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PDF FormatThere are those who argue that the Law of Return is racist, one of the clearest proofs that Arab Israelis are the victims of state-sponsored discrimination. This claim is baseless. The law does not discriminate among citizens. It determines who may become one. The principle of repatriation in a nation state is grounded in both political morality and international law. The United Nations’ 1947 resolution approving the establishment of a Jewish state was meant to enable Jews to control immigration to their country. Similar immigration policies based on a preference for people whose nationality is that of the state have been practiced in European countries, including many of the new nation states established after the fall of the Soviet Union. The need to preserve a national majority, especially in cases where the minority belongs to a nation that has its own, adjacent state, is not unique to Israel.29
Another example concerns the geographical distribution of Jewish settlement within Israel. The territorial integrity of a state is a legitimate national interest. In the context of the ongoing conflict, Israel is justified in establishing Jewish towns with the express purpose of preventing the contiguity of Arab settlement both within Israel and with the Arab states across the border: Such contiguous settlement invites irredentism and secessionist claims, and neutralizing the threat of secession is a legitimate goal. By contrast, the blatant discrimination against Arabs in the quality of housing and infrastructure cannot be justified.30 The Israeli Supreme Court’s declaration in Kedan v. Israel Lands Administration (2000), according to which the state must not discriminate against Arabs in these matters, is therefore welcomed. However, I do not accept the ruling’s further implication that there is no basis for permitting the creation of separate communities for Jews and Arabs. In a multi-cultural society such as Israel, most individuals prefer to live within their respective communities, and they should be allowed to do so, provided that this does not severely undermine the common civic identity.31
A third example concerns education policy, and in particular the question of whether Israel’s educational system should openly promote Jewish identity and the state’s Jewish character in its Jewish public schools. In recent years, this has been the subject of a lively public debate, a fact that is itself highly commendable.32 However, in the heat of the argument several important issues have frequently been overlooked. For example, while it is agreed that education for Jewish and Zionist identity should not take the form of mindless indoctrination, neither is it possible to reduce education to a dispassionate exercise in the comparative study of cultures. A proper education will give students the tools they need to examine their Jewish identity with a critical eye, and in some cases this education might even lead a student to disassociate himself from that identity. But even if education cannot be value-neutral—and by definition it never is—it has to be committed to both truth and a sense of perspective. Jewish education in Israel cannot ignore the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict and the disagreements about it that prevail today. Ignoring the more unpleasant parts of the historical record only weakens students’ ability to address the conflict properly, and makes it harder for them to criticize Israel’s actions while maintaining a sense of national loyalty. The richer and more complex the sense of identity, the stronger and more secure it will be.
Obviously a different approach must be taken in the Arab sector. The educational system for Israeli Arabs should strengthen Arab cultural identity and, as a result, alleviate fears that life in a Jewish state means weakening the bonds that have traditionally connected them with the Arab people. The Israeli Arab educational system should also promote awareness of minority rights and emphasize the fact that Israel is a democracy committed to the principle of non-discrimination, even if it may fall short in practice, and that it allows a variety of legal means for defending one’s rights and dignity. Importantly, it must instill in Israeli Arabs an understanding that their Israeli citizenship is part of their identity, even if they find it wanting. This citizenship means, among other things, allegiance to the state and respect for its laws, and acknowledging the right of the majority to determine the basic character of the state.
From the argument that the ongoing presence of a Jewish state is justified, one should not draw the conclusion that Arab citizens unhappy with the state’s character should resign themselves to it. The Arabs’ political struggle to change the character of Israel is legitimate, even if I do not share their aspirations. Yet it is crucial that this struggle be conducted under two constraints: First, it should take place only within the confines of the democratic “rules of the game”; second, so long as the majority prefers to maintain Israel’s Jewish character (again, without violating the basic rights of Arab citizens), this choice is legitimate. The state is justified in acting to preserve Israel’s Jewish nature, and this fact should not be used to delegitimize the state at home or abroad. In recent years, the commitment of Arab citizens to these two conditions has been anything but clear-cut, further complicating Jewish-Arab relations in Israel.
