Jonathan Cook
Blood and Religion: The unmasking
of the Jewish and Democratic State
Published by Pluto Press in Britain in April
and in the United States in July 2006
For details about how to buy the book
Praise for Blood and Religion:
‘Jonathan Cook’s timely and important book on the Palestinians in Israel is by far the most penetrating and comprehensive on the subject to date ... [He] builds, through exhaustive reference to the Hebrew press, a convincing picture of ethnocratic Zionism constantly preoccupied with a central dilemma: how to rid the land of its indigenous people. This work should be required reading.’
Nur Masalha, Director of Holy Land Studies, St Mary’s College, University of Surrey, and author of The Politics of Denial (2003)
‘An original and powerful book.’
Ilan Pappe, Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Haifa University, and author of A Modern History of Palestine (2004)
‘Very impressive … Some of his findings will astound even the knowledgeable reader.’
Salim Tamari, Director of the Institute of Jerusalem Studies
Reviews:
Extracts from the book:
On the problems of defining a state as Jewish (in PDF) click here HERE DOWN THE PAGE
On demography and the Gaza disengagement (in PDF) click here
From the back cover:
What does Israel hope to achieve with its recent withdrawal from Gaza and the building of a 700km wall around the West Bank?
Jonathan Cook, who has reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the Second Intifada, presents a lucid account of the Jewish state's motives. The heart of the issue, he argues, is demography. Israel fears the moment when a region's Palestinians - Israel's own Palestinian citizens and those in the Occupied Territories - become a majority. Inevitable comparisons with apartheid in South Africa will be drawn.
This book charts Israel's increasingly desperate responses to its predicament:
military repression of Palestinian dissent on both sides of the Green Line
accusations that Israel's Palestinian citizens and the Palestinian Authority are secretly conspiring to subvert the Jewish state from within
a ban on marriages between Palestinians living under occupation and Israel's own Palestinian population to prevent the right of return 'through the back door'
the redrawing of the Green Line to create an expanded, fortress state, where only Jewish blood and Jewish religion count
Ultimately, concludes the author, these abuses will lead to a third, far deadlier intifada.
About the author:
Jonathan Cook, a former staff journalist of the Guardian and Observer newspapers, has also written for The Times, Le Monde diplomatique, international Herald Tribune, Al-Ahram Weekly and Aljazeera.net
He is based in Nazareth, Israel.
Introduction: The Glass Wall
Instead on another deception: that the establishment of Israel allowed
the Jews to normalise, to become “a nation like other nations”. But
what exactly is the nation of Israel? In other countries, the answer
is relatively simple: the French nation, for example, is the collection
of people who hold French citizenship; it is, in other words, the
sum of French citizens. But the Israeli nation is something different.
According to Israel’s founding laws, the state belongs not just to
the people who live in Israel, to its citizens (one in fi ve of whom is
ethnically Arab), but to the Jewish people wherever they live around
the world and whatever other nationalities – American, French,
British, Argentinian – they consider themselves to be. As the Israeli
sociologist Baruch Kimmerling points out: “The state is not defi ned
as belonging to its citizens, but to the entire Jewish people.”
SEPARATE NATIONALITIES, UNEQUAL CITIZENS
The murkiness of Israel’s self-definition is underscored by the
privileged status various international Zionist organisations, including
the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund, enjoy in Israeli
law. They have a semi-governmental status, including owning vast
tracts of Israeli land, even though their charters require them to act
exclusively in the interests of world Jewry.
As a consequence, Arab citizens’ exclusion from the Israeli
and Jewish nation has very concrete effects both on their social
position in Israel and the possibility of developing a civic identity.
For example, there are some 137 possible nationalities that can be
recorded on Israeli identity cards: from Jew, Georgian, Russian and
Hebrew through to Arab, Druze, Abkhazi, Assyrian and Samaritan.
Everything, in fact, apart from Israeli.41 This is because the state
refuses to acknowledge that the Israeli nation can be separated from
the Jewish nation. The two are seen as identical, meaning that non-
Jews in Israel, including the population of more than one million
Palestinians, are effectively citizens without a nationality; they are
more akin to permanent residents. The state’s approach suggests
that it regards the nation of Israel as including potentially millions
of Jews who do not live in Israel and do not have Israeli citizenship
and as excluding the more than one million Palestinians who do live
in Israel and do have Israeli citizenship.
Blood and Religion
The courts have consistently upheld this position. In 1971, for
example, when an Israeli Jew petitioned the Supreme Court to have
his nationality changed from Jewish to Israeli in public records, Chief
Justice Shimon Agranat rejected the application, arguing:
If there is in the country today – just 23 years after the establishment of the
state – a bunch of people, or even more, who ask to separate themselves from
the Jewish people and to achieve for themselves the status of a distinct Israeli
nation, then such a separatist approach should not be seen as a legitimate
approach.42
Agranat’s ruling was confi rmed by the courts again in early 2004.
