The “High Committee for Monitoring Arab Interests in Israel” argues that “defining Israel as a Jewish state excludes us and creates tensions between us and the very nature of the state”. The “Jewish” character thus plays a critical role in the eyes of its leaders. It enables them to define and legitimize themselves advantageously at the expense of an Israel that is guilty of excluding Arabs, and therefore not “democratic”. This is the source of the accusation of “racism”, since the very existence of this state pits the Jew against the Arab. The benefit of this definition is that the “Arab” character and the “national” claim of the High Committee are therefore naturally part of “democracy”. This is not the case with the State of Israel.
The dialectical ambivalence of identity
It all depends on how the High Committee defines “Jewish”. In this respect, there is one indisputable fact: the symbols of the State are Jewish, so that any positioning of identity, especially when its aim is to distance oneself from this State, can only be based on this reality, or in this case on a negative judgment about it. But, objectively speaking, it is by relying on the Jewish character of the State (in order to reject it) that the Arab citizens of Israel base their identification as “Arabs”: by dissociating themselves from this State, while living in it. Without Israel, this identity, “Arabs in Israel”, would not exist as such. This is borne out by polls showing that, while identifying with the Palestinian cause and the Palestinians, “Arabs in Israel” would not join a future state of Palestine. They would remain (Palestinian) Arabs in a State of Israel that would no longer be a “Jewish” state, but a state “of all its citizens”, a utopian model born of postmodernist ideology. Would it call itself “Israel” with such a distinctive name? No one knows.
The Jews are not a nation but a religion
The ideological edifice of such a discourse thus depends on the definition of the “Jewish” character. An interesting fact is the disparity of registers: some are “Arabs”, others are “Jews”, some a nation, others a religion. The term “Jew” would refer exclusively to a religion. This is the nature to which both the High Committee and the Unified List assign Jews, even secular ones. They thus remain in line with the old thesis set out in article 20 of the PLO’s Palestinian Charter, never in fact repealed: ” The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate over Palestine and all that flows from it are null and void. Claims based on the historical and religious ties of the Jews to Palestine are incompatible with historical fact and with a just conception of the constituent elements of a state. . Judaism, being a religion, cannot constitute an independent nationality. Similarly, Jews do not form a single nation with their own identity, but are citizens of the states to which they belong. t” . This was confirmed by Hanin Zoabi, a member of the Arab-Islamic party in the Knesset, The Unified List: “Judaism is not a nationality and therefore it is impossible to speak of Jewish self-determination“, in a conference in Dallas, USA, in 2018. Hamas also confirms this in article 16 of its charter: ” Hamas says it opposes the Zionist project, not the Jews because of their religion. Hamas is not fighting Jews because they are Jews, but against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. In fact, it is the Zionists who constantly equate Judaism and Jews with their colonial project and their illegal entity. ” .
The High Committee’s position thus aligns itself de facto with the Palestinian Charters, those of the PLO and Hamas, which both agree in denying “Jews” the status of nation and confining them to that of “religion”, a judgment logically necessary to justify the fact that the Jewish state cannot be a “national” state but only a “religious” one, and therefore excluding other religions. If we transpose this situation to France to understand the substance of this statement, it would be tantamount to saying that French Muslims cannot integrate into France because, in its culture and symbols, it is Catholic, or because secularism is a political religion to which they do not adhere. If we transpose it to England: a Pakistani, and therefore British Muslim, could feel excluded from his country of citizenship because the Queen of England is the head of the Anglican Church, which is also the state religion. These conceptions lead postmodernists to describe European states as “racist”. This rhetorical “trick” is well known… It turns over to the interlocutor the responsibility for what one does oneself, i.e. refusing to integrate. Jews from the Arab world can testify in Israel itself that a dozen Arab-Muslim countries failed to create a citizenship that would welcome non-Muslims, which is not the case in the democratic West…
The Arabs of Israel are a nation
” We are not a religious minority but a national one “, decrees the High Committee. Now, the word “Arab”, taken in this global and unifying sense, refers to a doctrine that believes in the existence of a single (Arab) nation beyond the various peoples and ethnic groups (Egyptians, Libyans…) or states that make it up. “Arab” therefore refers to a collective political myth that has been illustrated throughout history by Arab nationalism (invented by the Christian Arabs of Syria-Lebanon) and pan-nationalism (Nasserite), followed by the pan-Islamism of “the Islamic nation (ummah)” without borders. Note that the deputies of the Unified List do not define themselves primarily as a specific “people”, in this case “Palestinians”, but as “Arabs”, in line with the PLO Charter: ” Palestine is the homeland of the Palestinian Arab people: it constitutes an inseparable part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation“. (Article 1). ” The liberation of Palestine is, from the Arab point of view, a national duty … in the vanguard of the Arab people of Palestine. It follows that the Arab nation must mobilize all its military, human, moral and spiritual potential in order to participate actively with the Palestinian people in the liberation of Palestine. “(Article 15 ). This belief explains why the Palestinians have systematically refused all plans for peace and partition, behaving not as a small people concerned with securing their own existence, but as the spearhead of the Islamic ummah.
Israel’s Arabs don’t define themselves primarily as Muslims
Israeli Arabs do not define themselves primarily as “Muslims”. According to the High Committee: ” The Palestinian Arabs of Israel, indigenous peoples, residents of the State of Israel, an integral part of the Palestinian people and of the Arab and Muslim nation “. Islam comes last, within the framework of an “Arab nation”, which is indeed a necessity if we are to remain consistent with the definition of “Jew” as a religion. If “Jew” excludes the others when the quality is applied to a state, the Arabs are immediately posited as an (ethnic) nation, which legitimizes their demand for political status, where Jews cannot. The relegation of the Islamic character in this hierarchical classification, however, conceals an underlying reference: the heritage of Islam and Sharia law, which assigns Jews (like Christians) to the condition of “religious community/umma”, subject to the rule of Sharia law, to the status of dhimmi, defined by religion, according to the doctrine of the Koran, the status of a dominated and segregated nation-religion. It should be noted, however, that the High Committee does not neglect to demand that the State of Israel exclusively manage the Waqf system and the holy sites (Muslim and… Christian), i.e. everything that falls within the realm of religious property.
Israel’s Arabs are the “natives
Defining itself as an “indigenous people” is a historical coup in view of the Jewish history of Eretz Israel, the Arab invasion of the 7th century, and the immigration of populations from all over the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It corroborates the historical revisionism of the Palestinian Authority at UNESCO. It is silent on the expulsion of Jews from a dozen Arab countries who became Israeli citizens, and yet were just as “indigenous” as the Palestinians, and so on. The supposed “indigeneity” is intended to provide a more specific basis for the accusation of colonialism levelled at Israel. Islam and Arabness are put in abeyance here, as a basis for an accusation other than racism…