Recently, Dr. Who was kind enough to lend me his space and time machine, the TARDIS.
I traveled to November 5, two days after the upcoming United States midterm elections. The headline in The New York Times the day after the election read, “Democrats win House and Senate races, but will not sit with Jewish members, so deny themselves a majority in both houses.”
The pushback from the Jewish community, as expected, was palpable and fierce. When I arrived the next day, there were massive demonstrations across the country organized by scores of Jewish organizations and their allies.
This was very disturbing and unsettling. I was relieved to discover the TARDIS had taken me to another universe, similar to ours but with dangerous dystopian modifications. While unnerving, I was able to shake the experience.
But that exposure did get me thinking about a similar headline in Israel: “Far-right Minister Smotrich says forming gov’t with Arab party chairman ‘worse than October 7.’” While in Israel there has been pushback, it is nothing like what would have happened had a similar statement been made towards Jews in the United States. That pushback in Israel has its limits.
In fact, the rejection of forming a government with the Arab parties is not confined to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, and the far Right. Naftali Bennet, Yair Lapid, and Gadi Eisenkot have said they, too, would not form such a government. That is to say: in the Jewish state, where Arab citizens make up 21% of the population, they are not wanted in a government.
When Jews living in the Diaspora are discriminated against, there is immediate criticism, but when Arabs are discriminated against in Israel, there is a nonchalant acceptance by Jewish Israeli society. Part of the reason is that the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews mistrust Israeli Arabs.
They point to, as one of many examples, the fact that a large percentage of the Israeli Arab population does not believe that a Jewish Temple ever stood on the Temple Mount. Such beliefs only confirm for Israeli Jews that Israeli Arabs are no different from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and therefore should not be trusted.
The brutal and horrific events of October 7 only hardened the attitudes of the majority of Israeli Jews towards Israeli Arabs. In contradistinction, there is the work of Maoz Inon, whose parents were burnt alive in their Kibbutz Nir Am home, and Aziz Abu Sarah, whose brother died from the beatings at the hands of Israeli military prison authorities.
They have joined together to work to break the century-long cycle of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. At one point in their must-read book, The Future is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land, Aziz quotes Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: “I’m convinced that people hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other.”
Jewish power
The Mishna (Pirkei Avot 2:4) teaches us, “Do not judge your fellow human being until you put yourself in their place.”
An off-ramp for the end of this conflict is for both peoples to trade places and see this conflict from their respective painful memories of the past and experiences of today. In doing so, both will confront the history and realities of the other they too often deny. Not an easy or simple task, but as the Mishna tells us, it is an imperative one.
Which ties us back to Smotrich and what he said a few years ago to Arab members of the Knesset: “You’re here by mistake – it’s a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out in 1948.”
He gets credit for acknowledging within his statement the history of more than 400 Palestinian towns demolished and erased and the more than 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled or exiled from those homes.
That, along with his statement comparing an Israeli government including Israeli Arabs to October 7, makes very clear his goal is to make Israel, as well as the West Bank and Gaza, Arab-free.
Hannah Arendt pointed out the difference between (political) power and violence. Zionism is about the Jewish reclamation of that power – “to be a free nation in our land.” Force is a manifestation of that power when called upon. When that use of force crosses a line, it becomes violence.
Smotrich does not advocate for Jewish power; he and Ben-Gvir campaign for Jewish violence and hate. By the same token, those Palestinians and supporters of Palestinians who advocate for “by any means necessary” are no different.
Israel oscillates between seeing itself as “a light unto the nations” and being a nation like any other. When it leans more towards the latter, Israel lives in a diaspora removed from the loftiest of Jewish values.
Zionist historian Shlomo Avineri reminds us that Israel in the eyes of Herzl was to be a land that “should be both Jewish and democratic – a Jewish nation-state, but one that would preserve equal rights for its non-Jewish population, not half-heartedly, but as a major tenet of its political and moral credo.”
Bennet, Lapid, and Eisenkot can reclaim that credo by declaring their willingness to form a government with Arab parties and rekindle that light unto the nations.
I reentered the TARDIS and traveled to May 2048 to see what Israel would be like on its centennial. I opened the door of the TARDIS, and what did I see? I saw an Israel shaped and guided by the decisions it made today.
The writer is a rabbi, works for the Friends of the Arava Institute, and teaches at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura. The opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and are not meant to reflect any organization with which he is affiliated.