The diffi culty facing the Israeli legal system is that to recognise a
common Israeli nationality – to recognise in effect a shared bond of
citizenship between Jews and Arabs inside Israel – would negate the
intentions of the country’s founding fathers, who premised their state
on the principle that it was a haven-in-waiting for the whole Jewish
people, wherever they lived. In this sense the legal concept of Israeli
nationality is unlike that found on the statute books anywhere else
in the world. Jews and Arabs may share the same label of “Israeli”
but they are different kinds of nationals and citizens: the former are
included in the notion of a common national good, while the latter
are excluded.
Consider just one example of the racist implications of this view
of Israeli nationality, sanctioned by both the state and the courts.
Although almost all land in Israel is nationalised, the state publicly
admits that it does not hold it for the benefi t of the country’s citizens.
It is held, in trust, on behalf of Jewish people around the world.
The land of Israel is the property not of the Israeli people but of the
Jewish nation, of Jews everywhere and for all time. As a result, Arab
citizens have no rights to most of the country’s territory, and legally
can be excluded from the communities built on that territory. A Jew
from Brooklyn and his or her children and unborn children enjoy
absolute and eternal rights in Israel (even if they choose not to realise
those rights), while a Palestinian citizen living in Nazareth or Haifa,
whose family has lived on the land now called Israel for many gen-
erations, does not. In 2002 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon explained
the difference during a Knesset debate when he observed that while
Arab citizens enjoyed “rights in the land” – they had tenants’ rights
– “all rights over the Land of Israel are Jewish rights”.43 In short, the
state considers the Jewish people as the landlords of Israel.
The difference in the nature of the nationality enjoyed by Jews
and Arabs is embodied at the most basic level in an early piece of
immigration legislation called the Law of Return. Passed in 1950,
two years after the establishment of the state, the Law of Return
was designed to ensure that the demographic ghost of the Pales-
tinian homeland on which the Jewish state was built never return
to haunt it. It gives a right to every Jew in the world to migrate to
Israel and receive automatic citizenship while barring the return of
Palestinians exiled by the 1948 war. The legislation skews the demo-
graphic realities in Israel so that Jewish numerical dominance can
be maintained in perpetuity. It has eased the passage of some three
million Jews to Israel, and disinherited the 750,000 Palestinians who
were either expelled or terrorised out of the country under cover of
war, and millions of their descendants. The consequence of the Law
of Return – if not its purpose – has been to ensure that inside Israel
the Jewish population maintains an unassailable numerical majority
over what remains of the Palestinian population.
THE JEWISH STATE DEFINED
The Jewish identity of the state, and the permanent marginalisa-
tion of the Palestinian citizens it was forced to inherit in 1948, was
enshrined in the country’s founding document, the Declaration
of Independence, which mentions only the history, culture and
collective memory of the Jewish people.44 It speaks not on behalf
of the country’s citizens but on behalf of the representatives of the
Jewish people, as well as the Zionist movements, including the Jewish
Agency and the Jewish National Fund.45 These organisations, which
enjoy a legal right to discriminate in favour of Jews, control social,
political and economic benefi ts for Jews only.
Despite a pledge in the Declaration of Independence to produce a
constitution within six months of the establishment of the state, no
document has yet been drawn up. One of the insuperable obstacles
facing the drafters has been how to embody the ethnic and religious
values of a Jewish state without resorting to clearly discriminatory
language.46 A fl avour, however, of what values the courts think a
“Jewish state” embodies have been provided by the current chief
justice, Aharon Barak, considered one of the most progressive and
secular voices in Israel:
[The] Jewish state is the state of the Jewish people ... it is a state in which
every Jew has the right to return ... it is a state where the language is Hebrew
and most of its holidays represent its national rebirth ... a Jewish state is
a state which developed a Jewish culture, Jewish education and a loving
Jewish people ... a Jewish state derives its values from its religious heritage,
the Bible is the basic of its books and Israel’s prophets are the basis of its
morality. A Jewish state is also a state where the Jewish Law fulfi lls a sig-
nifi cant role ... a Jewish state is a state in which the values of Israel, Torah,
Jewish heritage and the values of the Jewish halacha [religious law] are the
bases of its values.47
Instead of a constitution, Israel has 11 Basic Laws, none of which
guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of religion or, most impor-
tantly, equality. The Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty, passed
in 1992 and the nearest thing Israel has to a Bill of Rights, fails to
include equality among the rights it enumerates, instead emphasis-
ing the values of the state as “Jewish and democratic”. As a result,
state-organised discrimination cannot easily be challenged in the
courts. Repeated attempts by Arab Knesset members to introduce
an amendment to the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty
incorporating the principle of equality have been rejected by an
overwhelming majority of Jewish MKs.48 (In any case, since the 1948
war Israel has never revoked a state of emergency that allows gross
violations of human rights inside Israel).
