Israel’s false tautology
Israelis, Jews not the same
By Stephen F. Eisenman
Co-founder of Environmental Justice Foundation
Israeli leaders have begun to implement a plan they have long been preparing: Gaining complete control of the Land of Israel, “Eretz Yisrael” (אֶרֶץ יִשְׂרָאֵל), including Gaza and the West Bank. I won’t detail here the early political and military milestones in the project, except to note that Israel’s expropriation of Arab land has been well documented by UN agencies, Palestinian and other scholars, and human rights organizations. That history includes seizures following wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 and settlement activity up until the present. In the last few weeks alone, there has been a major expansion of “wildcat settlement outposts” in the West Bank, according to an investigation by the Israeli group Peace Now, as reported in The New York Times.
On December 25, 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israeli Knesset member Shani Danon that he was developing a plan to facilitate the “voluntary” transfer of Gazans to other countries. “Our problem,” he said, “is finding countries that are ready to absorb [them] and we are working on it.” A few days later, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said: “The solution in Gaza requires…encouraging voluntary migration and full security control including the renewal of [Jewish] settlement.” If Netanyahu, Smotrich, and others accomplish their goal of ridding Gaza of Gazans and extending the Jewish state “from the river to the sea,” it will be the bloody culmination of Theodore Herzl’s dream of a Heimstatte (a homeland) for the Jews in all of Palestine; it will also be a second nakba (catastrophe) for the Palestinians.
The false tautology
The cabinet of Israel has for decades argued that “Eretz Yisrael” — the total territory of historic Palestine — should be the homeland of Jews alone. That was implicit from the nation’s founding but became explicit with the passage in 2018 of the “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.” The chairman of the committee that drafted the bill and shepherded it through the Knesset, Amir Ohana stated: “This is the law of all laws. It is the most important law in the history of the State of Israel, which says that everyone has human rights, but national rights in Israel belong only to the Jewish people. That is the founding principle on which the state was established”. Though the bill was watered down somewhat from its original version, “it still permitted,” according to the Israeli Attorney General’s office, “harming a person because of his nationality or religion. That is blatant discrimination.” The law also affirms the right of diasporic Jews to emigrate (aliya — עליה) to Israel, but not Arabs or Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, or elsewhere, even if they are related to Israeli Arabs.
Preservation of the Jewish right of return is essential to maintaining Israel’s appeal to American and other diasporic Jews. The US has nearly as many Jews — just under 6 million — as Israel, together comprising ¾ of the global population. By making them de facto Israelis, the right of return expands Eretz Yisrael far beyond existing boundaries and implicates the diaspora in Israeli policy. The underlying ideology of Palestinian exclusion and Jewish inclusion is expressed by the following, implicit (and false) tautology: All (true) Israelis are Jews; all Jews are Israelis.
Of course, not all Israelis are Jews. 21% are Arabs (Palestinian, Druze, Christians, Circassian, and others), denied full recognition in accord with Israel’s Basic Law. If you consider the wider region to which Netanyahu’s far-right coalition lays claim, including Gaza and the West Bank, the population is divided roughly 50/50 between Jews and non-Jews — the latter mostly Sunni Muslims. (Recent demographic analysis suggests that Jews are now a minority in Israel and the occupied or administered territories.) Neither are “all Jews Israeli.” The Right of Return is an invitation, not a mandate, and only about 3,000 Americans per year accept it. In fact, more than twice as many Israeli Jews migrate to the US every year, as American Jews to Israel.
In the last few weeks, opposition to the war among young Democratic voters has moved the Biden administration away from unstinting support for the war and toward a policy of de-escalation, though far too slowly to protect the Palestinian population of Gaza. What’s needed now is for American liberals and progressives — Jewish and non-Jewish, but especially Jewish — to demand that continued US support for Israel be conditioned upon an end to the killing, and rapid commencement of negotiations for a long-term peace, along the lines of either a two-state or one-state solution. The slogans for that mass movement have already been deployed by courageous students and faculty, union workers, anti-war activists, and progressive Democrats in the US House of Representatives; They are: “Not in My Name,” “Never Again, Anywhere,” and “Peace Now.”
