A Place to Call Home
By Maurice Harris (as printed in the The Register-Guard, May 4, 2008)

Starting with little, what Israelis have achieved in 60 years is astonishing. Israel provides a safe haven for Jews in a world that, 65 years ago, was either exterminating them or denying them entry as refugees. It has absorbed millions of Jews from countries famous for anti-Semitism, like the Soviet Union, and from many Arab and Islamic states where Jews, like my Moroccan-Jewish relatives, were persecuted after Israel was established.

Israelis have revived the Hebrew language, shared new agricultural technologies with poor countries, created the freest press in the Middle East, and maintained a parliamentary democracy that includes Arab representatives. Israel protects the holy sites of minority religions and hosts an energetic high-tech economy. There is nowhere safer in the Middle East to be openly gay, to demonstrate against the government, or to criticize the opinions of religious leaders. The country is deep in my heart. I love the white sunlight, the history, and the mix of Jews from many lands with different accents and skin colors. This is the Israel that I celebrate – multi-cultural, inventive, and life-affirming. I disagree with many of its government’s actions, but I love Israel unconditionally.

My love for Israel has not blinded me to Israel’s impact on the Palestinians. I’ve studied the conflict and traveled to Gaza and the West Bank to see things for myself. I’ve witnessed, but thankfully never had to endure, the depressing reality that is life under the Israeli occupation. Neither my Jewish nor my Zionist ideals support this wholesale restriction of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories. I believe in the right of self-defense, but the occupation has done little to reduce terrorism, and it has been more about building and supporting new settlements than it has been about self-defense. My opposition to the occupation and to the settlement movement, with its messianic-fundamentalist interpretation of Jewish sacred texts, is as deep as my commitment to Zionism. My views are part of what is known in the Jewish world as progressive Zionism.

Progressive Zionism is a movement that advocates an end to the Israeli occupation, the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the sharing of Jerusalem, and the resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue through a compromise that preserves Israel as a Jewish homeland. Progressive Zionism is partly grounded in values of peace and justice, and partly grounded in the practical concern that if Israel can’t get itself out of the West Bank and find its way to a two-state solution, ethnic demographics will be the state’s undoing within the next half century.

Eugene has a strong progressive political community, and I’m proud to be a part of it. Progressives have rightly objected to the abuses and indignities of the Israeli occupation, and ever since the first intifada in 1987, the left has embraced the cause of Palestinian human rights. In recent years, however, the progressive rallying cry has shifted from “End the occupation” to “Dismantle Israel,” and that’s disturbing. Often I encounter people who argue that the best solution to the conflict is for Israel to cease to exist as a Jewish homeland, and for it to be replaced by a single, secular democratic state in all of Palestine. Why would anyone be opposed to a multi-ethnic democracy, after all? The reason this solution is unjust is because it only upholds one set of human rights – the rights of the individual – but it denies the right of small and vulnerable peoples to safety and self-determination.

While the U.S. is a wonderful example of a multi-ethnic, secular democracy, it is rare in the world. Most democracies are founded upon a combination of ethnic heritage and democratic institutions. This is why Europe’s democracies limit foreign immigration – to preserve their ethnic majorities. Ask the Kosovars if they’d like to reunite with Serbia, or the Pakistanis if they’d like to return to the status of being a religious minority in a greater India. Justice for human beings involves two sets of rights: the right of the individual to be accorded full citizenship within his or her country under the rule of law, and the right of peoples – especially small and vulnerable peoples – to self-determination through collective autonomy.

The “one-state solution” would turn the clock back to before World War II, when Jews were condemned to always be a minority group wherever they lived, and when democratic states failed to save them from mass murder. It’s also worth noting that the kind of multi-religious secular democracy that these advocates want to see replace Israel is a type of state that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the Middle East. Their solution would create a secular democracy in the one part of the Middle East where there is a concentration of Jews, thus disempowering Jews as a group, while leaving over 20 other states throughout the region that officially enfranchise Islam or Arab national identity as part of their constitution.

An Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement needs to embrace individual and collective human rights for both peoples. A two-state solution offers the closest approximation to justice, because it would create the opportunity for both peoples to have a homeland, for both peoples to have a place where their diasporas have a right to return, and for both peoples to live in neighboring democracies that can uphold the rule of law and protect their respective minority citizens.

Another comment I hear in the left-wing community is that Israel is an example of a European ethnic group taking away land from a Middle Eastern people in order to set up a state for themselves. This argument ignores the fact that a large percentage of the world’s Jews are not European at all. Mizrahi, or “Eastern” Jews, have lived in large numbers as minority members of Middle Eastern countries for centuries, and until recently, Mizrahi Jews made up the majority of Israel’s Jewish population. Many progressives I’ve spoken with have confessed that they were totally unaware that Mizrahi Jews even existed, or that most Mizrahi Jews are people of color.

When I bring up Mizrahi Jews, I sometimes hear the comment made that these Jews were doing just fine under Islamic rule and had no need of a state of their own. The truth is that while Jews fared better overall historically under Islamic rule than Christian rule, they still faced periodic pogroms, expulsions, special taxes, and other forms of religious humiliation and persecution under Islam. And like their European brethren, Mizrahi Jews also faced potential annihilation during World War II. For example, when the Nazis conquered Morocco, they deported several thousand Jews to rural concentration camps. Had the Allied invasion of Morocco taken place later than it did, Moroccan Jews may not have survived. And in 1941, the Mufti of Jerusalem, a key Palestinian leader, signed an agreement with Mussolini planning for the extermination of the Jews living in Palestine should the Axis forces defeat the British there. In fairness, there were also heroic Muslims who took great risks to protect Jews from the Nazis. But the overall condition of Mizrahi Jews was precarious and disempowered. As in Christian Europe, Jewish safety and survival under Muslim rule ultimately depended on the good-will of the leaders of the moment. After 1948, Islamic governments began persecuting Mizrahi Jews sharply, and most of them fled. 800,000 or more Jews, including my grandparents and mother, became refugees, most resettling in Israel. These refugees are rarely mentioned in the Israeli-Palestinian debate.

