Israel Can Be Jewish, Democratic, and Committed to Human Rights, Without Contradiction

Looking to Israel’s Declaration of Independence for guidance, Ruth Gavison addresses the polarization within Israeli society that has resulted from fierce debates over identity, the status of the Palestinians, religion, and the like:

We [in Israel] have forgotten that democracy, human rights, and the Jewish state, [all of which are enshrined in the Declaration], go together very well. Jews used to understand this. Not only do they go together well, they are required for each other. The people who struggled to establish the Jewish state knew that they were going to have a democracy and they were very responsive to the idea of human rights. . . . But these three interlocking elements . . . are today viewed by many as totally distinct, with either major tensions or even outright contradiction among them.

So, increasingly, we find people who want to take one element of the complex vision . . . and make it primary. They give their primary ideal a very expansive interpretation. They demand that the other two elements be operative only within the constraints of the broadly-defined primary element. And this happens from all sides of the political and cultural spectrum. . . .

The “wisdom” of the Declaration, and of the decisions that the founding fathers and mothers made in the first decades of Israel, was their agreement to disagree. . . . The Declaration itself [thus] left many ideological questions open. . . . Who is a Jew? What role does the Jewish religion play in the new state? What is the relationship within Judaism among nationalism, culture, and religion? What is the status of the Arab minority and what are its rights? . . .

[These questions] were to be dealt with politically, by a series of arrangements that Israel made. Israel created a set of impressive democratic institutions and an independent court, but it refused to transform the elements of its vision into legal questions of principle. Whether Israel was a capitalist or a socialist country, a religious or non-religious country, whether God would feature in the Israeli constitution—all of these were things people did not want to decide on. And that agreement not to decide permitted Israel to move on to the urgent challenges [facing it].

Read more at Fathom

More about: Israel & Zionism, Israeli Declaration of Independence, Israeli democracy, Israeli politics

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF