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PDF Format5. Israel is committed to the maintenance of its Jewish majority and to the Law of Return granting Jews the right to immigrate to Israel. (Articles 3, 4)
6. Israel is committed to the maintenance of a Jewish school system,whose purpose, in addition to general studies, is “to inculcate… an attachment to the Jewish people, the Jewish heritage, and the book of books.” The educational system will also encourage “love of the land of Israel.” (Article 3)
7. Israel is committed to the maintenance of state institutions whose purpose is the advancement of Jewish national culture, including the Hebrew language. Hebrew is explicitly accepted as “the principal language of the state.” (Article 3)
8. The declaration asserts that Jewish religion has “an important place in the public sphere and in the public aspects of the life of the state.” At the same time, it confirms the principle that religious norms should not be imposed on the private life of the individual. (Article 9)
9. The declaration makes specific reference to the role of the Tora in Jewish civilization; to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; and to God as the creator of all men. (Articles 1, 2)
10. The declaration explicitly rejects the claim made by Jewish and Arab public figures in recent years to the effect that Israel’s Jewish character stands in tension with its democratic government or with the rights of minorities. The state’s commitment to democracy and civil rights is reconfirmed. In particular, the declaration expresses Israeli Jews’ feelings of solidarity with the Druze and other national minorities who are full partners in the upbuilding of the state and its defense. (Articles 4, 5)
I think the achievement here is unequivocal. If one remains committed to the letter and spirit of this document, its meaning is that Israeli Jews will no longer accept a “neutral” Israeli state as a tacit precondition for discussions with our Arab neighbors. Just as the latter have their Arab national states, so too will the Jews have their one Jewish state. For Israeli Jews and for the Jewish people as a whole, this is a red-line issue, and the Kineret Declaration establishes this explicitly.
Elyakim Haetzni expresses contempt for all the Jewish-state talk in the Kineret Declaration, which to him is no more than “empty words,” at most a “mess of potage.” After all, how hard can it be to get Jews to declare Israel to be a Jewish state?
With all due respect, it appears to me that Haetzni is misinformed as to what has been going on in Tel Aviv for the past thirty years. Certainly, it is true that the contingent of Peace Now veterans in the Kineret discussions included a handful of Judenstaatlers, whose commitment to the above-mentioned principles does not fall short of mine, or of anyone else’s. Among these I would include Ari Shavit and Alex Yakobson, who were among the initiators of the declaration, and who invested prodigious efforts in persuading their colleagues to unite behind the declaration. But for others, things were by no means so cut-and-dry.
One naturally tends to focus on the 150 public figures who eventually signed the declaration. But this striking display of consensus obscures the twelve months of efforts that brought this consensus into being. In fact, the principal threats to reaching any agreement at all during the year of discussions that led up to the Kineret Declaration were the demand for the inclusion of Arab representation in discussions and the demand to exclude the term “Jewish state.” There were individuals who walked out on the discussions for these reasons and did not return. Even on the day of the final ratification, the demand to remove the term “Jewish state” was the subject of a row that subsided only when the chairman of the Committee for National Responsibility, Major-General Uzi Dayan, announced that he would not sign a document that did not include the term “Jewish state.” Moreover, a careful consideration of who did not sign the Kineret Declaration would reveal key public figures whose names do not appear precisely because of the term “Jewish state,” or because of related issues such as the declaration’s endorsement of the Law of Return.
Some of the declaration’s critics know all of this quite well. Nonetheless, they are preoccupied with what they see as the grave concessions made in the substance and language of the declaration. It is true, of course, that the Kineret Declaration sometimes uses language I might not have chosen had I been the sole author. But even so, I cannot see how restating my commitment to the rights of Israel’s Arab minority, or to peace between Israel and its neighbors, or to a politics of moral means—all of them things to which I have always been committed—has rendered me or any of the other signatories “obsequious” or how it bespeaks a “failure of nerve,” as Ruth Wisse would have it. Nor do I see these things as having “put the last nail in the coffin” of Jewish nationalism, or anything similar to this.