VI
The need for a justification for the Jewish state is not simply a matter of self-beautification, nor is it an attempt to square the circle. It is, rather, an existential need. The Jewish state will survive over time only if the majority of Jews are convinced that its existence is justified, and that it can retain its moral compass despite the difficult conditions of today’s Middle East. Unfortunately, however, many Jews prefer to ignore the question completely. As a result, our sense of justice has come to depend on our maintaining a persistent closed-mindedness. As a result many of our best people–those Jews with the greatest moral sensitivity and empathy for the suffering of others—may in the end lose their will to identify with the Jewish national enterprise and begin to view its existence as indefensible. Even worse, those of us who are morally uncomfortable with Israel’s current policies will have no real tools for determining whether these policies are in fact unjustified and should be opposed, or are indeed justified by the necessity of preserving the Jewish character of the state (so long as human rights are protected).
If we are to dispel the fog of pessimism that has recently settled over the Zionist enterprise, then, we will have to begin with a clearheaded approach. There is no point in denying that the State of Israel faces profound internal and external challenges. Israeli society is increasingly divided by economic disparity and conflicts between Jew and non-Jew, secular and religious, Left and Right. Yet the Jewish state is, in many respects, a major success, particularly when one considers the circumstances with which it must contend. In terms of democracy, Israel is far ahead of its neighbors, and far ahead of where it was in its early years. Israel’s economy and its scientific achievements place it among the world’s most developed countries. It boasts an open, self-critical society with considerable political freedom, and its rule of law and judicial independence rival those of the healthiest democracies. And these successes have come without the benefit of the rich natural resources found in other countries, including Israel’s Arab neighbors. True, Israel has not yet achieved a stable peace with many of its neighbors. We should continue to make such an agreement our goal, while remembering that its achievement does not depend on Israel alone. In the meantime, we can look back with pride and forward with hope. Israel has a great deal to offer its citizens, both Jews and Arabs.
For now, Israel is the state of the Jewish people. In the present circumstances it is justified in being so, and I hope that it will take the necessary steps to preserve this status in the future. This is no small aspiration: The history of the land of Israel is strewn with the remains of many peoples and cultures. Israel’s Jewish majority need not apologize for seeking to retain the Jewish identity of the state, but it must recognize the rights of Palestinians living between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. This includes their right to express their own unique identity both through an independent state of their own alongside Israel, and as a minority within the Jewish state. This issue cannot be wished away; it must be addressed in a way that is both effective and moral.
The hope that the Jews of Israel will become more culturally homogeneous is also pure fantasy. Israel will never be either wholly secular or wholly religious, wholly East or wholly West. Israel will never be a Western European country, nor will it be a typical Levantine one. But the tensions that arise from these various dualities are hardly to Israel’s detriment: The strength of Israeli society is derived from the combination of its elements, and this carries an important lesson for the state’s future. Israel must struggle to protect the unique combination of cultures, traditions, and identities that make up the Jewish state. Every group should feel at home, and no one group should be capable of imposing its ways on others. If we are wise enough to uphold this principle, it will not only serve the ends of the majority, but also safeguard the uniqueness of the minorities.
“It is not for us to finish the job,” we are told by the rabbis of the Talmud.33 Our generation is not responsible for establishing a Jewish state; rather, we are responsible for preserving it for future generations, and for ensuring that it is passed on to our children as a worthy inheritance. This requires that we give them solid grounds for believing in the justice of our common enterprise–and this, in turn, means recognizing the diversity of Israel’s citizenry and the complexity of our life together. Our generation needs to channel this diversity to good ends, even when different groups disagree, or when one group’s aspirations do not line up perfectly with those of the state as a whole. The key to our success, then, will be our ability to preserve the delicate balance between what unites us and what makes us different.
If we will it, this too will be no dream.
Ruth Gavison holds the Haim H. Cohn Chair in Human Rights in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. This essay is based on the Zalman C. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Jewish Political Thought, sponsored by the Shalem Center, delivered in Jerusalem on January 25, 2001.
Notes
I would like to extend special thanks to Yoav Artzieli for his help in preparing this lecture for publication.
1. For my purposes, there is no substantial difference between the expression “Jewish state” used in this article and others employed in public debates, including “a state for the Jews” or “a state for the Jewish people,” all of which attempt to underscore the particular, unique foundation of the State of Israel. The initial appearance of the latter expression in Israeli law occurred in Clause 7a(i) of the Basic Law: The Knesset, passed in 1985, which prohibits any party that denies that Israel is “the state of the Jewish people” from standing for election. This expression was preferred over the popularly used “Jewish state,” which can be seen as having an overly religious connotation. Nonetheless, when it was pointed out that the expression “the state of the Jewish people” implies that Israel is not, in fact, a state for its non-Jewish citizens, the legislature reinserted the term “Jewish state” in the Basic Laws of 1992, wherein Israel is defined as “a Jewish, democratic state.” This was also the expression of choice in United Nations Resolution 181, of November 29, 1947, which speaks of “a Jewish state” in contrast to an Arab one, as well as in the Declaration of Independence, which called for establishing “a Jewish state in the land of Israel.”
