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PDF FormatYoram Hazony responds:
Critics of the Kineret Declaration such as Elyakim Haetzni, Ruth Wisse, and Herbert Zweibon have denounced the agreement, arguing that it gives up important political assets in exchange for what is in effect a collection of worthless platitudes. In my estimation, these critics misjudge both what is taking place within Israeli society and the meaning of the agreement itself. As a co-author and signatory, I believe the Kineret Declaration is a milestone of considerable importance, establishing, for the first time since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a framework of bedrock principles around which the great majority of Israeli Jews can be united; and upon which a broad-based effort to extract our people from the circumstances in which it finds itself can be built.
What are these circumstances, and what are these principles?
For more than thirty years, Israel has been bitterly divided. Idealists and ideologues of the Left and Right split the public between them, and the once-dominant Zionist Center, as represented in the first decades of the state by David Ben-Gurion’s Labor Party and its allies, collapsed. The result has been a culture of internal division, mutual recrimination, and hatred, which has poisoned the life of our polity, and made true unity of purpose among Jews all but unthinkable.
We Jews have long since accustomed ourselves to a public culture marred by this unbridgeable polarity. But the events of the past seven years, including the assassination of an elected Israeli prime minister and more than two years of warfare waged against Israel by the Palestinian Authority, have brought changes in the way Israeli Jews understand the public life of their country. Few are now as certain as they once were that a Palestinian state will bring peace; just as few are as certain as they once were that Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza will bring strength.
But along with this erosion of old political certainties, there has come a certain clarity of vision in another area. It is now evident that regardless of who was right in the bitter arguments of the past thirty years, the Jewish state and the Jewish people, facing unprecedented crises both internally and externally, cannot continue to stand divided against itself. Today, the highest priority has become an accommodation that will reconstruct the Zionist Center, put an end to the chronic condition of internal strife, and permit the great majority of Jews to stand together within a body politic characterized by a substantial degree of unity of purpose.
A few years ago, I published a bookin which I argued that the principal obstacle to such an accommodation is the rejection of traditional Zionist ideas by much of the country’s cultural leadership. The very term “Jewish state”—the central idea in Israel’s Declaration of Independence and in the Israeli political tradition—had become for many an embarrassment, to the point that these words could not even be pronounced without equivocation. “State of its citizens,” “state of the Jews,” “state of the Jewish people and of all of its citizens,” “Jewish and democratic state”—anything was better than explicit use of the term chosen by Israel’s founders and enshrined in its Declaration of Independence, “Jewish state.” And along with the retreat from this term had come a retreat from the idea it represents: The idea that Israel is a state founded with a political purpose, and that this purpose is to be a sovereign power acting on behalf of the interests and aspirations of the Jewish people as a whole.
How can one explain this abandonment of the expression “Jewish state” and of the ideal to which it refers? This vexing question can, at the risk of oversimplification, be answered as follows. In the rush to placate Arab political ambitions, the Jewish people gave up not only on territory, but also on significant parts of the Jewish political tradition, which were felt to stand in the way of good relations with the Arab world and its European sympathizers. Central among these was the term “Jewish state” and what it stands for. Those who do not immediately know what I am referring to should ask themselves the following question: Our Arab interlocutors constantly press us to recognize the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,” and to accede to the establishment of a “Palestinian state.” How is it, then, that amid all these discussions, negotiations, and agreements, whether with the Arab states, with the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, or with the leaders of the Arab minority in Israel, one never seems to hear of the “legitimate rights of the Jewish people,” or of our people’s right to a “Jewish state”?
We are not used to admitting the truth in this matter. The reason our side in these discussions does not insist on the “legitimate rights of the Jewish people” and demand recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” is that we know the Arabs will not accept it. Recognition of “the fact that Israel exists” is one thing. After all, an Israel with a Jewish majority today may have an Arab majority tomorrow. But to assent to the proposition that the Jews have a right to a state that is their own, just as the Arabs do—this, we are told, is something else entirely. This is Zionism, which is racism. This is some kind of moral or theological abomination. No negotiation with any significant Arab political body has ever once suggested acceptance of the legitimacy of Israel as the state of the Jewish people. The answer to this is simply—“No. We cannot accept that.”
Fear of Arab opinion in this matter has been the fife and drum of Israeli political culture for a generation. It is this fear that dictates what we teach in high-school civics, history, and archaeology; that fuels the demand to abolish the Law of Return and the national anthem; that is the basis of our willingness to concede that no Jew will ever set foot on the Temple Mount again. It is this fear that nearly wiped out the use of the term “Jewish state” from our public life. And it is this fear, too, that prevented, for nearly a generation, public gatherings of Israeli Jews as Jews,to discuss Jewish interests, needs, and aspirations. The entire concept of Jewish interests, as distinct from those of the Arab world, of the Palestinians, of Israeli Arabs, was driven underground, to be discussed only in very small groups, or else not at all. Our leading men and women have wandered so far that in the first weeks of the discussions that led to the Kineret Declaration, the respected constitutional scholar Ruth Gavison was constrained to explain at length why it is legitimate for Jews to gather together, just as Arabs do, to discuss their common interests.
Herein lies the real significance of the negotiations surrounding the Kineret Declaration. Those who deride the value of this “dance” among Jews of various persuasions seem not to have grasped what it means for the individuals in question to publicly negotiate and reach agreement on a joint statement of Jewish interests, needs, and aspirations; nor what it means to have, for the first time in thirty years, a united Jewish position that can be the basis for discussions with the Arabs, where until now such discussions had been based on the views of only a certain segment of the Jewish public. In the Kineret Declaration, Israeli Jewry has, for the first time in a generation, spoken clearly and in a single voice. And this voice has committed itself to the view that there does exist a common Jewish interest, and that there will be no separate peace between the Arab world, on the one hand, and a narrow segment of Jewish opinion, on the other.
In terms of its substance, too, the Kineret Declaration is a path-breaking document, which re-establishes the existence of a Jewish-Israeli consensus concerning Israel’s character as a Jewish state. Among its provisions are the following:
1. The declaration re-establishes the term Jewish state as the political ideal at the center of Israel’s political tradition. (Articles 3, 4)
2. The declaration re-establishes the Jewish historical narrative, from the Bible to the Holocaust, as the basis for Israel’s national life. (Articles 1, 3)
3. The declaration asserts that the existence of a Jewish sovereignty is “an enduring and unquestionable right” of the Jewish people. (Articles 1, 3)
4. Israel as a state is committed to the continuity and strengthening of the Jewish people, and to taking responsibility for the well-being of the Jewish people. The state will assist in Jewish education in the diaspora and come to the aid of Jewish communities in distress. (Article 3)
