In 2000, following the outbreak of violence and the symbolic collapse of the Oslo Accords, I posited that a Jewish State and a Democratic State are no longer compatible, if they ever were. Personally, I believed they were possibly compatible, taking "Jewish" to be an ethnic characteristic rather than religious. The struggle over sovereignty in Greater Palestine, or the Land of Israel, seemed to be torn between demography and geography, and if democracy prevails, it will no longer be a Jewish State, whereas in order for the Jewish side to prevail, it could no longer be democratic.
This decade-old recognition of mine might seem naïve, to those who made such arguments at least since the beginning of the occupation of 1967, or to those who still hold that a two-state solution is achievable and viable, and will allow for both components to rest in one state called Israel.
However, I think that many Israelis do not consider democracy and their Jewish identity to be incompatible, and hence will find my forecast from 2000 to be false. Since then, I myself have changed my views slightly, and over the past few years of blogging have suggested that Israel was far from being comparable with the Apartheid regime of South Africa.
I still think there are several differences which should be of interest to Israelis and detractors of Israel alike. Actually, I am not so interested in detractors of Israel per se, but as one opposing the disenfranchisement of Palestinian rights, I do have an interest in critical aspects of Israeli policy. The first difference is that of naming and branding: Apartheid began as a neutral term describing an explicit policy of separation between blacks and whites. I cannot think of a neutral term of Israel’s policies (other than "bitachon", security), and therefore cannot see it shifting from a neutral term of policy to a source of shame.
More importantly, the difference between the status of Palestinian Israelis and Palestinians under Israeli occupation was in itself proof that the regime was not racist or consistently discriminatory. It was pretty easy to argue with people who called Israel an Apartheid, but were unaware of Arabs serving in courts and Parliament, and always found this piece of information baffling.
The events of the past year, therefore, have been puzzling, because several legislative steps seemed to stress the advantage of Jewishness in the Jewish state in a way that could either point to lack of awareness of the possible consequences of such legislation (and especially the possible chain of consequences), or could manifest a willingness to cross the line to an explicit regime of a privileged Jewish community in Israel, in other words – the first step towards what I anticipated in 2000.
At some point I wrote that an explicit Apartheid regime in Israel would be incompatible with Israelis self-image, and will therefore not happen. Now I think that two things might be combined to produce such an awful outcome: the first is the slow and gradual process by which Jews are gaining advantages in Israel; the other is the possible perception of a threat. Given the choice between "Jewish" and "Democratic" most Israelis will choose "Jewish". I don’t know if there always had to be a choice, or whether it was possible to continue living with the self-perception that the two need not be exclusive. But given the choice, that will be the outcome. All the more so, if the choice is not a leap from a democracy to an Apartheid, but merely from a semi-privileged population to a fully-privileged population (on expense of others).
Recognizing this possibility requires bearing a few things in mind:
First, that if this does happen, it will not be "Jews" vs. "Arabs" or "Palestinians," but rather "Jews" vs. "Non-Jews" to include labor immigrants. Such language also serves to intensify the myth of the majority (regardless of actual numbers) threatened by multiple forces which are never portrayed as cohesive or united, but only designated by their otherness.
Second, that not only has the two-state solution ceased to be an assurance against this possibility, it is even possible that it will accelerate the process (because "now that they have their own state, we have to defend the nature of our own state").
Finally, that I give special weight to the terms "slow," "gradual" and "privileged". Anyone who expects to see an overt fascist regime with racist rhetoric, shortly to be defeated by Allied Forces, is delusional. We are still very far from this point, and after reaching it (and only after), precisely because it was slow and gradual, it will be an even longer process to convince people that this indeed is the case, and only then will there be a third longer process of raising awareness and public pressure to change it. The last thing people should expect is for Israel to define itself as apartheidist within a year, and for the regime to collapse a year after that. That is extreme, as are many other expectations.
