious — feelings that deserve as much respect as those of any other group, but that so often receive infinitely less.
This does not justify unnecessary discrimination or gratuitous cruelties. Reliable and Jewish sources — not Palestinian/Arab propaganda — have documented numerous instances of unjustified humiliations inflicted on Arabs in the Israel-administered territories, unjustified abuses of human rights of Palestinian and Israeli Arabs, unjustified denials of resources and social services to Israel’s Arab population. These must stop.
But even if they do, the key issue would not change. The Jewish people want — no, need — to have a state in the land of Israel, a place where Jews are guaranteed freedom and self-government, where Jews come first, because for so long we have come last in so many other places — and there are millions of people, mostly (it seems) Arabs, who want to put us back there by force.
And if in the course of making and defending that state, we have to hurt a manifestly good person like Rami Mahamid, we can apologize, we can and should try to minimize the damage — but ultimately this is a dilemma our enemies have forced on us; and we have to choose our own survival.
I wish the whole world would work according to the American model of religion-state separation, democratically representative government “with liberty and justice for all.” But it doesn’t (and even American reality doesn’t always match the model). In fact, it is a world — the United States included — in which the sensibilities, well-being and even lives of Jews are nearly always less important than other things, and therefore are easily surrendered or ignored.
And I wish a good person like Rami Mahamid wouldn’t have to suffer because of our need to do what we must to exist — to survive — in our unique circumstances. But nothing he or his Arab brethren have endured or are enduring comes even close to equaling what we Jews have endured — and what too many people, particularly among his fellow Arabs, want us to have to endure again.
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