The same may be said with regard to the reference to Israeli Arabs’ “national identity.” For better or worse, Israeli Arabs have been recognized as having a separate national identity since Israel’s founding. This is the reason they are permitted to operate an entirely separate Arabic-language school system, and the reason Israeli identity cards until only recently included a line that read, “Nationality: Jewish” or “Nationality: Arab.” In this, Israel differs from the United States and France, where all citizens are expected to see themselves as belonging to the same “people”; and where, as a consequence, everyone is expected to attend the same schools and speak the same language. In Israel, Jews and Arabs share a common citizenship, but they are not expected to assimilate into a single national identity. This reflects the preferences of both Jews and Arabs, who see themselves as belonging to different peoples; and who, as a consequence, want their children to attend separate school systems and speak separate languages. I do not see any need for a change in this matter, and the Kineret Declaration simply accepts it as an integral part of Israeli democracy.
More to the point is Haetzni’s criticism that the Kineret Declaration, in accepting a solution to Arab-Jewish conflict on the basis of national states, implies the establishment of a fully independent Palestinian-Arab state west of the Jordan River. Factually, this claim is incorrect. Everyone at the table when the Kineret Declaration was being negotiated understood that there was no possibility of a coalition document of this sort endorsing something as contentious as a Palestinian state, and, indeed, it makes no such endorsement. What it does do is to devote three sentences to wording ambiguous enough to permit a spectrum of interpretations, including Effie Eitam’s proposal that a Palestinian national state be established on the East Bank of the Jordan.
This having been said, I do not think that a normative reading of Article 6 in fact points in this direction. The reason I say this is that Eitam’s interpretation rests on the belief that a Jewish state with a population the size of Israel’s can somehow succeed in absorbing the Arab cities of the West Bank. This, I think, is clearly incorrect. Israel cannot absorb these cities into itself; consequently, the ultimate political disposition of most of this Arab population will have to be found in its association with an Arab national state, or at least in some more limited form of self-government that will be Arab-national in character. There is no question that one can conclude from this that there should be an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank; many have interpreted the inclusion of the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people” in the peace treaty with Egypt as implying precisely this, and I think that it is absurd to expect a coalition document such as the Kineret Declaration to preclude this idea entirely.
To leave the door open to such a possibility is not, however, the same as endorsing it. In fact, the Kineret Declaration amends the language of the Camp David accords by making the question of the Palestinian polity conditional on the acceptance of the “legitimate rights of the Jewish people”:
Israel is prepared, therefore, to recognize the legitimate rights of the neighboring Palestinian people, on condition that it recognize the legitimate rights of the Jewish people. Israel has no wish to rule over another people, but it insists that no people and no state try to bring about its destruction as a Jewish state. [emphasis added]
In other words, the Kineret Declaration for the first time accepts the premise that, however one chooses to interpret the rights of the Palestinian Arabs, these rights cannot be taken to be absolute and independent of all other considerations. If the Palestinian Authority is to be a terror sponsoring regime, whose desire and capacity to recognize the rights of the Jewish people remain questionable at best, then its right to establish itself in the West Bank will be forfeit. In this context, the introduction of the demand that Israel be recognized as a Jewish state (as it was, incidentally, in the UN plan of 1947) is of the essence. It is this demand alone that can end the duplicity on the part of Arab leaders who are willing to recognize “the fact that Israel exists,” while at the same time insisting that, as a Jewish state, it is illegitimate—and therefore a fair target for an endless war of terror, diplomatic confrontation, boycott, and anti-Semitic incitement.
This transition from a belief in the absolute character of Palestinian-Arab rights, to a belief in the conditional quality of these rights, reflects a clear change in the standpoint of Israeli Jews after ten years of bloodshed in the wake of the Oslo accords. By making political gains for the Palestinian Arabs conditional on recognition of Israel as aJewish state, the Kineret Declaration seeks to adjust Israeli foreign policy to the harsh realities with which Israel is presently confronted. On the one hand, it does leave open the possibility of the establishment of a Palestinian-Arab national state. On the other, it makes any step in this direction conditional on what is in fact the minimum real requirement if there is to be peace: The Arabs must be willing to recognizethe right of the Jewish people to a Jewish state, just as Israel recognizes the right of the Arab peoples to their Arab national states.