The full article first appeared
in CounterPunch.
Are refuseniks common?
No. Generally speaking, refuseniks may end up serving repeated prison services, ordered to return to recruitment centres again and again. Some wind up doing months behind bars before they are eventually discharged.
The Israeli military does have a conscientious objectors committee, but exemptions are usually only granted on religious grounds — the ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews, for instance, are legally exempt. Refusing to serve as a matter of political principle is not considered a valid objection.
Earlier this year, Amnesty International released a report on Yuval Dag, a 20-year-old who had made his political objections clear before his summons. The army classified his refusal as disobedience and sentenced him to 20 days at Neve Tzedek military prison in Tel Aviv.
The rights group named four other individuals — Einat Gerlitz, Nave Shabtay Levin, Evyatar Moshe Rubin, and Shahar Schwartz — who were repeatedly detained in 2022. Conscientious objectors commonly serve five months or more in prison — a high price to pay for young people doing what they believe to be right.
Many objectors come to their decision after participating in protest movements, whether on climate change, Israel’s occupation, violence, and discrimination against Palestinians — a system that many rights groups have compared with apartheid.
Are there any famous refuseniks?
In 2003, a group of Israeli Air Force pilots provoked national fury when they refused to take part in operations in the West Bank and Gaza. Submitting a letter to the media, they branded attacks on the territories as “illegal and immoral”.
The case was noteworthy, involving elite army members like Brigadier General Yiftah Spector, considered a legend in the forces for his attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1982. The cabinet accused the pilots of “pretentious snivelling”.
That same year, the country’s elite commandoes also defied orders to carry out attacks on the occupied territories. Setting out their position in a letter, 15 reservists from the Sayeret Matkal unit, often compared with the British army’s SAS, said: “We will no longer corrupt the stamp of humanity in us through carrying out the missions of an occupation army.”
“In the past, we fought for a justified cause (but today), we have reached the boundary of oppressing another people.”
In 2007, Bar Refaeli, a model, married a friend to avoid military service, later telling the press that “celebrities have other needs”. Later, to avoid damage to the companies she worked for, she agreed to participate in an enlistment campaign. The case ignited a debate on how easy it is to dodge conscription.
Hang on, wasn’t there dissent in army ranks this year?
Yes, but it was not linked to the occupation. In early March, about 700 reservist soldiers — including some top brass — resigned en masse during widespread protests over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul. Critics accused him of curtailing Supreme Court powers to shield himself from corruption charges.
Explaining his refusal to serve in the army, Dag said that reservists had resigned because they were afraid of living in a dictatorship. But, he pointed out, “We need to remember that in the occupied territories there has never been democracy. And the anti-democratic institution that rules there is the army.”
Responding to rebellion in the ranks, Netanyahu said: “There’s no room for refusals.” Military service was, he said, “the first and most important foundation of our existence in our land …The refusals threaten the foundation of our existence.”
Netanyahu’s view is not unusual. Across the political spectrum, with the exception of some left-wing and Arab groups, parties condemn the refusal to serve for a number of reasons. Left wingers worry about polarisation, claiming that refusing to serve will encourage right-wing resistance to removing settlements. Right wingers believe that refusal helps the enemies of Israel.
What does the law say?
The right to conscientious objection to military service is protected by international law, enshrined in Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The UN Commission for Human Rights has stated that states must “refrain from subjecting conscientious objectors to imprisonment and to repeated punishment for failure to perform military service”.
However, it is common practice in Israel, not only to imprison objectors, but to repeat sentences several times. In 2003, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that international law banned “double jeopardy”.
Selective objection is not an option. In 2002, the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled that allowing soldiers not to serve in the occupied territories would “loosen the links that hold us together as a people”.
The case had been brought by a group called Courage to Refuse, who said their duties would involve “dominating, expelling, starving, and humiliating an entire people”.