Ayelet Shaked, Israel’s ‘Justice Minister’, Explains Why Universal Human
Rights Must Take Second Place to Zionism
The idea of a Jewish Democratic
state is a fiction much loved by the Zionist left. According to the 2013 Democracy Index 74.8% of Jews believe that Israel can be both Jewish
and democratic whereas only one-third of Israeli Arabs believe this.
This definition is implanted in the nearest equivalent to
Israel’s constitution, the Basic Law 1985 which stipulates
that an election list cannot participate in elections to the Knesset, if their goals or
actions include ‘negation of the
existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.’
According to a survey commissioned by the Jewish National Fund, in reaction to the
decision of the Supreme Court in Kadan
that it was illegal to refuse to allocate land to someone because they are not
Jewish, over 80% of Israeli Jews preferred the definition
of Israel as a Jewish state, rather than as a state of all its citizens.
This is the backdrop to the speech below by Israel’s
‘Justice’ Minister Ayelet Shaked at the Congress
on Judaism and Democracy. Shaked is a member of Habayit
HaYehudi/Jewish Home a far-Right religious settlers party and someone who has advocated
genocide of the Palestinians. Shaked
sees it as her mission to move the courts and Israeli society away from western
notions of universal values and human rights and towards Zionist ideals. What matters are Jewish rights in a Jewish
state.
Shaked articulated the case for the Jewish Nation
State Law which spells out that Israel is a state of its Jewish citizens not
all its citizens. That is the foundation
stone on which Israel as an Apartheid society rests.
An ethno-nationalist state represents a particular ethnicity not all its citizens or those who reside within its borders. It
is by definition a racist state.
Shaked raised the spectre of ‘a kind of creeping conquest from Africa.’ This fear of hordes
of non-Jewish migrants, posed in apocalyptic terms of ‘conquest’ by a whole
continent, represents the racist siege mentality of proponents of the racial
state. The fear of losing the Jewish
demographic majority is the greatest fear of Israel’s rulers and the Zionist movement because it lays bare the undemocratic reality lying at the heart of the Israeli state’s existence.
The ‘demographic question’ governs the policies and actions of
Israel’s government. The desire for
racial purity and with it domination is the fear and the bond that ties Israel’s Jewish working class to its ruling class.
According to Shaked, Israel as a Jewish state must accord
the Arabs civil but not national rights.
In most states nationality and citizenship are coterminous, even if
there is more than one nationality within an over arching nationality. So for example all residents in Spain are
Spanish although within Spain’s borders there are Spaniards, Catalans and
Basques. All have equal rights
individually even though the rights of Catalans and Basques as distinct nationalities are
circumscribed and subordinate to the greater Spanish nationality. But in Israel there is no overarching Israeli nationality. The dominant
nationality is Jewish in a Jewish State. It is clear that one nationality, the Jewish nationality, is superior and favoured to all other nationalities. There are many
other nationalities but none of them have national rights which makes these ‘nationalities’ an absurdity, totally meaningless!
But what in practice does it mean to say, as Shaked does, that Arabs only
have civil rights? In fact it is a deliberate
smokescreen. What are termed Israeli
Jewish national rights are in fact the individual rights accorded to Jews in
accordance with Jewish racial supremacy.
The failure to recognise an Arab or Palestinian nationality on equal terms to a Jewish nationality means that the individual rights of Arabs and Palestinians, as individuals, is that
much less.
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| The Knesset |
Shaked’s aims and desires are nationalist
not national in the same way as the Nazis were expressing German nationalist or volkish politics not those of German nationalism. The same was true of Polish, Hungarian and Romanian nationalists. Their angst was directed against other nationals on racial grounds. So too in Israel.
Jewish racial superiority in Israel results in
segregation in most areas of life. It
means means that the individual rights of Israeli Arabs are inferior to those
of Israeli Jews in almost every area of life. Israeli Jewish ‘national’
rights are therefore, by definition, racist.
