The Knesset Government Building in Jerusalem
The Israeli Knesset and Palestinian Authority remain in a deadlock.
Mahmoud Abbas has not been able to get Hamas and Fatah, two factions of the Palestinians, to agree together to renounce violence, or to acknowledge the right of Israel to exist. Prime Minister, Netanyahu, at the same time is under enormous pressure from his political base to continue construction of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem and in the contested Palestinian land known as the “West Bank”.
Security Wall on East Slope of Mount of Olives
Israel wants to be recognized as a democratic State that provides full and equal rights to its Jewish and Israeli Arab population. But as a State formed to be a homeland for the Jewish people, Israel’s leaders must make sure that its non-Jewish citizens do not grow to the point of being able to get a majority of the vote in popular elections.
This past week something else happened that has raised additional tensions. In an attempt to position Israel as a Jewish State, the Israeli Knesset advanced proposed legislation that would require an oath of loyalty from new immigrants acknowledging that Israel exists as a homeland for the Jewish people.
Writing in the Jewish news service Haaretz.com, Gideon Levy writes, “Remember this day. On this day the character of Israel changed.”
Levy goes on to reason that if this legislation passes it will be all the more difficult to defend Israel as a member of the democratic states since a democracy stands not just for the rule of the majority but the rights of a minority.
Levy goes on to warn, “For decades, we have futilely dealt with the question of who is a Jew. Now the question of what is Jewish will not go away. What is the “state of the Jewish nation”? Does it belong more to Jews in the Diaspora than to its Arab citizens? Will they decide its fate and will this be called a democracy? Will the ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta sect, which opposes the state’s existence, along with hundreds of thousands of Jews who have avoided coming do whatever they want with it? What is Jewish? Jewish holidays? Kosher dietary laws? The increased grip of the religious establishment, as if there is not enough of it now to distort democracy? Swearing an oath to a Jewish state will decide its fate. It is liable to turn the country into a theocracy like Saudi Arabia.”
I write this not to engage in a debate about the merits of this proposed “oath of loyalty” or even about whether a democracy is the only defensible form of government in a modern world. It seems to me that what is important about this development is that it reflects the ultimately unavoidable issue of Jewishness.
Israel’s leaders want to be seen as a modern secular democracy while laying claim to “Jewishness.” Without realizing it they are laying claim to something that cannot be defined or defended apart from its spiritual roots.
So Paul wrote to the Romans, “For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not from men but from God” (Rom 2:28-29). Later in the same letter Paul adds, “For they are not all Israel who are of Israel” (9:6).
As the Knesset continues to press for the protection of Jewishness it is unwittingly attempting to protect something which exists to say, there is no security in anything or anyone other than the God who gave birth to “a chosen people”, and a “promised land” to tell his story… and ours.
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