The Hebrew Republic by Bernard Avishai

Author:Bernard Avishai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then.13

Morris became famous in the late 1980s, tracing the fate of Arab refugees during the first Israeli-Arab war, showing what was flight and what was expulsion. His outburst suggests an ominous direction in Israel’s political center. For there is an obvious way to safeguard a Jewish majority that is hardly named in polite conversation, though the polls, and the way most Israelis now grasp their history, should be giving us pause.

I mean “ha-transfer”—reducing by forced expulsion or economic pressure the numbers of Arabs living in the country. There is simply no way to get the “clean” separation Jeffrey Goldberg writes about without extensive ethnic cleansing. Israelis know this in their bones, even if they do not feel comfortable talking about it. When Meir Kahane voiced such views in the 1980s, his party was banned from the Knesset. Today, exponents of transfer serve in the government. The center would no doubt prefer the status quo to any ethnic cleansing, yet they know that the status quo—numbers, occupation, and all—is unsustainable: An April 2002 poll of Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies revealed that 46 percent of Israelis entertain the idea of expelling Palestinians, including Israeli citizens. Thirty-one percent, roughly the number of people who favor a state of Jewish law, favor the expulsion of Israeli Arabs.14 The settlers, for their part, do not have to convince a majority of Israelis that their settlement program is right. They only have to prove something proponents of the demographic argument concede in advance: that the Jewish people are something organic, which Israelis dare not divide.

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