2. In my book Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State: Tensions and Prospects (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hame’uhad, 1999) [Hebrew], I deal summarily with these preliminary challenges, and conclude that Israel as a Jewish and democratic state is both coherent and legitimate. I then concentrate on the tensions between these elements and on ways of mitigating them.
3. This misguided alliance between liberal Jews and Arab enemies of the Jewish state is strengthened by a tendency to equate the Jewish state with a Jewish theocracy. A Jewish theocracy is not legitimate, they argue, because by definition it cannot be a democracy, and because religions are not entitled to political self-determination. However, this is clearly a misreading of the term “Jewish” in a “Jewish state,” which refers not to religion but to national identity. The confusion stems from the fact that the relationship between nationality and religion in Judaism is a unique one. No other people has its own specific religion: The Arab peoples, for example, comprise Christians, Muslims, and Druze. While there was a time when the French were mostly Catholics or former Catholics, they still waged religious wars with the Huguenots, and today a large number of Frenchmen are Muslim. At the same time, no other religion has a specific nationality of its own: Christians can be French, American, Mexican, or Arab; Muslims, too, can be Arabs, Persians, or African-Americans. This distinction is not merely the result of secularization: Judaism, at least from a historical perspective, has never differentiated between the people and the religion. Nor was there any belated development that altered this unique fact: Social stereotyping never allowed an individual to be a part of the Jewish people while at the same time a member of another religion; nor could one be an observant Jew without belonging to the Jewish people.
This uniqueness, however, should not cloud our thinking. The Arab challenge to the Jewish state rejects any claim to Jewish self-determination, be it based on nationality or religion. It is important that those secular Jews who insist that Jewish identity is not exhausted by religion do not allow their position in the internal Jewish debate over the Jewishness of Israel to obscure for them the legitimacy of a Jewish nation state. Likewise, the state must accept all interpretations of Judaism and Jewish identity put forth by its Jewish citizens, and provide a home for all Jews, irrespective of their attitude to the Jewish religion. In this essay, I use “Jewish” and “Jewishness” to incorporate all forms of Jewish culture and Jewish identity.
4. The Jewish character of the state is a source of tension not only between Jews and Arabs, but also among Jews. Some of the more extreme Orthodox leaders, who advocate a kind of Jewish theocracy, insist that a democratic Israel is, by definition, not Jewish. This conception of the Jewishness of Israel has been rejected by all mainstream Israeli political leaders, including Orthodox ones, and rightly so. At the other extreme, however, there are many Jews who insist that liberal democracy demands perfect neutrality with regard to religious identity, and therefore the absolute separation of religion and state. This view is misguided. A liberal political stance does not automatically mean rejecting the establishment of religion any more than it means abandoning the state’s Jewish national character in favor of a universal one. Liberal democracy does insist on freedom of religion and from religion, as is recognized in international law, but this is not the same as disestablishment: While those who call for absolute separation generally refer to the American model, there are many European democracies that ensure religious freedom while granting official status to one church or another.
These two kinds of tension surrounding Israel’s Jewish character–arising from the Jewish-Arab and religious-secular rifts–are both addressed in my book, note 2 above. In the present essay I concentrate on the Arab challenge to Jewish self-determination. For my views on some of the issues in the internal Jewish debate, see also Ruth Gavison and Yaakov Medan, A Basis for a New Social Contract Between Religion and State in Israel (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute and Avi Chai, 2003). [Hebrew]
5. For a detailed and well-reasoned argument on the advantages of national self-determination at the sub-state level, see the writings of Haim Gans, and especially The Limits of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2003). Self-determination of different national groups in the framework of one state can be found, for example, in Belgium, Canada, and Switzerland.
6. There are some Jews who claim that the hatred of some in the secular Left toward the haredim is in fact a unique manifestation of anti-Semitism in Israel. This is an intriguing claim, but we should note that critical sentiments against the haredim almost never involve violence against them, or an attempt to limit their freedom to conduct their religious life.
7. There is a dispute regarding the size of various diaspora Jewish communities as a result of methodological difficulties in collecting data. According to the World Jewish Congress, the number of Jews in the United States is estimated at between 5 and 6 million; in Israel, there are 5 million. The third-largest Jewish community is in France, home to approximately 600,000 Jews.