It is expressed e.g. in the differing levels of poverty in Israel. Whilst 30.3% of Israeli children lived in poverty at the end of 2015, this masked the difference between Arab and Jewish children. Whilst one-fifth of Jewish children lived in poverty, some two-thirds of Arab children did. 30% of Israeli Children Living in Poverty; Arabs, Haredim Worst Affected, Report Claims, Ha’aretz 17.1.17. Whilst poverty decreased between 2014 and 2015 for Israeli families overall, amongst Arab families the poverty rate increased from 52.6% in 2014 to 53.3% in 2015, while the poverty rate among Arab children increased from 63.5% in 2014 to 65.6% in 2015. More than 1 in 5 Israelis live in poverty, highest
in developed world, Jerusalem Post 15.12.16.
There is no end of justifications for Zionism’s racism. According to Shaked it is not offensive to
talk of ‘Judaising the Galilee’ or
Negev or Jerusalem. What this means is
seen in the demolition of the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran in January 2017,
where a school teacher was murdered as part of the eviction and demolition of the village. It means the demolition of other
‘unrecognised’ villages in order to replace them with Jewish towns and villages. It means ensuring that the majority of Arabs
in a region is thinned out by Jews. Judaisation
is no different in principle from the Nazi deJewification. Here we seen Shaked’s fully fledged racism.
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| Jerusalem Day, Damascus Gate which is an excuse for racist settler youth to rampage through the Arab quarter chanting ‘death to the Arabs’ |
Shaked is also upset regarding the justification for the Jewish
Nation-State bill. She complains that people are not being honest. ‘The state did not defend the law for
national demographic reasons, it claimed only security reasons.’ One can understand her upset. Shaked wants the racism to be upfront, not
hidden behind euphemisms. What she is
saying is, let us not pretend that the reason for discrimination is ‘security’
when we know that is a lie. Let us be
honest, let us say it is because a Jewish state means a Jewish majority and
Jewish privilege.
And just in case the meaning has not sunk in, she makes it
crystal clear:
“the state should say
that there is place to maintain the Jewish majority even if it violates
rights.”
If the price of a Jewish majority means racism and an
infringement of the rights of its minority Arab citizens then so be it. In other words Israel is the kind of democracy in which it is impossible for Jews every to be in anything other than a majority.
Shaked concedes that ‘there
is an advantage to democracy’ but ‘it
must be balanced’. In other words whilst ‘democracy’ is good for PR reasons it has its limits. How can you balance
democracy? It’s like pregnancy. You either are or you aren’t. You either have it or you don’t. In other words Shaked is saying that if Zionism and a Jewish state can be preserved
democratically with a Jewish majority, then fine. But if it maintaining a Jewish majority can’t be done democratically then it must
be done undemocratically.
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| This is a nice graphic but not altogether true in all of Israel – some cities are mixed and restaurants and buses (except to the West Bank) are not segregated – most housing though is |
We only need to look back to 1948 when Israel was created as
a Jewish state. The problem then was that
even in the UN allocated Jewish state there was a rough parity of about 600,000
Jews and a similar number of Arabs. The solution that was
chosen in order to create a Jewish state was to drive 85% of the Arabs out
through the use of massacre and terror.
Again Shaked makes clear her worries that although
universal human rights are enshrined in Israel’s court judgements (in fact they
are not) what she terms ‘Jewish values’ are not. One wonders what it is that she
calls ‘Jewish values’. For Shaked ‘Jewish
values’ are the values of racial domination.
In essence they are a euphemism for Jewish supremacy. What worries her is that the emphasis has
been on universal rather than on racial and ethnic Jewish rights.
I disagree that this is the case in Israel but for a fascist any
concession to the minority is one too many.
“In our laws there
are universal values, rights, already enshrined in a very serious way. But the
national and the Jewish values are not enshrined. Over the past 20 years, there
has been more of a focus on rulings over universal values and less over the
Jewish character of the state.’