ISRAEL’S PACT BETWEEN THE RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR
The veiling of the religious and ethnic discrimination at the heart of
Israel has been partly achieved through the seemingly unimportant
decision of its founding fathers to remove the state from all matters
of personal status. Each religious community has been left to regulate
issues relating to its members’ births, deaths and marriages. In these
core matters in each citizen’s life there are no civil institutions or
courts to which he or she can turn. It is neither possible to register
as an atheist or agnostic, nor formally to bring up one’s children
as secular citizens. Instead, the leaderships of each of the main
religious communities – Jew, Muslim, Christian and Druze – have
been given exclusive powers to deal with their own members. Anyone
belonging to the Arab Christian community of the Greek Orthodox
faith, for example, must seek a divorce in a Greek Orthodox religious
court before a panel of clergy in proceedings possibly carried out in
Greek, with translation for the Arab participants, and according to
Byzantine laws dating back to the fourteenth century.50 Similarly,
no civil marriage is possible in Israel, forcing citizens from different
religious communities to marry abroad.
Rather than encouraging diversity, Israel has used the “subcon-
tracting out” of personal status matters as a way to create a series of
ethnic and communal partitions. There is no room for civil society
to fl ourish when the state has abandoned its citizen to their religious
ghettos, and the arbitrary decisions of their religious leaders. Instead
individual citizens have been left to fi ght lonely battles to establish
their rights in the most private areas of their lives, without the help
or protection of civil institutions and laws. By refusing to offer an
alternative, secular identity to its citizens in addition to that offered
by the religious authorities, or to arbitrate in disputes between indi-
viduals and their confessional group, the state leaves citizens prey
to anachronistic traditions and the whims of bigots. In Israel, the
most lively public debates concentrate on arcane personal status
issues, such as the battles to ease marriage restrictions, allow public
venues to open on the Sabbath, and end the Jewish Orthodox’s iron
grip on conversion. There is no room to adopt a more critical civil
discourse, one that questions the huge budgetary requirements of
Israel’s military or the economic policies that have opened up huge
disparities in wealth and employment.
The authority wielded by the various religious leaderships, rather
than equalising the status of the different religions before the law,
has served to entrench an especially privileged place for Judaism in
Israel, as the religion of the majority. The Hebrew calendar and the
Jewish religious holidays are the only ones recognised; offi ces, banks,
institutions and public transport shut down for the Jewish Sabbath
only; restaurants, factories and public institutions are obligated to
follow only the hygiene practices of Jews; only Jewish holy sites are
recognised and protected by law; almost the entire budget of the
Religious Affairs Ministry is reserved for Jewish places of worship,
cemeteries, seminaries and religious institutions;51 and Jewish
religious schools receive resources far outstripping those given to
state-run Jewish and Arab education.52
Conversion, which would at least offer a route, if a problematic
one, to inter-confessional marriage inside Israel and lower the barriers
between religious communities, has been made all but impossible
in the case of Judaism. In an agreement forged in the earliest days
of the Jewish state, control over personal status matters was passed
exclusively to rabbis representing Orthodoxy, a fundamentalist
stream of Judaism and the least progressive of its major movements.
As well as insisting on a purist defi nition of who is registered as a
Jew (only those born to a Jewish mother), the Orthodox rabbinate in
Israel approves only a handful of conversions to the Jewish faith each
year, requiring that converts accept a fundamentalist interpretation
of Judaism, including observance of halacha (Judaism’s equivalent
of sharia law). Conversions performed in Israel by rabbis belonging
to other streams, such as the Conservative and Reform movements,
are not recognised by the state.
This pact between the state and Orthodoxy has averted any threat,
however improbable, of Palestinian citizens converting en masse
to Judaism and thereby ending their exclusion from the centres
of power. But it has also caused collateral damage, making life
extremely diffi cult for Jews living in Israel who are not considered
Jewish by the Orthodox rabbinate, including more than a quarter
of a million immigrants who arrived in the last 15 years following
the collapse of the Soviet Union.53 Because they are the non-Jewish
spouses of returning Jews, or the offspring of such marriages, they
fi nd themselves unable to wed in Israel,54 to be buried in Jewish
cemeteries, or to be registered as a Jew on their identity cards. Their
children inherit this fl aw.
Religious control over personal status matters has erected impene-
trable barriers between Jews and Arabs in both the communal and the
individual sphere. The policy has undermined any awareness of shared
interests between Israel’s different confessions; instead, communal
groups must battle for resources that benefi t their members alone
rather than forging alliances that might unite groups on other bases.
The arrangements put in place by the state have forced citizens to
remain in a sectarian, tribal formation – as Jews, Muslims, Christians
and Druze – vying for resources and privileges.
In this hierarchy of citizenship, given the state’s defi nition as a
Jewish state, the Jewish majority is always the winner by some con-
siderable margin;55 lagging a great distance behind are the Christian
Arab denominations, which, because of their historic links to the
global Churches, have enjoyed better opportunities for education
and travel;56 next comes the small Druze community, treated by the
state as a national minority separate from the Arab population whose
members are obligated in law to perform military service alongside
Jews; and in last place is to be found the large Muslim population,
comprising 80 per cent of the country’s Palestinian minority, which
has been entirely marginalised.
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