The Jewish Nation State Law: If Israel Practiced Democracy, It’d Be Called Palestine

Introduction

On July 19, the Israeli legislature, the Knesset, passed a law defining Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, prompting criticism in the US mainstream media that it represents a departure from the democratic principles Israel was founded upon.

The reality is that the Jewish Nation State Law can’t represent a departure from democratic principles for the simple reason that Israel owes its very existence to a fundamental rejection of democracy.

The “Jewish State” of Israel was established through two profound manifestations of that rejectionism: the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

A brief review of the historical record shows how, if Israel practiced democracy, it would be called Palestine. Hence the necessity for the Jewish Nation State Law.

The Zionist Mandate for Palestine

During the First World War, Great Britain came to militarily occupy Palestine and promised the Arabs their independence in exchange for a commitment to join in the war effort against the Ottoman Empire. Although they did not rise up en masse against their Ottoman rulers, Arabs from Palestine were among the first to volunteer to fight with the British in order to gain their freedom from Turkish rule.

However, the British government never had any intention of honoring its promise to support independence for the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. Instead, their aim was to prevent the Palestinians from exercising their right to self-determination in service to the Zionist leadership in Europe, a quid pro quo for Jewish support for the war effort.

The infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917, delivered in the form of a private letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a representative of the Zionist movement and member of the renowned banking family, was a propaganda document designed for the purpose of acquiring Jewish support for the war.

It promised British support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” while paying meaningless lip service to “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” in order to ensure that the Declaration did not undermine the government’s need to also acquire support from Arab rulers.

Established in the wake of the war, the League of Nations issued its “Mandate” for Palestine, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration and was drafted by organized Zionists to further the aim of reconstituting Arab Palestine into a “Jewish state”.

The purpose of the Mandate, enforced by British guns, was to deny democratic self-governance to the inhabitants of Palestine until the Jews had through mass immigration managed to establish a numerical majority.

However, by the end of the Mandate, Jews still remained a minority, comprising about a third of the population. Moreover, despite the best efforts of the Zionist leadership, the Jewish community had only managed to purchase about 7 percent of the land in Palestine. Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district in Palestine, including Jaffa, which included the main Jewish population center of Tel Aviv.

The reality of demographics and land ownership posed a problem for the Zionist leadership. The Arabs rejected the Mandate and were giving the British trouble. They recognized that the Zionists envisioned their political disenfranchisement and eventual displacement from the land.

Initially, the means by which Arabs were displaced was through land purchases exploiting feudalistic Ottoman land laws that deprived Arab peasants of their property rights. But the failure to acquire more than 7 percent of the land meant that other means would need to be employed to gain control over the area envisioned for the “Jewish state”.

The Arabs naturally rejected the Mandate, and they also understood that the implementation of the Zionist project meant their subjugation to foreign powers. (Indeed, the British acknowledged that the Arabs of Palestine exercised a greater measure of self-governance under Ottoman rule!)

While Zionist propagandists like Elan Journo in his new hoax book What Justice Demands are fond of claiming that it was the Arabs who rejected Jewish self-determination in Palestine, the truth is that the Mandate itself constituted a rejection of this right of the land’s Arab inhabitants.

Moreover, the Arab leadership was insistent in their demand that the independence of Palestine be recognized under a constitution guaranteeing representative democracy and minority rights. The Zionist leadership tellingly rejected the democratic solution, as did the British (who described Arabs demanding that their right to self-determination be respected as “extremists”, whereas those who were willing to collaborate with the Zionist occupation regime were dubbed “moderate”).

Democracy simply was not a solution for the Zionists—it was rather an obstacle to be overcome to achieve their aims. In the view of the Zionists, the Palestinians had to be prevented from being able to exercise their right to self-determination, and so British guns were employed to that end.

But British guns only took the Zionists so far. They’d have to get the rest of the way toward establishment of their “Jewish state” on their own.