Notice how Shaked contrasts universal
values against what she calls the ‘Jewish character’ of the state. Universal values apply regardless of colour,
ethnicity etc. whereas ‘Jewish values’ by definition only apply to Jews. So universal values for example would suggest that
anyone, regardless of ethnicity, can rent a piece of land or property.
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| Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948 contained a pledge of equality for all citizens (Arabs had to wait 3 years for citizenship) however the Declaration was never integrated into the law and therefore has no legal effect |
Shaked is honest about equality. She doesn’t like it. Equality won’t feature in the new Jewish
State Bill. Why? Because “Israel is a Jewish state. It isn’t a state of all its
nations. That is, equal rights to all citizens but not equal national rights.” Because ‘the word “equality” was very general and the court could take it “very far,” god forbid. And she makes it crystal clear that there are
limits to equality under the law because “There are places where the character of the
State of Israel as a Jewish state must be maintained and this sometimes comes
at the expense of equality.” Of
course Shaked is too modest to spell out what the places are where equality must
be sacrificed to Jewish ethnic domination, but we can guess.
What Shaked is arguing for is precisely what anti-Zionists
have argued for years. Zionism is
inherently racist, it is a form of Jewish supremacy and it is the ideology of
racial exclusivity. Shaked, unlike her
Israeli Labour Party opponents is at least being honest. These arguments echo a speech Shaked made a
year ago when she said that:
that it will not – continue to bow its head to a system of individual rights
interpreted in a universal manner”. Translated this means that universal
rights such as equality before the law, equality between people of different
racial or ethnic origin, non-discrimination must be sacrificed on the altar of the Jewish supremacy inherent in
Zionism.
And in case there were any doubt Shaked refers specifically
to the Kadan case in 2000 in which the Supreme Court ruled that the
Jewish National Fund could not discriminate in selling or leasing land to
non-Jews. This ruling was opposed not
only by Likud but also by much of the Israeli Labour Party. The reason as Shaked freely admits is ‘whether it’s all right for a Jewish
community to, by definition, be only Jewish, I want the answer to be ‘yes, it’s
all right.’”
In other words racially pure Jewish settlements inside
Israel proper are perfectly acceptable to this racist. If there were any doubt she refers to the
Family Unification Law (which like any Orwellian law stands for the exact
opposite – it is really the Division of the Family Law). Non-Jews i.e. Arabs don’t have, unlike
Israeli Jews, the right to bring in a partner to marriage if they live in the
West Bank or the Arab countries. A Jew
can bring in whomeosever s/he wants. Shaked
worries that the Supreme Court only upheld the law by 6-5 votes and quotes approvingly
from ex-Judge Chessin that Israel is not a utopian state. Well racial equality in Israel might be
utopian but in most of the world it is taken for granted, at least on paper.
Thus we have a Jewish Nation State law which is
fundamentally racist, which demotes Arabic from an official language and lays
the basis for an open acknowledgement that Israel is a Jewish Supremacist
State. Yet despite this Israel describes
itself as the only democracy in the Middle East.
opponents she is at least honest that Zionism and equality are opposites and
that a Jewish democratic state is an oxymoron.
Israel
Cannot be Both Jewish and Democratic
chauvinism. The Jewish state’s further descent into the bellicose murk is being
felt by the country’s minorities. Home destructions and deportations are
portentous of a bleaker future for non-Jews in Israel.
apartheid regime for decades now. Over the years, Israel has demolished homes, kidnapped thousands of political prisoners, transferred 500,000 settler-colonists onto
the West Bank, conducted massive military operations in civilian areas, hoarded
the vast majority of Palestinian water, and committed a host of other crimes under
the apartheid banner.
Today, the Zionism which has destroyed so many occupied
lives is turning inwards. Israel is being corroded by the ideology underpinning
its existence. The Zionist state’s latest victims are Palestinian-Israelis and
migrant workers.
