'Jewish State' Has Become an Anachronism
At the dawn of the 20th century, in the twilight of the continental empires, Europe's subject peoples dreamed of forming "nation-states," territorial homelands where Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Armenians and others might live free, masters of their own fate. When the Hapsburg and Romanov empires collapsed after World War I, a flurry of new states did emerge. The first thing they did was privilege their national "ethnic" majority -- defined by language or religion or antiquity or all three -- at the expense of inconvenient local minorities, who were consigned to second-class status.
But one nationalist movement -- Zionism -- was frustrated in its ambitions. It was only in 1948 that a Jewish nation-state was belatedly established in formerly Ottoman Palestine. But the founders of the Jewish state had been influenced by the same concepts and categories as their fin de siecle contemporaries back in Warsaw, Odessa and Bucharest. Not surprisingly, Israel's ethno-religious self-definition and its discrimination against internal "foreigners" have always had more in common with, say, the practices of post-Hapsburg Romania than either party might care to acknowledge.
The problem with Israel, in short, is not, as is sometimes suggested, that it is a European enclave in the Arab world but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-19th-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state" -- a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded -- is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.
In one vital attribute, however, Israel is different from previous insecure, defensive microstates born of imperial collapse: It is a democracy. But thanks to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices.
It can dismantle the settlements and return to the 1967 borders, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy.
Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy the West Bank and Gaza, whose Arab population will become the demographic majority within five to eight years, in which case it will be either a Jewish state with a growing majority of disenfranchised non-Jews or it will be a democracy. But it cannot be both.