8. There are many religious Jews who oppose the existence of a Jewish state that is not a Jewish theocracy. From this perspective, the present State of Israel may be worse than having a non-Jewish state. Yet in a non-Jewish state, the Jewish population, including the observant and haredi sectors, would undoubtedly not enjoy the current level of freedom to preserve and develop their way of life. Furthermore, it is a fact that Tora learning among the Jewish people has never been as widespread as it is in Israel today.
9. According to a census taken in 1922, there were 83,794 Jews in the Mandate territory out of a total population of 757,182 (approximately 11 percent). See Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, The Origins of the Israeli Polity: The Political System of the Jewish Community in Palestine Under the Mandate (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1977), pp. 21-22. [Hebrew]
10. Why the Jews did not return to the land of Israel in greater numbers is a vexing and complex question. For our purposes, however, the numbers and their implications are sufficient.
11. Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, and Other Legal Essays (New Haven: Yale, 1923). Using Hohfeld’s distinction, I would assert that the Jews had the liberty to settle in the land of Israel at the beginning of the Zionist movement, and that the local Arabs likewise had the liberty to oppose this settlement by means of political, economic, and other non-violent measures. Jews did not have a right to settle (since the Arabs did not have a duty to allow them to do so), but Arabs did not have the right to prevent them from doing so (since Jews did not have a duty to refrain, and the Arabs did not themselves control the land or make its laws; if they had, they would have legislated controls over immigration which would have denied the liberty of Jews to come). Liberties may of course clash, since the agents, by definition, are under no obligation to refrain from acting. However, once a large Jewish community had taken root–and certainly after the establishment of the state, which housed a large Jewish concentration with no other home–this community had the right to self-determination and security. A corollary of this right is the obligation of the Arabs to refrain from violence in their attempts at resistance.
12. On the whole, Arabs make a point of denying the historical-cultural-religious relationship of the Jews to the land of Israel. Thus, at the Camp David summit in August 2000, PA Chairman Yasser Arafat questioned the historical relationship of the Jews to the Temple Mount (despite the fact that Muslim sources–even those that claim a Muslim hegemony in the land during the time of Napoleon–admit this historical relationship). Some Arabs go even further, comparing Israel to the Crusader kingdom in the hope that, in the long run, its fate will be the same. This consistent denial makes it difficult for Palestinians to accept that there are two justifiable yet conflicting claims, and consequently to reach a historic compromise. There is also reason to fear that this denial expresses the hope that the Jews of Israel do not in fact feel closely connected to their land, and that a sufficient combination of force and rhetoric will cause them either to leave or to forgo the state’s Jewish character.
13. Regrettably, the anti-Israel majority in the United Nations General Assembly succeeded in 1975 in reaching a decision, in force for a decade and a half, according to which Zionism was considered a form of racism.
14. One thinker who understood the significance of the Arab presence in Palestine was Ahad Ha’am. See “The Truth from Palestine,” in Ahad Ha’am, The Parting of the Ways (Berlin: Judische Verlag, 1901), p. 25. [Hebrew] A Zionist thinker who stressed that the Arabs could not be expected to agree to a Jewish state in their native country was Ze’ev Jabotinsky. See Ze’ev Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall,” Jewish Herald, November 26, 1937.
15. Despite the fierce dispute surrounding the claims of the “new historians,” the picture remains reasonably clear: More than half a million Arabs left Israel during the 1948 War of Independence and in the period immediately after, forming the basis of the refugee problem that continues to plague the region to this day. There was no systematic policy of expelling or uprooting them–in fact, in some places the Arabs were specifically asked to remain, while in others they left in response to their leaders’ calls. Many Arabs, however, indeed fled from the threat of hostilities, and in certain instances were expelled. See, for example, Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1987).
16. It should be noted that there is no corresponding soul-searching in the Arab sector. Arab analyses of the period of 1947-1949 include regrets for the consequences suffered by the Palestinians, and at times even a measure of anger against neighboring Arab countries and the local Arab leadership for their failure in preventing these consequences. Yet there is almost no recognition of the fact that it was wrong for the Arabs to reject partition.