The Guardian‘s “Ethnic cleansing in the Israeli Negev,” depicts a hulking mass
of baklava-clad riot guards descending on Al-Araqib in the pre-dawn morning.
The village’s Bedouin residents were forcibly extracted from their homes while
a bulldozer bulldozed their lives. Incredibly, the village was destroyed to
make room for a national forest. It seems that against all morality, the desert
will continue to bloom.
That the destruction of a Palestinian-Israeli village
requires an audience is only slightly shocking. Groups of Jewish Israeli
citizens were bussed in to cheer the spectacle of the state-sanctioned “ethnic
cleansing.” What’s very shocking is that the Jewish state enlisted the services
of young Jews in wreaking destruction. Teenage volunteers with the
police civilian guard emptied the Palestinian-Israeli houses and “smashed
windows and mirrors in their homes and defaced family photographs with crude
drawings.”
Elsewhere in Israel, non-Jewish youths learned that they
were unfit to remain in country of their birth. Four-hundred migrant children —
most of them born in Israel — will be deported soon. Ironically, their expulsion has been spearheaded
by parliamentarians from the rightwing Yisrael Beiteinu party, many of whom are
Russian immigrants to Israel.
Weighing in on the topic, the Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu said that, “this is a tangible threat to the Jewish and
democratic character of the State of Israel.”
Many of Israel’s staunchest supporters are baffled by
what’s happening in the small Mediterranean state. Regrettably, they fail to
understand that Israel is following the natural evolution of a country founded
on a race-exclusive basis.
Israeli pundits frequently insist that their state is both
Jewish and democratic. They say that minorities in Israel have equal rights and
representation in state apparatuses. That’s not true, but it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that
roughly 20% of Israelis are not Jewish. And those non-Jews are meeting one
another, falling in love, and having children. To borrow Netanyahu’s words, it
is these children that are a “threat to the Jewish and democratic character of
the State of Israel.”
Zionism — the idea that Jewish people ought to have a
Jewish state in mandate Palestine — is anachronistic in the 21st century. The
idea that non-Jews who have lived on the land for generations before the
creation of the state of Israel should be relegated to second-class citizenship
because they’re not Jewish is illiberal. It’s also racist.
These people, Palestinian-Israelis and other native
non-Jews, have no way of entering the mainstream of political and cultural life
in Israel. The only reason they can’t is because they’re not Jewish.
Is it possible for a non-Jewish person to become the Prime
Minister of Israel today? And what about Minister of Defense? What does it mean
for the Jewish state if the 20% minority grows to 50%, then 70%? Is it still
the Jewish state?
For too long Western liberals have engaged in willful
denial about the true nature of Israel. Israel is the Jewish state — of that I
have no doubt. But can the Jewish state be squared with liberal and democratic
values when one out of every five citizens isn’t Jewish? I don’t think so.
Israel is already an apartheid state. The separation of the
people — their enforced apartness — arises not out of security considerations,
but racial ones. In short, Israel cannot be both the Jewish and democratic
state. That’s because Zionism is fundamentally anti-democratic in a mixed-race
society. The important questions now are how will Israel prevent the growth of
its non-Jewish minorities? And how long will Western liberals continue to
pretend that Zionism is compatible with liberalism?
Justice
Minister: Israel Must Keep Jewish Majority Even at the Expense of Human Rights
law, contending that Israel as a Jewish state must administer equal civil but
not national rights
Revital Hovel.
