In its first 70 years, Israel has not produced a constitution. Because the Jewish People possess a Torah, many in Israel view that as our ideal constitution and would oppose the authoring of another. Hence the issue has remained in abeyance.
As a compromise, going back to 1950, the Israeli Knesset occasionally produces “basic laws,” laws meant to take precedence over, and override, other laws already in existence, with the secondary hope that a growing corpus of these basic laws will fill the vacuum deriving from the absence of a constitution.
Thus, back in July, the Israeli Knesset, whose present constellation is both politically right-wing and open to Jewishly-positive legislation, passed “the Basic Law: Israel – the Nation-State of the Jewish People.” The government has incorporated in this law, for the first time, certain principles which to most Jewish voters in Israel today are obvious.
If the principles are so obvious, why make them laws? The answer is that in recent times, Israeli left wing and Arab bodies have been calling into question the basic principles upon which Israel was founded as a Jewish state. As a minor example, Arab Knesset members have attacked the national anthem, “Hatikva,” as being “too Jewish,” hence insulting to Israel’s Arab citizens. Section 2 of the Nation-State law therefore declares, “The national anthem of the state is “Hatikvah.”
Following are, for me, the four most interesting declarations in the new law:
- Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people in which the State of Israel was established.
- The State of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, religious, and historic right to self-determination.
- The fulfillment of the right of national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.
- The state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.
Each of these four points may seem obvious to the WWW reader, but in our day, each has been challenged, even ferociously challenged, from without, and even from within.
If we claim that “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish People,” well, the Palestinian Arabs claim that, historically, the Jews weren’t here (!). If we claim, “The State of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People,” there are plenty of those same Arabs who claim vociferously that the State of Israel must be totally neutral to be fair and must not favor Jews in any way. If we claim that “fulfillment of the right of national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” then we are denying the Arabs their “right of return” to the places some of them lived before 1948 within what became the State of Israel. As far as our claiming Jewish settlement to be a “national value,” the Arabs consider settlement to be the mother of all terrorism. If you call it a “national value,” it ceases to be politically incorrect to mention it, and it becomes lawful to encourage it.
So, the Nation-State law pushes buttons that upset our enemies, even if that is not its goal. The right wing, represented by Israel’s coalition government, created, advanced, and passed this law. The left wing, the opposition, opposed it.
The right wing claims, “The more it upsets our enemies, the more proof of its necessity.” The left wing claims, “Everything good about it existed already in other forms, such as the Declaration of Independence. Everything bad about it should be left out anyway. It just riles up our enemies needlessly.”
In response to detractors who say that the law is insulting to minorities, Prime Minister Netanyahu counters that minorities can have full rights as individuals, but not as national entities.
Who is right?
I think the argument over the Nation-State law is no different from all the other right-left arguments that have been raging for at least 50 years, since the liberation of the Old City of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in 1967. The question is this: Each time we want to do something that our neighbors might not like but that will help us to consolidate our country as Jewish and strong, should we avoid doing it in the first place so as not to upset them, or should we go ahead with it?
In 1968, when the late Rabbi Moshe Levinger wanted to put many thousands of Jews in Hebron and restore it to its status as sister-city of Jerusalem, Moshe Dayan said, “Hebron is an Arab town with 27,000 inhabitants. To introduce Jews there will needlessly rile up the Arabs as well as American President Johnson and his secretary of state William Rodgers.”
The truth is that the Arabs of Hebron at the time were trembling in fear of a massacre. Ten months after the Six Day War, they still had white flags flying from every building in Hebron. Nothing would have happened if thousands of Jews had moved in. In 1971, after the creation of a compromise town outside Hebron, Kiryat Arba, relations between Jews and Arabs flourished. Jewish children learned Arabic, playing with the Arabic children. Jewish adults attended Arab weddings in Hebron (until that harmony ended with Oslo).
In 1979, when Kiryat Arba’s residents once again sought to settle Hebron under a new, more right-wing government, they were restrained for 13 months on the grounds that allowing settlement in Hebron would upset Jimmy Carter. Only the Arab massacre of six Jewish men at the end of this period gave Menachem Begin the courage to stand up to Carter and begin Jewish settlement in Hebron.
Thirty-nine years later, Jimmy Carter doesn’t like us, and he has written an autobiography in which he proves it. Would he have disliked us even more had we settled Hebron 13 months earlier, without waiting for a massacre?
In 2005, Israel rushed to unilaterally give up Gush Katif, saying, “If we give up Gush Katif and throw 10,000 Jews out of their homes, President Bush Jr. will write us a letter ‘viewing favorably’ Israel’s holding on to a few sections of Judea and Samaria.”
A few years after the pull-out, the American government denied the existence of such a letter.
Each time, we look back and understand, “If we had done what we wanted instead of what we thought our neighbors wanted us to do, nothing bad would have happened. In fact, our situation would have been improved.”
The Torah actually relates to this. At least five times in the book of Deuteronomy, G-d tells us, regarding conquering the Land of Israel, “Do not fear” (3:22; 7:18; 20:3; 31:6; 31:8). The Torah is telling us how to relate to the Jewish People’s return to the Land of Israel. In fact, the entire spy episode in parshat Shelach is intended to convey to us that when the opportunity arises for us to settle the Land of Israel, we mustn’t cringe and we mustn’t fear, and G-d forbid that we should allow negativity to slow us down.
Of course, I am not making any of this up. The Chief Rabbi of Kiryat Arba, Rabbi Dov Lior, would raise these points every year at the end of his halacha talk on Shabbos Hagadol. He would emphasize that in every generation, going back to our standing at the Yam Suf (Sea of Reeds), our backs have been to the sea and G-d saved us. He would argue that these points apply today as well, to settling the Land of Israel.
And, of course, these ideas did not originate with him, either. His own teacher, Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, zt”l, Rosh Yeshiva of Mercaz HaRav, was the elderly rabbi who sent dozens of his disciples out to settle Judea and Samaria, crying out, “Lo Taguru!” Do not fear! And they went.
In 1991, President George Bush Sr. was pressuring Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir into starting the “Madrid talks,” in which Israel, for the first time, was going to be discussing giving up parts of the Land of Israel to the Arabs as part of an “autonomy” plan. Shamir approached the Lubavitcher Rebbe and asked him how he should respond to the pressure from Bush to attend the talks. The Rebbe responded, “Say no! Say you won’t attend!” So Shamir asked, “But what if I’m afraid to say no?” And the Rebbe answered, “If you’re afraid to say no, you should quit!”
David Ben Gurion famously said, “It doesn’t matter what the non-Jews say. It matters what the Jews do.” David Ben Gurion was an irreligious Polish Jew raised in a Jewish environment, reacting instinctively as the people he grew up among might have reacted. Today’s Israel behaves Jewishly not because of a vestigial memory. Having hit bottom during the Oslo years, having forgotten altogether what it was that its religious great-grandparents said, having burnt its fingers with dangerous non-Jewish experiments, it is now on its way back up. The situation today is more healthy.
If, today, the Arabs dare to say we have no right to live in our country as Jews, that we never lived here in the past, that we have no right to return to our ancestral heritage, there could be no better response than a basic law stating the truth, and there is strong political support for such a move.