Another view I’ve heard in left-wing circles says, “OK, the Jews deserve a homeland. But why not have it be somewhere uncontroversial?” I’d like to explain why. Jews are not a foreign infection in the Middle East. Jews are an unusual people in that we’ve been spread out thinly in many parts of the world, where we’ve lived continuously for centuries. The Mizrahi part of our population is indigenous to the Middle East, and the rest of our people has deep roots there. Except for deserted places, every place in the world is somebody’s home, so sending Jews to have a homeland outside of Palestine would still have created issues of conflict and compromise with some native population. Palestine was the only part of the world where Jews had an historical connection. I ask those who would have liked to send Jewish refugees from Hitler somewhere deserted to consider that this sounds an awful lot like a wish to just send the Jews “away.” There is no “away.” Jews are a part of the world, and it was in Israel that Jews birthed the religion that forms the foundation of Christianity and Islam. Judaism is an integral part of the Middle East’s history and religious life, and Jews have a place in the Middle East. The moral test for the world following the Holocaust wasn’t, “How can we find somewhere blank on the world map so that we can send these Jews away?” The test was, “How can we re-conceive of how the community of nations lives with the Jews so that Jews have true safety and dignity?” Israel is part of that answer.

*     *     *

Maybe the politicians will usher in a peace agreement soon. It’s unlikely, but possible. If it happens, it will likely be a cold peace, more a truce than a grassroots peace among peoples. For a deeper kind of peace to take hold, honesty needs to replace propaganda and misinformation.

Over the last two decades, Israeli society has been growing more honest about its own birth, and this has been emotionally difficult for Jews worldwide. A group of Israeli historians began speaking publicly about what they learned as they researched the Israeli War of Independence and the flight of 700,000 Palestinian refugees that ensued. They shattered one of the Jewish community’s comforting myths about 1948 – namely, that we Jews didn’t expel Palestinians from their homes during the War of Independence; rather, the Palestinians supposedly left of their own choosing in an effort to assist the invading Arab armies.

In growing numbers, Israelis are acknowledging a more painful truth. In actuality, during the course of the war, Palestinians fled for various reasons. Like refugees in every war, some fled because of panic. Some left on orders from Arab armies amidst assurances of swift victory over the Jews. But some fled because they were forcibly expelled by Jewish soldiers, rounded up at gunpoint and sent packing. There were a few instances of massacres of Palestinians, just as there were Arab massacres of Jews, and there were “whispering campaigns” in which Israeli forces deliberately spread rumors of horrors that would befall Arabs who stayed behind in the hopes that that would scare them away.

There wasn’t a full-blown ethnic cleansing of Arab Palestine, as a sizable Arab population stayed put during 1948. But there were loosely coordinated efforts at ethnic cleansing in certain parts of the country during the war, and as Jews we have to own up to this sad truth. We bear moral responsibility for the intentional displacement of part of the Palestinian population in 1948. Our claim to the human right of a small, vulnerable people to self-determination in our homeland is just, but it must be balanced with the individual and collective rights of the 700,000 Palestinian refugees who suffered loss of home, property and community.

If there is ever to be a grassroots peace between Jews and Arabs, the final peace agreement needs to acknowledge this truth and include a limited right of return to Israel for a number of Palestinians that is demographically calculated so that Israel remains a Jewish homeland. Israel also will need to pay compensation to those Palestinian families who left in 1948 and who are not allowed, or who choose not, to return. Finally, a state apology from Israel for its share of the responsibility in the Palestinian refugee crisis would be healing and help deepen peace.

Honesty also requires that the Arab and wider Muslim world tell the full, nuanced truth about the past. This includes telling the real, not the rosy, story of Jewish life historically under Islamic rule. It also means teaching about the Holocaust, including Jewish vulnerability in Arab lands during World War II, and it means repudiating Holocaust denial. It means taking responsibility for the systematic education of tens of millions in anti-Semitic treatises like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and in cartoonish imagery depicting Jews as conspiratorial money-grubbers scheming to take over the world.

Honesty also means Arab and Islamic nations allowing their own historians and journalists to question freely their own mythic narratives about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the same way that Israel has allowed. And honesty means the Muslim world telling the truth about the 800,000 Mizrahi Jewish refugees. If a grassroots peace is to take hold, Arab states will need to offer some kind of option of return or monetary compensation to these Jewish refugees, many of whom lost their homes and all their resources when they fled. An official apology would mean a lot to these communities, too.

Things are so discouraging right now that it looks like only a miracle will help both sides achieve the kind of peace I’ve described above. But every effort towards this kind of peace has influence, and hopefully the best aspects of the human spirit will rise up and help the peoples of the region transform. I will celebrate Israel’s 60th this week because there is so much to celebrate, and because I love the country and its people. That love leads me to be both a defender of, and a critic of, the remarkable place my people calls home.

Note: Melissa Crabbe contributed to this article.