What Nation? What Kind of Nation State?

Since I discussed the variety of meanings attached to terms like nation and nationalist or Zionist (in the September 16 insert to the September 12, 2006 posting here), it seems to have become the subject of wider discussion. In Canada's Liberal Party's leadership contest, it may have started earlier, when front runner Michael Ignatieff (having been accused earlier by Ukrainian Canadian constituents of published slights against Ukrainian nationhood) made positive noises about Quebec nationhood. That trend was reinforced by Conservative minority prime minister Stephen Harper suggesting that the Quebecois, but not Quebec, be considered a nation; with approval from all parties in parliament.

Stephane Dion, the Quebecois who came from fourth place to win the Liberal leadership has been opposed to anything that could detract from the unity of Canada/Canadians including Quebec/Quebecois. He had initially been recruited into politics (from academic life) by former Liberal PM Chrétien right after the narrow defeat of a referendum for Quebec sovereignty, because of his determined stand against independence. He has since been under some pressure to end his dual citizenship by relinquishing the French one (I ought to say something about that; not now).

In yesterday's (December 30) column, Uri Avnery discusses nationhood in relation to Israel. The specific context is the Israeli refusal to allow an Arab Israeli (Sami) from Acre to live with his wife Lola from Jenin; which is in the occupied West Bank. Apart from security concerns, routinely alleged for discriminatory measures against Arabs, others have been used, most recently that Israel is a nation state; meaning what?

I doubt that most readers in North America and other modern democracies found it easy to understand Avnery's train of thought here; as indeed I hadn't, making me refer also to the Hebrew version. He asks: "What is the nation in question? A world-wide Jewish nation? An Israeli-Jewish nation? Or just an Israeli nation?" In the end, what he believes an Israeli nation state has to be, amounts about to what people in modern Western democracies tend to believe; but apparently not quite.

Avnery mentions effects of "political slang" in Israel. I had been amused early on when on U.S. TV weather forecasts, they talked of the weather in "the nation's midsection". Storms reported there would have conjured up in the minds of people used to ethnic nationalism terms, like most Israelis, an epidemic of badly upset American stomachs; rather than stormy weather in the centrally located U.S. prairie states. One way to bypass most of the confusion about words may be to cite the practical issue of the Israeli identity card, which some Israelis now are trying to change, including Avnery: "Israeli identity cards record the holder's 'nation'. Cards belonging to Jews say: 'Nation: Jewish'." That was already true when I received my ID card while serving in Tzahal (now "IDF" for easier ID in the US ) during the War of Independence; when Avnery was already badly wounded (I think). He now wants the card to say Nation: Israeli.

But does he mean that he wants an Israeli nation state; or any nation states at all. He seems to regard these as obsolete. Two posssibilities are presented: (a) "A citizen's state, in which all the citizens are equal, irrespective of ethnic origin, nation, religion, language and gender................"; (b) "A national state, in which a Jewish-Israeli majority exists side by side with a Palestinian-Israeli minority. In such a state, the majority has its national institutions, but the minority, too, is recognized as a national entity, with clearly defined national rights". Jabotinsky, his early right wing Zionist mentor, is supposed to have favored the latter. Labor's Pinhas Lavon, in Israel's first weeks, "suggested a choice between an 'autonomist' approach which would allow the minority to form its own autonomous institutions in a state dominated by the majority belonging to another nation, and a 'state-values' state, in which all citizens would be treated according to universal and egalitarian standards. Lavon preferred the second alternative (a state belonging to all its citizens), and so do I".

I don't know if I am the only one who finds it hard to see how the latter can be harmonized with the paragraph shortly thereafter: "I AM an Israeli. I certainly want to live in a State of Israel where the majority speaks Hebrew and the Hebrew identity, the Hebrew culture and the Hebrew tradition can be developed. That does not restrain me at all from striving for a situation in which the Palestinian citizens of the state are free to develop their own national identity, culture and tradition". The problem is not in the translation. (The only thing different in the Hebrew version is the addition of "there is nothing new under the sun" following the Jabotinsky and Lavon quotations).

At the end Avnery predicts the end of the nation state as it has existed since the transition from small feudal dynastic states (as I had described for Germany, but he also includes England, France, having incorporated Scotland, Corsica). While the formal structure may remain, they will turn into "multicultural, open and liberal" states. And "if the State of Israel does not want to explode from within, it must sooner or later become such a state - an Israeli state in which Sammy from Acre can live in dignity, together with his wife Lola from Jenin".

