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Everyone is talking about the successful-albeit
lackluster-performance of Ehud Olmert's Kadima party in Tuesday's
Israeli elections. Kadima won a marginal victory, gaining 28
seats in the Knesset, and giving Olmert the opportunity to form
a government.
But in a sense the real winner
of the elections was Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beiteinu,
which pushed past Likud to become one of Israel's major parties-turning
Lieberman into a potential kingmaker. This is a remarkable development
because Lieberman's party stands for one thing: an Israel finally
cleansed of the remainder of the indigenous Palestinian population.
Lieberman was born in Moldova
in 1958. In 1978, he moved to Israel. Since he is Jewish, he
was eligible for instant citizenship under Israel's Law of Return.
It was evidently not enough
for Lieberman that, as a Russian-speaking immigrant fresh off
the plane, he was instantaneously granted rights and privileges
denied to Palestinians born in the very country to which he had
just moved (not to mention those expelled in during the creation
of Israel in 1948). The very presence of an indigenous non-Jewish
population in Israel was, in effect, unacceptable to him.
In 1999, he formed a party
called Yisrael Beiteinu ("Israel our Home"), made up
largely of other Russian immigrants for whom the presence of
Palestinians is also unacceptable.
Lieberman's party believes
what all Israelis believe: that Israel is a Jewish state. Unlike
the more respectable Israeli parties, however, Lieberman's party
is willing to add that since Israel is a Jewish state, non-Jews
are not welcome. Even if they were born there.
Since Israel has-somewhat conveniently-never
declared its own borders, Lieberman proposes that the state's
borders be drawn in such a way that Jews are placed on one side
of it, and as many Arabs as possible on the other. Ethnic purity
is the operative ideal. The mainstream Israeli parties, and even
right wing politicians like Moshe Arens, denounce what they regard
as Lieberman's racism.
The difference between Lieberman
and mainstream Israeli politicians, however, is not that they
believe in cultural heterogeneity and he does not: for they are
as committed to Israel's Jewishness as he is.
The difference, rather, is
one of degree. Mainstream Israeli politicians agree that a line
of concrete and steel ought to be drawn with Jews on one side
of it and as many Arabs as possible on the other. But they argue
that it is OK to have a few Arabs on the inside, as long as they
behave themselves, and don't contribute too heavily to what Israelis
refer to ominously as "the demographic problem."
Contending themselves with
the platitude that Israel is a democracy, mainstream Israeli
politicians ignore the fact that, in matters of access to land,
questions of marriage and family unification, and many of the
other normal rights and duties associated with citizenship, Israel's
Palestinian minority faces forms of discrimination not faced
by Jewish citizens of the state.
This is hardly surprising.
As the state of the Jewish people, Israel is, after all, the
only country in the world that expressly claims not to
be the state of its actual citizens (one fifth of whom are non-Jews),
let alone that of the people whom it governs (half of whom are
Palestinian).
Non-Jews have always been,
at best, an impediment to Israel's Jewishness. The only question
has been what to do about them. Lieberman's suggestion is hardly
novel. Until he was assassinated, the Israeli cabinet minister
Rehavam Ze'evi used to refer to Palestinians as "lice,"
and compared them to a "cancer" destroying Israel from
the inside. He thought that Palestinians should simply be expelled.
Lieberman's solution to "the demographic problem" may
seem a little less inhumane, but it is just as racist.
The point, however, is that-as
the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy points out-Ze'evi and Lieberman
are no more racist than mainstream politicians like Ehud Olmert.
The difference is simply one of modalities. "Lieberman wants
to distance [Palestinians] from our borders," writes Levy;
"Olmert and his ilk want to distance them from our consciousness."
Racism, Levy concludes, is the real winner of the 2006 elections.
The question is whether this
represents some new development, or merely a sign that Israeli
politics are becoming truer to the nature of Israel itself-a
reminder that the quest for ethnic purity, no matter how it's
dressed up, is inherently ugly.
CounterPunch
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