It’s not only Israel’s enemies who are melting with pleasure over the country’s system collapse. Critics and opponents of Zionism – living and dead, Jewish and non-Jewish – can also say, either with great concern or with schadenfreude, “We told you so.”
After all, even the harshest critic could never have predicted such a swift, brazen actualization of the negative potential they identified in the Zionist idea from its inception. For instance, the potential reflected in a United Nations resolution from 1975 that defined Zionism as racism. (The resolution was revoked in 1991.)
If Zionism were a healthy movement, the establishment of the state should have led to a natural death, like that of the placenta or the umbilical cord after a baby’s birth. A movement founded for the purpose of establishing a national home for the Jewish people should have ended its role after that goal was achieved.
From the moment the state was founded, the continued existence of the Zionist movement constituted a surplus of nationalism. It’s like a child who remains connected to its mother through the umbilical cord or a family that saves the placenta in the freezer.
The so-called nation-state law is like a baby born from a recycled placenta and that suffers from this surplus nationalism. That’s also the reason for the opposition it encountered.
Contrary to Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the nation-state law was seen as enshrining Jewish superiority and Arab inferiority, as bolstering Israel’s Jewish character at the expense of its democratic character. The fact that many Israelis felt a need to enact this law rather than making do with the Declaration of Independence attested to the weakness of the Israeli identity.
Just as it wasn’t enough for the Palestinians to recognize the State of Israel the way enemy states did in the peace agreements, and they were asked (and refused) to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, Israelis were unable to make do with defining themselves as the State of Israel, and sought to legislate themselves as the state of the Jewish people.
But even this was not sufficient. Negev and Galilee Development Minister Yitzhak Wasserlauf of Otzma Yehudit (how weak one must be in order to call your party “Jewish power”) and party chair Itamar Ben-Gvir are working to pass a cabinet resolution making Zionism a “guiding value for the activities of the government.” The proposal asks the government and its ministries to give “significant weight” to Zionist values as they appear in the nation-state law when setting administrative, domestic and foreign policy or proposing legislation.
And as usual in Israel, the method of creeping annexation is being employed. The Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, denied petitions against the nation-state law on the grounds that it was strictly a declarative law. But now that it has been upheld, along comes this ultranationalist coalition and translates it into policy.
This is not surprising. When the hunger is emotional, no food will satisfy it. In the draft resolution, the section on funding is marked “not relevant,” as is the one on staffing requirements. To this, we can only say, “yeah, sure.” Just as the nation-state law is strictly declarative. It is obvious that the sole purpose of this perverted resolution is to give preference to Jews over non-Jews in public institutions and budgetary allocations.
Israel’s mechanisms for maintaining national purity have proved to be even more rigid than Jewish law, which defines a Jew as anyone born to a Jewish mother (or who converted in accordance with Jewish law). It’s apparently now easier to join the Jewish religion than it is to join the Jewish people or to receive Israeli citizenship.
The religious Zionist project of “settling in people’s hearts” could not be more explicit: Israel’s Declaration of Independence is not sufficient, we need the nation-state law; the nation-state law is not sufficient, we need to ensure that Zionism is a guiding value. And even that is not sufficient, because maybe some non-Jewish thought has remained in our heart, seeking to contaminate the purity of the state, and the state must uproot it at any cost.
Israel’s Nation-state Law Reflects the Failure of Zionism
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30.04.2023
It’s not only Israel’s enemies who are melting with pleasure over the country’s system collapse. Critics and opponents of Zionism – living and dead, Jewish and non-Jewish – can also say, either with great concern or with schadenfreude, “We told you so.”
After all, even the harshest critic could never have predicted such a swift, brazen actualization of the negative potential they identified in the Zionist idea from its inception. For instance, the potential reflected in a United Nations resolution from 1975 that defined Zionism as racism. (The resolution was revoked in 1991.)
If Zionism were a healthy movement, the establishment of the state should have led to a natural death, like that of the placenta or the umbilical cord after a baby’s birth. A movement founded for the purpose of establishing a national home for the Jewish people should have ended its role after that goal was achieved.
From the moment the state was founded, the continued existence of the Zionist movement constituted a surplus of nationalism. It’s like a........
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