Olmert (and Ross?) and a new concept of the Jewish state

Olmert (and Ross?) and a new concept of the Jewish state

Posted by Helena Cobban
June 1, 2009 3:48 AM EST Link
Filed in Israel-2009

Ariel Beery had a very interesting piece in Haaretz yesterday. It describes a new movement among Israelis-- and key friends of Israel like Dennis Ross-- to fashion a new concept of a state.

Instead of this state being a nation-state, that is, a project that includes all those who live inside its borders, this new kind of state would be what Beery calls

a node-state - that is, ... the sovereign element chosen by narrative and collective will at the center of a global network.

Immediately before he introduces that concept he notes this:

The State of Israel... was doubly special - first because it claimed to be the state of the Jews even as the majority of the Jewish nation still lived outside its boundaries, and second because it had no desire to integrate other, non-Jewish groups among its citizenry into the Jewish nation. Israel has thus been criticized for not behaving like a classic nation-state.

Beery indicates that when Ehud Olmert was still prime minister, he strongly supported this reconceptualizing of Israel:

Ehud Olmert set out to transform the conceptual and practical relationship between the state and the Jewish Diaspora. He began doing so last summer, when, in a speech before the Jewish Agency's board of governors, he said that, "We must stop talking in terms of big brother and little brother, and instead speak in terms of two brothers marching hand in hand and supporting each other."

For me, as a US citizen, an even more important part of what Beery writes comes next. He tells us that,

To translate thought to policy, his government tasked the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI) with developing a new strategy for the state to involve itself with the Diaspora both fiscally and programmatically, in order to strengthen Jewish identity especially insofar as it is connected to Israel.

The JPPPI is, of course, the institute that was headed until just a few weeks ago by Dennis Ross, now Sec. of Sate Clinton "special adviser" on the affairs of a swathe of countries, including Israel's current big nemesis, Iran.

We already knew the JPPPI had a close connection with some international Zionist organizations like the Jewish National Fund. But now we learn that Ross also received a direct "tasking" from the Israeli prime minister to engage in a far-reaching reconceiving of the nature of the Israeli state and its relationship with world Jewry??

How can anyone in the Obama administration think that this man has the objectivity to have any say at all-- even if only as an "adviser"-- in the fashioning of our country's Middle East policy?

As another footnote we should, of course, zero in on the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the "herrenvolk" concept that lies at the heart of the transformation of the idea of Israel from being a nation-state to being a "node-state."

Israel's 1.3 million Palestinian citizens, and their friends and allies among the country's Jewish citizenry, all call unequivocally for the definition of Israel to be the state of all its citizens, with no privileging of one group of citizens over others based solely on grounds of religion or ethnicity.

The idea that Dennis Ross, a Jewish person who has stable (and very influential) citizenship in a prosperous western democracy, should have more say in defining what the nature of the Israeli state should be than, say, a Palestinian-Israeli Knesset member or even just an regular--and fully tax-paying-- Palestinian citizen of Israel truly boggles the mind.