By Jeremy Ben-Ami
Many of Israel’s founders understood that the type of state Israel would become greatly depended on grappling with the conflict between two peoples over one small piece of land.
But today, many of Israel’s leaders and some of its biggest supporters abroad have taken to avoiding talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, two states or peace.
In my view, anyone who believes that Israel needs to strike a balance between its Jewish and democratic identities cannot ignore the unresolved conflict. Israel must grapple with it head-on.
Two fundamental truths make these topics unavoidable. One is that half the 13-14 million people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are not Jewish. The other is that this remains a state without borders. Borders define sovereignty and in turn establish the status of the people who live there. That in turn defines the nature of the state.
Yet this most fundamental task of state creation remains — for Israel at 75 — incomplete.
To determine whether Israel will be a true democracy and can remain the national home of the Jewish people at the same time will depend on the territory it has occupied since 1967 and has existed under its military control in territorial purgatory.
As a proud Zionist, I believe the Jewish people are a nation with the collective right to self-determination and that the state of the Jewish people is properly established on the land which they have called home for millennia. I believe deeply in the justice — not just the necessity — of a state that the Jewish people can call home.
With my family’s experience of the Inquisition, pogroms in the Russian empire and the Holocaust in Europe, I staunchly believe the world was correct to establish a state that provides safety, sanctuary and a home to the Jewish people.
At the same time, I find it absolutely imperative that, alongside an Israel rooted in both Jewish and democratic values and identity, there must also be a nation-state that is home of the Palestinian people. Palestinians also have a long and deep connection to the land. Their claims are just, and the tragedies they have suffered — including in 1948 — are real.
Failing to address the Palestinian question head-on while discussing what it means to be a Jewish state is to ignore the most important challenge facing Israel’s future. The only way to avoid choosing between being either Jewish or democratic is for the conflict with the Palestinians to be resolved by providing the Palestinian people with the opportunity to fulfill their just collective right to self-determination in a separate state of their own.
At the same time, an essential element of being a “Jewish state” should be demonstrating extreme sensitivity to the rights of non-Jews living in the state and under its authority.
Anti-democratic forces around the world are aiming to limit the definition of who is entitled to the rights afforded to those living in their countries. Israel must buck this trend. The creation of a two-tiered legal structure — one for Jews and one for those who are not — would not only be undemocratic and unjust. It would be un-Jewish.
Inclusion extends to the place of those of us who do not live in Israel in the global Jewish discussion about the direction of the state. I travel throughout the United States and speak regularly with Jewish Americans about Israel as the state turns 75.
We may not pay taxes, send our kids to serve in the army or live under the threats that those who live there face. Yet the Jewish identities and experiences of people who don’t live in Israel are deeply affected by the course of events in Israel and by the actions and choices of those who do live there.
Part of what it should mean to be the “Jewish state” is to take some responsibility for the wellbeing of the Jewish people as a whole. If we Jews living in the United States are devoting considerable time, energy and emotion to grappling with the occupation, conflict and Palestinian rights, it doesn’t feel right that these topics should not be core to a discussion of what it means for Israel to be a “Jewish state.”
Since its amazing victory in the Six-Day War — which started 56 years ago today — Israel has been “managing” the conflict. Throughout that time, there have been uprisings and conflicts. There has been terror and violence. I know firsthand about having my bus line, favorite cafes and even the market stall where I had just bought lunch blown up.
Yet across the years, public support and demand for conflict resolution has faded in Israel. And as the path toward peace has grown harder to see, there has been a growing desire to simply avoid talking about these difficult topics.
But ignoring the conflict, pretending it may go away if we just look the other way, is not a solution. Failure to act is putting Israel on a path toward a tragic one-state, undemocratic — and un-Jewish — reality.
Jeremy Ben-Ami is founder and president of J Street, the pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy advocacy group.
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