http://www.alquds.org/palestine/history/index.html
The Nature of the State of Israel
From the Introduction to Israel - An Apartheid State,
by Uri Davis, Zed Books, London and New Jersey, 1987
(This sub-chapter is entitled in the original: Israel and Palestinian Return)
Israel was established as a Jewish state. It was not intended as a state for
all of its citizens, Jews and non-Jews alike. Rather, it was primarily
envisaged as a state for Jews, that is, a state of which every Jewish
individual throughout the world would be a potential citizen. Thus, when the
state was unilaterally established on 15 May 1948, it became imperative for its
legislative body, the Knesset, to define in law those persons who would qualify
as actual or potential citizens, and those who would be excluded - that is,
non-Jews in general, and Palestinian Arabs in particular. This was done without
undue delay. In 1950 the Israeli Knesset passed two laws: the Law of Return,
defining the boundaries of inclusion ('every Jew has the right to immigrate
into the country') and the Absentee Property Law, defining the boundaries of
exclusion ('absentee'). Under these laws, every Jew throughout the world is
legally entitled to become a citizen of the state of Israel upon immigration
into the country, while some two million people, the 1948 Palestinian Arabs and
their descendants, who were exiled as a consequence of the 1948-9 and the 1967
wars, are denied the rights of citizenship. Nevertheless, their right of return
is universally recognized in international law and in repeated UN resolutions
(beginning with Resolution 194 (III), 11 December 1948). They clearly exist.
Yet, they are defined in Israeli law as 'non-existent', and as 'absentees', and
they are excluded by law from actual or potential citizenship in the Jewish
state.
The Law of Return (1950) is the cornerstone of the Israeli Nationality Law
(1952). The details of the Law of Return (1950), the Absentee Property Law
(1950), the Israeli Nationality Law (1952), and the legal mechanisms of
exclusion that are codified in this body of legislation will be discussed in
detail [in the following chapters]. It is important to note here, however, that
the Israeli Knesset, having elevated the attribute of 'being Jewish' to the
status of a legally determining principle of exclusion from, or inclusion in,
the constituency of actual or potential citizens of the state of Israel, has
brought into sharp focus the crisis of modern secular Jewish identity which the
Zionist movement claimed to have solved. Under this body of legislation, as
amended over the past three and half decades, it is not only the Palestinian
non-Jew - first and foremost the Palestinian Arab 'absentee' - who is excluded
from his or her right to undisputed citizenship. Large categories of Jews are
similarly excluded: Jewish bastards, Jewish persons born to non-Jewish mothers,
Jewish persons born to Jewish mothers who converted to another religion, and
non-Jews converted to Judaism by conservative or reform rabbis (only the Jewish
orthodox conversion procedure is effectively recognized in Israel. The question
of 'who is a Jew' has bedevilled Israeli political practice and legislation
since the passage of the Law or Return in 1950. As Akiva Orr noted:
First, Zionism did not believe in the existence of God; the movement was
secular, not religious...Zionism insisted that suffering in exile was a result
of a minority status, not of sin. Zionism preached that the Jews must act on
their own behalf to create their state in Zion, rather than wait till God did
it for them. Finally, Zionism argued that when Jewish independence was
resurrected the Jews would become 'a nation like all other nations' or
'normalized' as some put it (Orr, The unJewish State, p.6)
And yet, by every conventional criterion, the state of Israel is a theocracy.
Civil marriage is not permitted under Israeli law, and marriage can be legally
consecrated only by Rabbinical, Church or Shari'a courts. The same applies to
divorce. Under Israeli law (Jurisdiction of Rabbinical Courts (Marriage and
Divorce), 1953), religious courts are state courts and the religious judiciary
(Rabbinical, Church and Shari'a) are paid by the state.
Political practice and legislation have been similarly bedevilled by the
question of 'who is an Israeli' in the state of Israel. Clearly, the term
'Israeli' and 'Jew' are not coterminous. Seven hundred thousand of the over
four million citizens of the state of Israel (some 17 percent) are non-Jewish.
They are Palestinian Arabs, the descendants of the remnants of the Palestinian
people who have remained in Palestine under Israeli rule (some 150,000 in
1948-9). Much of this volume will be devoted to the analysis and explication of
the political and legal mechanisms in terms of which the state of Israel
confers a priori exclusive and privileged access to national resources and
services on its Jewish citizens, to the exclusion of its non-Jewish, mainly
Palestinian Arab, citizens.
In this context, however, it is necessary to remember that Israeli legislation
is not directed against those non-Jews who are legally incorporated, albeit in
terms of extreme discrimination, into the Israeli body politic as citizens of
the Jewish state. Rather, the most damaging manifestation of Israeli
legislation is directed against those non-Jews who are legally excluded as
'absentees' from the body of Israeli polity: two million Palestinian Arab
displaced persons, conventionally referred to as 'refugees'.
Thus, each Israeli Jew has a shadow: the Palestinian Arab refugee of 1948.
Israeli Jewish homes are built on the ruins of their homes. Israeli Jews
cultivate their land.
The Palestinian Arab refugee of 1948 is today a soldier in the Palestine
Liberation Army: a fida'i. All human beings will rebel, must rebel, in
such circumstances, to reconstitute their full human existence, to reclaim
their rights, if necessary by armed struggle, inside every part of the homeland
from which they have been excluded. And in this struggle the Palestinian Arab
deserves our full moral and material support.