Ha’aretz Feb 13, 2018 2:57 AM
fence erected some years ago on the Egyptian border, “We would be seeing here a kind of creeping conquest from Africa.” The
fence effectively stopped asylum-seekers from Sudan and Eritrea from entering
the country.
also said, “I think that ‘Judaizing the
Galilee’ is not an offensive term. We used to talk like that. In recent years
we’ve stopped talking like that. I think it’s legitimate without violating the
full rights of the Arab residents of Israel.”
on the controversy over the Jewish nation-state bill.
is place to maintain a Jewish majority even at the price of violation of
rights.” She added, however, that maintaining a Jewish majority in Israel
and acting democratically “must be
parallel and one must not outweigh the other.”
state and the reasoning of the justices. The state did not defend the law for
national demographic reasons, it claimed only security reasons.” Shaked
told the conference that “the state
should say that there is place to maintain the Jewish majority even if it
violates rights.”
can coexist. “From a constitutional point
of view there is an advantage to democracy and it must be balanced and the
Supreme Court should be given another constitutional tool that will also give
power to Judaism.”
rulings interpreting the Entry to Israel Law, or a ruling like the one in the
Ka’adan case in 2000 that banned discrimination against an Arab family who
wanted to move to a small Jewish community that sought to bar them.
universal values, rights, already enshrined in a very serious way. But the
national and the Jewish values are not enshrined. Over the past 20 years, there
has been more of a focus on rulings over universal values and less over the
Jewish character of the state. This tool [the nation state bill] is a tool that
we want to give the court for the future,” said the justice minister.
Dana Weiss, on whether the court could not consider the Jewish character of the
state without a nation-state law, she said: “It
can, but it’s as if you’d say that without the Basic Law on Human Dignity and
Liberty the court won’t care about dignity and human rights. It’s different
when you have a constitutional tool.”
the nation-state bill, Shaked said: “Israel
is a Jewish state. It isn’t a state of all its nations. That is, equal rights
to all citizens but not equal national rights.” Shaked said the word “equality” was very general and the court
could take it “very far,” adding, “There
are places where the character of the State of Israel as a Jewish state must be
maintained and this sometimes comes at the expense of equality.”
of who is a Jew. “Everyone has his own
Judaism. In the nation-state bill, when it talks about a Jew, it means the
nationality.” Shaked then referred to the Ka’adan ruling and said that if such
a case were to come up again or “the argument over whether it’s all right for a
Jewish community to, by definition, be only Jewish, I want the answer to be
‘yes, it’s all right.’”
which prevents the unification of families where one of the couple is
Palestinian and one is Arab Israeli, was twice decided at the time by the
Supreme Court by one vote, with six justices supporting it and five dissenting.
The justices gave precedence to security considerations over the importance of the
right to maintain a family, in a case that split the Supreme Court.
Justice Mishael Chesin, who was in the majority opinion that approved the law,
in which he said Israel needed to awaken from the dream that it was a utopian
state.
unequivocal terms, and tied it directly to Zionism:
violation of rights.”
Congress on Judaism and Democracy, as reported by Haaretz.
“Jewish State”:
nation-state bill, Shaked said that
equal rights to all citizens but not equal national rights.”
was very general and the court could take it “very far,” adding that
that it will not – continue to bow its head to a system of individual rights
interpreted in a universal manner”.
truth:
the world, that Israel is built on foundations of injustice and therefore must
be defended from the hostile talk of justice. How else can the repulsion to
discussing rights be explained? Individual rights are important, she said, but
not when they are disconnected from ‘the Zionist challenges.’ Right again: The
Zionist challenges indeed stand in contradiction to human rights…”
and as in any religion, its denial is prohibited. In Israel, ‘non-Zionist’ or
‘anti-Zionist’ aren’t insults, they are social expulsion orders. There’s
nothing like it in any free society. But now that Shaked has exposed Zionism,
put her hand to the flame and admitted the truth, we can finally think about
Zionism more freely. We can admit that the Jews’ right to a state contradicted
the Palestinians’ right to their land, and that righteous Zionism gave birth to
a terrible national wrong that has never been righted; that there are ways to
resolve and atone for this contradiction, but the Zionist Israelis won’t agree
to them.”
the essential conclusions of last year’s shelved UN report on Israeli Apartheid, which elucidated the racist practices of the Israeli state and its
inherent Apartheid nature. The report noted that
for minor reforms and better budgets, but are legally prohibited by the Basic
Law from challenging legislation maintaining the racial regime. The policy is
reinforced by the implications of the distinction made in Israel between
“citizenship” (ezrahut) and “nationality” (le’um): all Israeli citizens enjoy
the former, but only Jews enjoy the latter. “National” rights in Israeli law
signify Jewish-national rights.” (My emphasis).
