In Us vs. Them, Everyone Loses

Before I begin this week's post, I must offer you this disclaimer: I am Jewish.  I believe completely and whole-heartedly in Israel's right to exist and prosper.  I make my following arguments not to hurt Israel; rather, I critique Israel because I love Israel.

With that, let us begin...

Today, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu offered to extend the moratorium on settlement building in the West Bank (a practice the UN has found to be in violation of Palestinian sovereignty) if Palestinian leaders were to officially recognize Israel as a Jewish state.  The Palestinians immediately refused.

Yesterday, the Israeli cabinet approved the addition of a "loyalty oath" to citizenship laws that would require every non-Jew applying for citizenship to swear loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state and democracy.

These are just two in a slew of Israeli policies and positions emerging to further restrict the rights of Arabs, 20% of Israel's population, incite resistance and violence, prevent a peace agreement, and undermine the very values upon which Israel was formed.  By forcing Arabs seeking citizenship to swear allegiance to a nation that has shown it does not want them while simultaneously showing disregard for the sovereignty of Palestinian territory, Israel is inhibiting negotiations of a peace agreement and the eventual, much-needed two-state solution.  Indeed, by insisting on one controlling state that denies Arabs equal rights and the right of self-determination, Israel endangers the survival of the very values the loyalty oath was created to defend: Israel as both a Jewish and democratic state.

If Israel hopes to fulfill its Zionist mission, it must avoid and reverse the "us vs. them" ideology that has come to plague its policies.  While history offers us many examples of the failure of this ideology, I refer you instead to a valuable piece of literature that I'm reading in my English class: The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver.

The Poisonwood Bible follows the Prices, a 1960s Baptist family from Georgia, on a mission to the Belgian Congo (for a more complete summary, click here). The Price family, led by the Reverend Nathan, struggles to adjust to life in the Congo, to understand the Congolese people, to recognize the incompatibility of Christianity with the village's way of life, and to accept the legitimacy of the Congo's autonomy and independence.  Several of the daughters, but Nathan especially, enter the Congo choosing ignorance and isolation from the native culture rather than understanding and accepting it. As the Prices become the last white family in their village and in much of the Congo, their strict us vs. them dichotomy serves to only further endanger them and inhibit them from realizing any of their goals -- personal, religious -- or even to survive.

Israel now faces a choice, as it always has to an extent, between the "us vs. them" view that both history and literature teaches us is destined to fail, or a measured and pragmatic negotiation of its current position in order to salvage its long-term viability.  Again, Israel today cannot be both a Jewish state and a democracy.  If it embraces and favors only Judaism, it strips equal rights from a significant sect of the population, and therefore is not a democracy; if it gives equal rights to all the Arabs in its territories, Jews will soon loose their demographic majority in the region and loose control, thus eliminating the Jewish state.  Israel cannot have both, just as Nathan cannot both force Christianity on the Congolese people and survive in a foreign country with few other whites and little independent means.

In the game of us vs. them, nobody wins.