17. Different internal growth patterns between the two peoples account for an almost constant demographic ratio, despite large waves of Jewish immigration over the last fifty years. For details, see Issam Abu Ria and Ruth Gavison, The Jewish-Arab Rift in Israel: Characteristics and Challenges (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 1999), p. 16, table 1. [Hebrew]
18. For a fuller discussion of this, see David Kretzmer, The Legal Status of Arabs in Israel (Boulder: Westview, 1990).
19. The Oslo process, which started in 1993, seemed to have decided the issue, on the part of the representatives of both peoples, in favor of the two-state solution. There is consistent international support for this kind of solution, culminating in a UN Security Council resolution in 2001. However, the violence that erupted in the aftermath of the failed Camp David II talks in September 2000 has made this route questionable again.
20. From a moral point of view, it is preferable to give the Palestinians national sovereignty over at least part of their homeland. In this way, the Jewish people’s right to exercise self-determination would not come at the expense of the corresponding rights of the Palestinians. A Palestinian state of this kind would also give Israeli Arabs the choice of living in their own sovereign state or of maintaining their citizenship in the Jewish state. If they chose the latter, their fate would be no different from that of other minorities in countries identified with another, majority nationality. Prudence dictates a two-state solution because of the demographic reality: The Jewish people is a small one, and unable to create a stable majority in the entire land of Israel. Israeli sovereignty over the whole land between the sea and the river will undermine the logic of partition and create a binational state.
21. On the one hand, it would appear that the Palestinian approach to the “right” of return is only a negotiating position, one that they will not give up until they have obtained what they consider to be an acceptable agreement on borders. Indeed, there were Palestinians who interpreted the signing of the Oslo accords in this way. On the other hand, the Palestinian position in favor of an unconditional right of return is expressed consistently not only in political statements but also in their educational doctrine. Jews should take this position just as seriously as the Palestinians take the position of those Jews who refuse to relinquish even part of Israel’s territory because of its connection to their forefathers.
22. For data on the status of Israeli Arabs, see Abu Ria and Gavison, The Jewish-Arab Rift. For the situation of blacks in the United States, see Jennifer L. Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream (Princeton: Princeton, 1995). Comparisons of this kind are always highly charged: Israeli Arabs object to such comparisons, arguing that they–in contrast to black Americans–are living in their homeland. Often, the fate of native minorities in countries like the United States and Australia is not very encouraging. On the other hand, African-Americans do not question the existence of the United States and are not engaged in a struggle against it.
23. In the 1956 case of Kafr Kassem, in which Israeli reservists killed 49 Arab villagers who were not aware of a curfew, those responsible were brought to justice; when 13 Israeli Arabs were killed during the Arab rioting in October 2000, a state committee was set up to investigate the matter. The only other case of Arab citizens being killed by state authorities is that of the Land Day demonstrations in 1976, which resulted in the deaths of six Arabs. It is not trivial to note that after two years of terrorism against Israeli civilians, which included a number of cases in which Israeli Arabs were involved as perpetrators or abettors, no violence against Israeli Arabs has been reported since October 2000.
24. For a detailed analysis of the compatibility between Israel’s democracy and its Jewish character see my “Jewish and Democratic: A Rejoinder to the Ethnic Democracy Debate,” Israel Studies 4:1, 1999, pp. 44-72.
25. Issues of membership and legitimation arise for other groups in Israel, such as non-Jewish immigrants or haredi Jews, some of whom reject the state altogether. I have dealt with some of these issues elsewhere; in this essay I concentrate on the tension generated by the Jewish-Arab conflict.
26. In May 2002, three laws were enacted to deal with these tensions. One of them forbids incitement to armed conflict with the state or support for such conflict, and the others allow for the disqualification of party lists or candidates who express such support. Israeli law also disqualifies parties or candidates that “deny that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state.” The latter laws were invoked in 2003 to ban two Arab parties and their MKs. All bans were overruled by the Supreme Court. It is my hope that the criminal law will be applied as seldom as possible in this context; it is far simpler to prevent a person who makes such declarations from being on the public payroll than to send him to jail. While the disqualifying laws may raise the risk of undue limits to freedom of speech, they may also help create shared “red lines” for political activity, by forcing candidates and parties to clarify that their positions are not inconsistent with the integrity of the state and the legitimacy of its being Jewish if the majority so wishes.
In view of the importance to Jews of a Jewish state, some ask why the right of the Jewish people to a sovereign homeland should depend on the ongoing support of a majority of the public. Why not simply determine that Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, and that this fact should not be subject to change by the electorate? Why take the roundabout route of disqualifying parties who make this their explicit political platform? Why then allow them to run after all, once they mask their intentions a bit? Or, at the very least, should we not require a special majority for any change in the state’s basic character, as with many constitutional premises in democratic states?
