In my youth, I was horrified when I heard Ultra-Orthodox demonstrators in Israel shouting "Nazis!" at the police. I thought it was as bad as desecrating the Sabbath or eating non-kosher food. In the past few years, especially amid the controversy over the nation-state law, we are hearing similar cries from secular cultural figures and senior army officers, who are throwing around imaginary memories of the 1930s in Nazi Germany. This is also an abomination, but even worse – it is stupid and naive.
Where have they been when it comes to the Law of Return, a law that underpins the country that has gathered in the exiles from the moment it was founded? Since 1950, Israeli statute has stated explicitly that every Jew is entitled to make aliyah! Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion preferred not to define "who is a Jew," but the Knesset eventually defined that right as belonging to anyone born to a Jewish mother or who converted (even if not in strict accordance with Jewish law), as well as the "non-Jewish" children and grandchildren of a Jew.
The nation-state law is middling legislation in comparison to the wonderful Law of Return, which helped build not only the IDF, but also all the kindergartens in which the secular knights of Israeli culture were raised. What happened to them? Has their hatred for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu driven them mad?
In those same years when Jewish, Zionist Israel refused to allow the refugees of the Nakba – the hundreds of thousands of Arabs from Haifa and Jaffa, Lod and Ramle, the Galilee and the Negev, who fled the country in 1948, afraid of the war that their leaders started – it passed a law giving all Jews the right of return, even if their forefathers had been born in the Diaspora and lived there for hundredsof years, and absolutely refused to allow Arabs who fled from here back!
If they have distanced themselves from Zionism, and if they have a shred of integrity, let them hold a protest rally (in north Tel Aviv, on the ruins of the village Sheikh Munis) against the Law of Return, not the nation-state law!
And that is not all. Over the course of 70 years, an Israeli culture has developed, thanks to our Jewish army, in which our beloved Druze and Circassians serve along with everyone else in uniform. But the Arabs in Israel are exempt from military conscription because they are Arabs and have no need to play the religion card to evade service. How could such "racist" discrimination been enshrined in law?
I spent years trying to clarify when, exactly, the Zionist "occupation" began? As a founding settler of Ofra, the first settlement in the Gush Emunim bloc, I met then-Maj. Gen. Ehud Barak in the late 1980s, in the midst of the First Intifada. The IDF's Central Command set up a military post in the village of Ein Yabrud.
I told Barak, bring our soldiers back to the Jewish settlement, because the IDF in Ofra is an army of defense, whereas in Ein Yabrud it is an army of "occupation." The soldiers were indeed sent back to Ofra. They patrolled the village without any checkpoints in place and without seizing Arab homes. In my opinion, it made no difference to security.
In those years, Professor Ruth Gabizon was in charge of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue in Jerusalem. There, I realized that the "Zionist occupation" did not begin in 1967, as the fruitful imaginations of Israelis who lust after delusion would have it. There were Palestinians in the talks, educated, cultured, moderate individuals who had nothing to do with terrorism, who opened my eyes. In their minds, the "occupation" began in 1948! They saw the state of Israel in its entirety as "occupation," and ending that occupation meant nothing less than wiping out the state.
True, there are some Palestinians who think the occupation began with the Balfour Declaration, or even with the first Zionist settlements in the 19th century, but there is no Palestinian who thinks it dates from 1967. That is an Israeli delusion.
The members of the Brit Shalom peace movement understood that founding a Jewish state would lead to years of terrible wars. So they were willing to forgo a state and be satisfied with an autonomous Jewish "national home." But Dr. Arthur Ruppin, one of the leaders of Brit Shalom, tried to find out whether the moderate Arab leadership would agree to Jewish aliyah, and encountered a steadfast refusal.
It always hurts to sober up. For the sake of us all, the opponents of the nation-state law must realize that it and the Law of Return are one and the same! If they are tired of Zionism, of the Jewish state, of the 1948 "occupation," then we have nothing left to talk about. But if they still have a smidgen of Judaism and Zionism, they should put the false slogans aside and enter into a polemic with their eyes open.