Entry Denied

An e-mail from Gush Shalom included an appeal from an Israel Committee for the Right of Residency (ICRR) concerning entry denials to the occupied territories with strong resemblances to what happened to Jewish citizens of Poland living in, and expelled from, Nazi Germany in October 1938. The event is now remembered almost only for leading indirectly to the Kristallnacht pogrom a week later, after Herschel Grynszpan, whose family, like mine, was among those expelled, fatally shot vom Rath of the German embassy in Paris. My posting of January 6, 2006 has a brief description of what actually happened to us in Dortmund: being woken up by brownshirted stormtroopers (SA) banging on our door, exhibited with all others on the central city square, then put on a special train to the Polish border; where the Polish government refused to admit the Jews who had been born in what had since become Polish territory. Some pertinent background not included in that posting is given in the next two paragraphs before the ICCR appeal.

That "Polenaktion", the first Nazi "Aktion" in which children were also targeted, was not just a German atrocity. Most of our parents' generation had been born in what became the second Polish Republic after World War I, but had really been born in, and come to Germany from, one of the three empires that had kept partitioning Poland among themselves, predominantly from the Habsburg one. Getting German citizenship had been almost impossible, even for those of us who had been born in Germany. But when the Polish state was revived, its government had undertaken to provide citizenship to people born in the areas now to be part of Poland. Passports were renewed periodically, without problems.Then, near the end of October 1938 the increasingly authoritarian and antisemitic Polish government made clear that it would no longer renew passports, or recognize still valid ones (at least for Jews), beyond the end of the month.

That the Nazis were taken by surprise and had to decide fast, if they were not to have a lot of stateless Jews, is shown by the lack of preparation and the poor organization of the expulsions. In turn, the Polish authorities were not prepared for the way the Nazis reacted and had to improvise their own reaction. There were stories of people being chased back and forth by rifle fire from both the German and the Polish side of the border; even of many thus killed. Apparently none were, and it now appears likely that from the Polish side there was shooting with only one group, and that was above their heads. As to Polish policy, there is ample documentation now of demographic considerations and steps taken to decrease the percentage of Jews in Poland. So they decided : Entry denied; to the Grynszpans, to us and thousands of others.

The following excerpts from the appeal of the Israel Committee for the Right of Residency, ICRR, start at the beginning.:
"In March 2006, the Israeli government initiated a policy of visa denial to individuals of Palestinian descent having foreign passports, many of whom Israel has arbitrarily denied residency rights to in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). Many of these persons have lived in the OPT for years without succeeding to obtain residency rights ……… These people have managed to stay in the Occupied Palestinian Territory by means of tourist visas issued by the Israeli government. Such visas are valid for three months. Their holders are obliged to go abroad to renew them ……..[but] have no assurance that they will be allowed to return, and in recent years the number of people denied reentry has increased significantly ……… And only today, December 5, 2006, we learn from the Palestinian campaign for entry rights, of an escalation in Israeli policy. The Ministry of Interior now refuses to process visa extensions at all. .. As a result of this 'entry-denied' policy, families are torn apart, schooling for the children is disrupted, and economic disasters follow."

[Although there are differences, most notably in that their foreign passports entitle them to go to the issuing country, this part is very close to what was happening to us at the (German-) Polish border and is clearly also motivated by the "demographic threat", albeit this time from non Jews. The latter probably also figures in the following]:

" Among the entry-denied individuals are professionals from foreign countries who are not necessarily Palestinian. This group includes physicians, teachers ….. and professionals in a variety of fields filling critically important positions in hospitals, schools, universities, and social institutions……[They] leave a vacuum in institutions unable to find replacements. This is devastating for all concerned, and has life-threatening implications particularly in the field of medical care"
" A group of concerned Israeli citizens has organized to protest this injustice which stands in gross contradiction to Israel's self-declared image as a democratic state supportive of human rights and aspiring to a peaceful resolution of its conflict with the Palestinian people. ….. We have been meeting with staffs of foreign embassies in Israel and have called upon them to use their good offices……However, embassies do not make policy."

" We therefore call upon you, people of conscience living abroad, to organize campaigns to inform your officials in your countries about Israel's policy of 'entry-denied. …… write letters of protest to the Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, and for those of you who are academics or are in the medical profession to additionally write to the Minister of Education and Minister of Health."

The ICRR asked to have this distributed widely. I tried to have it disseminated by what seemed a suitable Canadian outfit; no success, so I have to hope this achieves something. The full appeal, with addresses to write to, is at http://www.flwi.ugent.be/cie/Palestina/palestina312.htm