In the context of a democracy of consensus-building and negotiation, it is still possible to establish Israel’s Jewish character as a constitutional credo that could be changed only by the will of a special majority. This would lend the country’s particularistic character a measure of constitutional stability, and even provide some small insurance against demographic changes or temporary swings in public sentiment. However, it is important to recognize the limits of such benefits. It will not be possible to preserve Israel’s Jewish character if the majority of its citizens are not so inclined. After all, the great advantage of democracy is the fact that diverse groups can play a role in shaping the country’s character. Thus, decisions concerning the nature of a Jewish state–decisions that will invariably affect the interests of both Jewish and Arab citizens–will always be more readily accepted if they are made in the context of an open democratic system, rather than being imposed on the public. The law may demand that challengers accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state once the majority supports it, not that they should refrain from wanting to change its character.
Finally, it is worth emphasizing that the quest for civic equality is not the same as “color-blindness.” The privatization of collective identities will help neither Jews nor Arabs, and will obscure important differences between different Jewish and Arab communities. The pursuit of equality should therefore be accompanied by a careful analysis of the needs and aspirations of all communities.
27. Further evidence of immanent tension, in most democracies, between the culture of the majority and that of the minority is found in the issue of language. France stresses the use of French and French culture as a national unifying feature, and in the U.S. we see a re-assertion of the need to maintain the primacy of English. This preference inevitably creates difficulties, both real and symbolic, for communities which resist assimilation into the majority culture.
28. Methods of safeguarding the state’s Jewish character may include policies on immigration, settlement, housing, and education, as well as decisions regarding state symbols, public culture, and national language. As regards state symbols, it is clearly difficult for an Israeli Arab to identify with the national flag (based on a Star of David) or seal (based on the menora of the ancient Temple). As a result, there are those who think that Israel should adopt symbols that will not alienate its non-Jewish citizens. I have serious doubts about this: Many countries use symbols that express the characteristics of the majority, and the existence of minority groups is not considered sufficient reason to change them. For example, many European nations have a cross on their flag, and the Indian flag is based on the symbols of Hinduism. Nevertheless, we must take into account the alienation of Israel’s Arab citizens as a result of these symbols. It seems to me that the flag is less problematic, however, because it does not require any act of identification on the part of the minority. But the national anthem Hatikva (“the hope”) arguably places Arab citizens in an untenable situation. After all, it is impossible to expect an Arab to identify with the joy of realizing “the hope of two thousand years,” the dream of the Jewish people “to be a free people in our own land.” It must be remembered that this “hope” is the Arabs’ calamity. I am therefore of the opinion that a second anthem should be considered–one with which the state’s non-Jewish citizens would be able to identify, stressing only civic shared aspects. Both anthems could be played at official events, and individuals could participate in the singing of the anthem(s) of their choice. It is not unreasonable, however, to expect Arab citizens to show courtesy while Hatikva is played or sung.
29. Amnon Rubinstein and Alex Yakobson, Israel and the Family of Nations: The Nation State and Human Rights in Israel and Around the World (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2003).
30. The issue of housing should be handled in cooperation with representatives of both the affected villages and those communities seeking a solution to their housing problems. It is important that there be no illegal building: This sort of construction could be dangerous and might disrupt vital development plans. However, in the absence of formal planning that allows for legal construction according to need, efforts to stop illegal construction would be arbitrary at best, and almost certainly doomed to failure. The decision to demolish illegal structures (or to “legalize” some of them) will be easier if it is accompanied by the development of an integrated building program in Arab villages. Moreover, plans of this nature will encourage the Arab population to adopt a variety of housing styles, as opposed to the single-story type of construction to which they are accustomed and that is wholly unsuitable for the population’s size and financial resources.
31. For a more detailed discussion, see Ruth Gavison, “Zionism in Israel? A Note on Kedan,” Mishpat Umimshal: Law and Government in Israel 6:1 (2001), pp. 25-51.
32. For an analysis of the debate on the teaching of history in Israel, see Eyal Naveh and Esther Yogev, Histories: Towards a Dialogue with the Israeli Past (Tel Aviv: Bavel, 2002). [Hebrew] Israel never considered a neutral public education, since it is mainly a country with two dominant national groups. Among Jews, there is a distinction among educational streams according to religious attitude. Some of the Arab schools are run by churches, but they do admit Arabs of other religions.
33. Mishna Avot 2:16.