Secretary General bowed to Israeli (as well as American) pressure to have it
taken down for its supposed ‘anti-Semitic’ nature – but here is Israel’s Justice
Minister confirming what it is essentially saying.
clear about why she wants the Nation State bill to be consolidated into a
quasi-constitutional ‘base-law’: The purpose of the nation-state bill, she
said, was to prevent a ruling like the one in the Ka’adan case in 2000 that
banned discrimination against an Arab family who wanted to move to a small
Jewish community that sought to bar them. Shaked wants it to be completely
possible for a Jewish community to bar entry for Palestinian citizens on a
racial basis. Indeed, Shaked referred to the Ka’adan ruling, saying that
a Jewish community to, by definition, be only Jewish, I want the answer to be
‘yes, it’s all right.’”
values” were supposedly taking over:
of a focus on rulings over universal values and less over the Jewish character
of the state. This tool [the nation state bill] is a tool that we want to give
the court for the future.”
there appears to be a tiny crack in the wall of Israeli Apartheid. She wants it
completely shut and bolted. And most important: the world needs to accept it as
a legitimate ideology and policy.
non-Jewish citizens. This is not even about Israel’s 1967 occupation (although
it of course indirectly affects Israeli policy in all territories).
fighting a battle against the courts, and that there is a supposedly liberal
Supreme Court that can act as counterweight to this. But remember – the Supreme
Court is essentially Zionist, and therefore it is always biased towards the
“Jewish State”. Since that concept cannot be challenged in any meaningful way,
and since Shaked is actually voicing Zionist ideology honestly and
vociferously, one is left with very little meaningful agency to protest or
counter this.
protest: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).
conference. BDS is a “a civil wrong”, she
said, and went on:
and not persuasion. It does not serve the basic principles of democracy, but
instead undermines them by preventing a free exchange of ideas. As such, it is
not worthy of the constitutional protection enjoyed by other forms of political
expression.”
court authority. And hence it is alright for the state itself to impose
sanctions upon individuals for pursuing it:
proportionate when the state is interested in defending itself against a
boycott of civilians”, Hayut said.
essence. The state may be ‘criticised’,
by means that allow “exchange of ideas”,
but not by means which the state itself deems may actually bring about change
to its racial structure and hierarchy. This is not an unexpected external
growth from a supposedly ‘democratic Zionism’. All this simply amounts to a
further dropping of masks concerning the very essence of Zionism. It is
Apartheid in its very nature.
“Israel has been infected by the seeds of
fascism.” But he is the same ‘leftist hero’ who bragged about how the Israeli left
had “liberated” the occupied territories, and bemoaned that the US didn’t
recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital already 65 years ago. So Barak is
saying that these “seeds of fascism” are just something that has “infected”
Israel in the recent period. But they were there all the time, they are the
seeds of the fruits of Zionism, which Barak is a subscriber to. It is doubtful
that a ‘liberal’ such as Barak or his ilk, can ever ‘rescue’ Zionism from its
more overt fascists such as Shaked.
in, with its ‘separate but equal’ legal doctrine, which maintained that even if
there was racial segregation (literally Apartheid), African-Americans could
still be considered “equal”, just “separate”. It took various Supreme Court
rulings from 1950’s as well as the Civil Rights Act in 1964 to overturn this
false notion of “equality”.
that the state ideology explicitly overrides equality. Truth be told, it has
been so since day 1.
