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".