Open letter to the leaders of Israel’s “change coalition”

Dear Gadi, Naftali and Avigdor,

You don’t know me and I don’t know you. We don’t mix in the same circles. But I’d like you to hear me out anyway. Who am I? Take a look at me aged 14 in November1975, going to Manchester Grammar School wearing a badge saying “I’m a Zionist” as a response to the infamous UN Resolution equating Zionism with racism. The badges had been handed out at the local branch of Habonim, the Zionist youth movement in which I spent my teenage and early adulthood. I became the mazkir artzi (national secretary) of the movement from 1982-84, during which time I was the co-chair of the Zionist Youth Council and also a vice-president (or some such title) of the UK’s Zionist Federation. At the end of 1984, as I believed any genuine Zionist should, I came to Israel on aliya. I’ll hope that is enough to establish my Zionist credentials, because I know you want to create a new “Zionist government of those who serve.” (I’ll skip over the decade I spent in Israel, especially the bit when I refused to serve in the West Bank, as you’d probably stop listening to me, just another smolani (lefty), one who stopped calling himself a Zionist some decades ago).

In any case, you don’t have to listen me. I’m joining a chorus of voices proposing the same thing. Hagai Elad reminds you: “Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued rule poses a real danger to the country’s future, the leaders of the ‘Change Bloc’ warned before the elections … If they want to save the country, they need … to hear the hundreds of thousands of great-grandchildren of Palestinians from the Nakba generation say in a clear voice, to themselves and to anyone who cares to listen: We are here.” Noa Landau wrote: “On election day, multitudes of Arab citizens reached out to the public that calls itself liberal in the State of Israel, saying that they want to be part of this country.” Sanaa Hammoud calls out to you: “From here it is in your hands, leaders of the change bloc. We have shown up. We are ready. We are the partner. Will you refuse our offer?” Will you?

I add to that chorus that if you establish a Jewish-Arab government, you will also create a Zionist government, probably the best one Israel has ever had. Gadi, you’ve laid down conditions for parties to join the coalition you want to lead, including adherence to the values of the Declaration of Independence. That document envisions a “country for the benefit of all its inhabitants … based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets” that would also “uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex.” Creating Israel’s first Jewish-Arab government, by including the Joint List and Ra’am in your coalition, would be a wonderful fulfilment of the values you cherish. It would be an effective mechanism to work towards liberty, justice and peace. You could formulate policies, approve legislation and establish programmes in which young people could serve their country by advancing those values. There is more than one way to serve your country.

Would the Joint List and Ra’am be such terrible coalition partners? Much of what they demand is what any government should be able to do, notably to put an end to the terrible wave of criminal killings that plague Palestinian society in Israel. Other good tests of the meshulit (governability) that everyone was going on about recently would be to impose law and order on the violent settlers in the West Bank, by changing the orders given to the military and police there. This could also be the best Zionist government that Israel has seen by restoring the damage done to it as a “Jewish and democratic” state, protecting and reinvigorating its democracy and its independent judiciary. But it would also be the best Zionist government ever because it could extract Israel from its “forever wars,” which is the cost of living – and dying – under the current government. In the Declaration of Independence, the Zionist movement also offers “peace and amity to all the neighbouring states and their peoples.” Saving Israel from the current isolationist, extremist, violent, hateful and self-destructive path it is on would surely count as the foremost Zionist act.

And if you pay no heed to my advice or the voices of the protestors who will gather on Saturday night to demand an Arab-Jewish government, what kind of Zionists will you be? The kind that lends weight to the claim that “Zionism is racism.” Because you will be demonstrating that for you Zionism means only Jews may participate in the government of Israel, that the representatives of the Palestinians in Israel do not have equal political rights to the representatives of the Jews. That you do not uphold the values of the Declaration of Independence, so that you should not be in your own coalition. That is where the dividing line of Israeli politics and society has now shifted to, following the unprecedented turnout of Palestinian society in Israel. On one side are the Zionists who are also Jewish supremacists, recognising only Jewish rights to their homeland, not Palestinian rights. On the other side are Zionists, who, true to the Declaration of Independence, invoke both the “self-evident right of the Jewish people to be a nation … in its own sovereign state” and the same rights of “all other nations” to be the same, which must include the Palestinian people too. The Zionism of those who claim exclusive rights to land and statehood is racist. If you fall into the trap laid for you by Netanyahu and his allies, by delegitimising the mandates of Israel’s Palestinian-majority parties, you will hand him an election victory he did not earn. As Gideon Levi wrote: “If the opposition leaders tell the Arabs ‘no’, it will be clear that they are Bibi-ists. That they prefer even the devil Netanyahu to conquering their racism.”

You will have to be bold to establish Israel’s first Jewish-Arab government. You will have to be statesmen, not politicians. You will need to fall in line with your coalition partner, Yair Golan. What I am and so many others are asking is political fantasy, I know. But Zionism began as a political fantasy that became a reality: “if you will it, it is no dream.”