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A Jewish-Arab government for Israel now

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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).

Electronic poster: Huge protest on Saturday night: Israel is ready for Jewish-Arab partnership

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.

Protestors in Tel Aviv on 28/10/2026, holding placards saying “Yes to a Jewish-Arab government,” “Peace, equality and social justice,” “Freedom for all from the river to the sea.” Photo by Motti Milrod.

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.”

David and Goliath

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[I am a posting some autobiographical blogs, I hope towards writing a book about how my ideas and beliefs about Israel-Palestine and the conflict have evolved over the years. I might start here.]

“When David killed Goliath it was God’s doing. When Israel won the War of Independence, it was God’s doing.” That is how I remember the start of the essay I wrote about Israel in 1972, aged eleven, for which I won the Leon and Bertha Gradel Israel essay prize at King David Junior School in Manchester. My good memory at that age plays an important role in the story of the prize, which I was invited to read out an evening dinner for the school governors. I was terrified by the prospect and rehearsed a lot, carrying the essay around with me in the days leading up to the event. On the afternoon of the dinner, I realized when I arrived home that I had left the single copy of my text at school. When my father came home from work, he took me to the school in the hope of finding the caretaker to let us in, but there was no sign of him. So, I sat down to rewrite the essay, drawing as best I could on memory, filling in the gaps with equally florid prose where there were gaps. I spent the evening stuck as closely as possible to my two peers – both girls – who were also at the dinner, so closely that they went to the toilet to shake me off for a while. Needless to say, I made no mention that I was not reading out the actual prize-winning version when called up to the stage to speak. The following day our class teacher, the inspiring and much-loved Mrs. Abrahams, asked me how the reading had gone. When I told her and the whole class about forgetting the text in my desk, she was prompted to call one of the two local Jewish weekly newspapers [check cutting at Dad’s] , which published the story. We omitted just one detail, which was that my father and I had found an open outside door at the school but my classroom door was locked, my desk frustratingly close to it. There was no need to embarrass the caretaker.

On the left is Osmar Schindler’s 1888 painting “David and Goliath.” On the right is 15-year-old Faris Odeh throwing a rock at an Israeli tank during the Second Intifada. He was killed by the Israelis ten days after this picture was taken. Source: Beirut Today

The opening trope of the essay, of Israel as the David to its aggressive and monstrous Arab, non-Jewish neighbours, indicates how deeply I had absorbed a religiously-framed mythical Zionist narrative about the righteousness of the birth of the State of Israel. According to that narrative, Israel was. like David, relatively small and ill-equipped, the young Jewish underdog bravely standing alone against the might of the states of the Arab League, standing in for the Biblical Phillistines, Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, who invaded the newly-declared state on May 15th 1948. So outnumbered and overwhelmed was Israel that it was miraculous that it not only survived but triumphed over its enemies, just as in the First Book of Samuel David accredits his victory to the living God, not to the “sword and spear.” So, it was not just any sort of Zionism with which I had been inculcated, but a religiously-tinged version that saw the hand of God at work in the creation of the State of Israel, just as in the Biblical stories. There could thus be no question about the justice of Jewish nationalism, any more than of the Israelites victory over the Phillistines, achieved “in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of the armies of Israel.” (Book of Samuel 1, 17, 45).

The trope of Israel as David and the Arabs as Goliath is still current and potent. A book published in 2012 that posits Israel as the aggrieved party in the conflict, the victim of outrageous global media bias, uses the trope for its title. A blogger in 2019 similarly targets the “Goliath Arab propaganda machine” and bemoans its efforts to rob Israel of its victim-status as David: “we cannot let the Arab Propaganda machine steal the truth, including our very history and identity, and take Israel from the real David back to the evil Goliath.” Another similarly-titled recent book laments that Israel has lost its David status not only because of the size of the Arab and Muslim Goliath but also because of a new paradigm on the Left, a “race-consciousness in which the struggle of the third world against the West … replaced the older Marxist model of proletariat versus bourgeoisie.” Some people are just sore winners, oblivious to the immense power disparity between Israel and Palestinians. I could say more, but it’s not worth the trouble.

Not that I thought of my childhood essay at the time, but my experience of living in Jerusalem throughout the first intifada thoroughly dispelled the mythology of Israel as the small David and Palestinians as the giant Goliath. The uprising pitched mostly unarmed Palestinians in the Occupied Territories against Israel, the regional military superpower. Frequently, Palestinian youths – the Shabab – throwing stones or using catapults confronted and harried Israeli troops whose commanders were ill-prepared for handling a mass civilian uprising.  Although I had no television at home at the beginning of the intifada, I did not need to see live pictures of slingshots pitched against rifles and armored vehicles to understand that the typical media framing of the conflict had shifted and even been reversed in Israel as well as abroad, even in the USA, as noted by Ella Shohat in 1991. Palestinians became David and Israel Goliath. Perhaps the Palestinians did not have God on their side, as did David, but they certainly had justice on their side as the rebelled against illegitimate and unrelenting military rule.