Lebanon and Israel

Merely describing somewhere as "The Land Without A People" does not actually make it so. This realisation has compelled Israel to withdraw (until recent events) from the Gaza Strip, it will compel Israel to withdraw from most or all of the West Bank, and it would compel Israel to expel her allegedly equal non-Jewish Arab citizens (as distinct from the large number of Jewish Arabs in Israel) if the rest of the world's (undefined) Jews decided to avail themselves of the Law of Return. Where are they to go, the few Israelis withdrawn from Gaza, the far more Israelis to be withdrawn from the West Bank, or the other half of the world's Jews if they "Returned"?

Well, the Biblical Kingdom of Israel and the modern State of Israel have both had variable borders; the former did not even include Jerusalem for much of its history. Anyone reading the Bible or any contemporaneous account can see that the peoples of the ancient Levant were indistinct, so that neither David nor Solomon would now be considered Jewish by the Orthodox (recognition of this fact destroys the entire Zionist case, but then that case was invented by people who scorned the Bible and subscribed to nineteenth-century German racial theory instead). Hiram, King of Tyre was a close friend and ally of Solomon's, while Jezebel was a princess of Sidon. The Psalmist extols the cedar of Lebanon.

But Lebanon is no more an empty land than Palestine was, so the Israelis are just going to have to empty it in preparation. That is exactly what they are doing, since they refuse to repeal the Law of Return and enter the family of democratic nations with equal citizenship for all, a family which already included the Lebanon that they are trying to destroy.

For the future of the State of Israel hangs in the balance. Israel can no longer sustain her inherent ambivalence. Is she a Zionist state, a homeland for "the Jews"? Or is she the Middle Eastern outpost of liberal democracy, in which the large Arab minority enjoys equal citizenship? She cannot be both, and has tried for far too long to do this impossible thing.

Half the world's Jews already live in Israel, but the other half could move there any time it liked, and could only be accommodated by displacing the Israeli Arabs (including members of the Knesset, a Supreme Court judge, and even several members of the national football team). While the Law of Return remains in place, the Arabs can never be equal citizens (which is to say, true citizens at all), and so Israel remains, to that extent, not a democracy, but an ethnocracy.

The Law of Return is based on the Nuremburg Laws, but the Zionist project was several decades old by the time of the Second World War, and its pioneers, by fighting the British, effectively fought for Hitler, in the process inventing much of modern terrorism. It is high time to draw a line under Zionism, and, by repealing the Law of Return, to bolster Israeli resistance to the impractical, but until that point unanswerable, Palestinian demand for a comparable right even in relation to Israel's pre-1967 borders.

An Israel which thus really did grant genuinely equal citizenship to all her people really would be democracy's standard-bearer in the region. But an Israel in which the ethnic majority (for now - it might not even be that for much longer) carries on reserving the right to displace some of its fellow-citizens, on grounds of ethnicity, in favour of its own ethnic group cannot be any such thing.