For the time being, it appears that no Palestinian regime will be willing to accept Israel as a Jewish state, even in exchange for its independence. Much of the Palestinian-Arab leadership continues to believe that Israel, as a Jewish state, is illegitimate; and that it must be replaced with a binational state, the precursor to an “Israel” with an Arab majority. Whether in the form of a suicidal terror war, or of a more sophisticated “cold war,” the Palestinian leadership as a whole still seems to be committed to its war against the Jews. For this reason, the entire matter of a workable Palestinian state is, from the perspective of the Kineret Declaration, remote. More remote, even, than the reassertion of Jordanian control in the Arab cities in the West Bank—which would at least have the advantage that it might really bring peace.
This brings me to Aryeh Perlman’s effort to demonstrate, on the basis of quotations from my writings, that the Kineret Declaration represents a shift in my views. Perlman’s question is a fair one, but I am afraid his argument is based on a mistaken interpretation of the viewpoint defended in those articles. The passage of time has given me no cause to regret anything I said or wrote with regard to the 1993 Oslo accords or the character of the PLO leadership with whom that bargain was struck. At the time, I was among those who said that the Oslo agreement would bring Lebanon to the outskirts of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem; and in this, unfortunately, my worst fears have been fulfilled. But this does not mean I was committed to direct Israeli political control of the Arab cities of the West Bank. As I have said, Israel’s Jewish population is not nearly large enough to make the incorporation of these Palestinian-Arab populations into the Israeli polity feasible. As early as 1985, I therefore wrote in support of considering options such as autonomy and Jordanian control in various of the territories in question. The demographic circumstances today are far worse than they were then, and I still do not see how anyone can seriously contemplate direct annexation.
Finally, I should like to say a word concerning Christopher DeMuth’s question regarding Christians in Israel and the territories. It seems to me that the suffering of the Christian-Arab minority is one of the great unspoken tragedies of the political landscape that has been created by the Oslo agreement. The aim of men such as Yasser Arafat is to do to the Christians of Bethlehem what was done to the Christians of Beirut: To reduce them gradually to a state of helplessness and submission. Difficult as it may be to admit this, the well-being of Christian Arabs in the West Bank and Lebanon depends not on the good graces of Muslim rulers, which have so rarely been forthcoming, so much as on the strength of their relationship with Israel. My own hope is that one day the Christian-Arab communities in and around Israel will be able to free themselves from the fear of Muslim fanaticism and enter into a relationship of mutual respect and genuine peace with the Jewish state. This is certainly a subject that future discussions of the kind that gave birth to the Kineret Declaration will have to address.
As I indicated earlier, I do not believe that every word of the Kineret Declaration is as it would have been if I had written it myself. To point to one out of many examples, I believe that the extreme tax burden in Israel, which has grown even worse in recent years, can only result in the flight of Jewish manpower, talent, and capital from the country. As such, I see the stifled market mechanisms as a real threat to our ability to maintain a Jewish majority here. However, not only did I fail to introduce economic growth into the document as a matter of significant Zionist concern, I consider myself fortunate to have persuaded my colleagues at least to give up on the worst of the socialist language some of them found so enticing.
This is the way of these things. Coalition agreements are by their nature based on give-and-take. The question in any given instance is whether what is gained in establishing a coalition is worth the price. Some feel it is, so they take the responsibility of negotiating and affixing their names to something that by its nature can never be perfect. Others feel it is not, so they do not negotiate and they do not sign. By this, they gain whatever advantage comes of never having compromised on anything. But they must also live with the knowledge that at the crucial moment they gained nothing for their cause, for the simple reason that they were willing to give nothing up.
So it is with the Kineret Declaration, of which I am proud to have been a co-author and a signatory. Whatever give-and-take took place in the drafting of this document, I believe, was more than justified by the circumstances in which the Jewish people presently finds itself; and by the gains made in the declaration with respect to fundamental Zionist principles, and in particular with respect to the ideal of Israel as the Jewish state. For the first time in a generation, these principles have received explicit public endorsement by Israeli public figures from across the political and cultural spectrum, in an alignment that represents the great majority of Israeli Jews, and of diaspora Jews as well. This is, of course, no more than a first step in the effort to heal the rift that has divided our people for so long, and to re-establish a strong Zionist center that can fill this divide. But it is such a first step. As such, I believe it is worthy of all the support that can be given it.
