For four years, the Israeli opposition sought to undo the catastrophic results of the 2022 election. In 2026, they succeeded – but the electoral result is regarded as a disaster by many. Why isn’t 67-53 a victory? Obviously, because 19 of them are not opposition; they’re Arabs!
Where did that come from – that Israeli feeling that only Jews are to be trusted with national security decisions? Clearly there has been nothing in the last four years, specifically since October 7, that has called into question the loyalty or patriotism of Israeli Arabs (aka Israeli Palestinians). Is it left over from 1948, when chance largely determined which Palestinians could stay in the new state of Israel, and who had to leave, forcibly or otherwise?
I do not defend the harsh military rule Israeli Arabs lived under until 1966, but Jewish Israelis understandably saw little difference between the Palestinians who continued to live in the Galilee or the Negev and those who joined the fedayeen (the Palestinian guerrillas who began operating in the Fifties). Some must have been literally brothers.
Now, almost 80 years later, the picture is completely different. Israeli Palestinians are four to five generations removed from the Palestinians of 1948. They and their parents went to schools with an Israeli-designed curriculum, and learned Hebrew and even Judaism from an early age. Many have gone to university (in Hebrew) and are especially numerous in health-related professions, since most are barred from the security sector.
Why has Israel never even considered revising the distinctions made in 1948 under completely different, wartime conditions? Partly because those distinctions weren’t invented in 1948; they were baked into Zionism from its very beginnings, and had more to do with the European intellectual climate around 1900 than with the Middle East.
The European nationalism of that time had discovered race and social Darwinism, which were avidly incorporated into its notions of who was – or could ever be – a citizen.
That’s precisely why Jews were othered; not because they spoke or dressed differently. Alfred Dreyfus was indistinguishable from thousands of other French army officers – except that it was known he was Jewish. And that made him “other”; he couldn’t be trusted not to betray France because he could never be truly French.
Zionism imbibed this semi-racial consciousness as part of the heady brew of European nationalism in which it was conceived, and it fit neatly into Judaism. Too neatly. Even in the heyday of secular Zionism, the only way to become truly Israeli, i.e., Jewish, was through religious conversion. But that was rare; almost all were born into the fold.
That worked in the early 20th century, when Jews almost only married other Jews – and who would claim to be Jewish if they weren’t? It didn’t really fit during the post-Soviet aliyah when undoubtedly a lot of people who weren’t halakhically-born Jews became Israelis, and have been accepted as such. But that was glossed over since aliyah fit into the Zionist narrative.
Fundamental attitudes towards the Arab “other” have changed much less; obviously because they are both still identified as the enemy and are not part of the Jewish nation – and there is still no Israeli nation. Israel is only a state (medina), without the resonance of being a nation or a people (am). Arabs cannot be part of the Jewish body politic because they are inherently, irredeemably excluded from being part of the Jewish nation, just as Dreyfus was not regarded as a real Frenchman.
Moreover, Jewish Israelis have always lumped Arabs into one nation; a particularly conscience-salving trick because expelled Palestinians were assumed to be among their own people, ignoring the localism endemic in Arab society. New Israelis in the 1950s were only too happy to believe the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser, that the Arab nation would never accept the Jewish nation in its midst, which justified their treatment of Palestinians in Israel.
Even much later, in the heyday of the Abraham Accords, when Arab states were lining up to make peace with Israel, Israelis were still sure “the Arabs” were out to destroy them, even as they jetted off to holiday in Dubai. Of course there was another strain, one of civic, rather than racial, nationalism in Zionism. The most quoted phrase in Israel’s Declaration of Independence – “[The State of Israel]… will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex …” – had a genuine place in the Zionist movement.
And indeed, on a practical level, as Israelis have met more Hebrew-speaking Arabs in universities or in their professions, many barriers have eroded. But not in politics, where ideologies retain their sway. In Israel, politics isn’t “the art of the possible,” as an American definition puts it, but rather, the art of the impossible (e.g., Ben-Gurion’s quip, “The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer”).
Some Arab (and Jewish) political streams retain ideologies that are fantastical in Israel today. Liberal Israelis point to these ideologies as genuine reasons for refusing to go into a coalition against Bibi Netanyahu, whom they have reviled for years.
But does Vice-President Vance’s absurd anti-constitutional embrace of Christian nationalism keep him out of the American political mainstream? Liberal Israelis have yet to realize that a government coalition isn’t a marriage or a promise to believe the same thing forever – or even for four years.
Thus, even United Arab List’s Mansour Abbas, who has turned himself inside out trying to prove his acceptance of the Israeli state, is not acceptable to most Israeli Jews post-October 7. No one can coherently explain why, but currently an illusory “unity” government or a new election is for many liberals preferable to accepting that politics in a democracy must be the art of the possible.
They should note that the Israeli right learned that in 2022. When Bibi realized he needed more votes, he simply did away with the 40-year-old ban on mainstreaming racism and Kahanism – and invited Itamar Ben-Gvir into his coalition. Does Avigdor Lieberman really think that Mansour Abbas or even Balad party chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh could do even a fraction of the damage done by Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich?
As I’ve previously maintained, it is past time for Zionism to retire. Late 19th-century ideologies have no place in a 21st-century state, and should be replaced by a civic nationalism that includes the whole of the actual population. Of course Israel will remain “the Jewish State.” But retaining old ideologies is something else, since ideologies that liberated one generation will likely shackle another a century down the road.
Paul Scham is a retired Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Maryland and President of Partners for Progressive Israel, an American NGO. From 1996-2002 he coordinated joint Israeli-Palestinian research projects at the Truman Institute of the Hebrew University. He lives in Washington, D.C and writes a free substack called Israel and its Neighbors.
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