But Israel, by rejecting those fleeing violent racism, has betrayed the vision of its foundation
Hungarian police at Budapest Keleti railway station as refugees board trains on Thursday 10 September.
Photograph: Ferenc Isza/AFP/Getty Images
I’m excitedly packing my bags to fly to Israel
for the New Year, Rosh Hashanah. For secular Israelis, it’s a time of
food and family, with a preponderance of apple and honey to invite a
sweet new year. For the more religious, the ram’s horn will be blown and
a period of 10 days’ self-examination will begin, concluding with Yom
Kippur. It is said that on Rosh Hashanah three books of account are
opened in which our human failings are recorded. And those who have not
repented by Yom Kippur will be subject to judgment. The days between
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are a sort of religious last-chance saloon.
I’m a committed Zionist. That’s become a loaded word, fraught with
political anxiety, especially on the left. But what I mean by it is
simply that I passionately support the existence of Israel. And I don’t
support it in some abstract, mealy mouthed way. I have a great love of
the place and its people. But what I emphatically do not mean is that I
support Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. I believe illegal
settlements must be dismantled. And I yield to no one in my detestation
of the current government and its blatant racism towards Palestinians.
Indeed, prompted by my belief that Jews needed shelter from the racism
directed towards them, it is precisely because of my fear and hatred of
racism that I became a Zionist in the first place.
And if any evidence for the persistence of racism is required, look at the ways in which places like Hungary are responding to the latest vulnerable refugees in their midst.
Many ordinary Hungarians are doing heroic work in offering a welcome to
desperate Syrian families. But the official response from state and church has often been little short of wicked. And it feels like no coincidence that one of the great founding fathers of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was born in Budapest.
Refugee families are forced to scramble for their food at Hungary’s main refugee camp on the border with Serbia.
But my problem with modern Israeli politics is precisely that it has
betrayed the vision of Herzl’s idealistic and secular foundation. For
what began as a safe haven for a battered refugee people has turned
itself into the very thing it was designed to protect these people from:
a state that enshrined institutional racism into its core. Not only
towards Palestinians, but also towards refugees retracing the Exodus
journey from north Africa. Culture minister Miri Regev has called
Sudanese refugees “a cancer in our body”.
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This is the tragedy of modern Israel – it has turned on its own ideals. So when Binyamin Netanyahu says Israel is too small a country to accept any refugees fleeing from murderous Isis thugs – who are also virulent antisemites remember – opposition leader Issac Herzog is dead right to insist: “You’ve forgotten what it is to be Jewish.
Refugees. Persecuted. The prime minister of the Jewish people does not
close his heart and the gate when people are fleeing for their lives
from persecution, with their babies in their hands.”
I am not a Zionist for religious reasons. For me it’s the secular
“safe haven” argument that clinches it. But those who claim religious Judaism
– like many on the Israeli right – are called to live up to the
fullness of its injunctions, not least those that insist upon welcoming
the stranger and the alien. The Hebrew Bible is not just about strong
nationalistic leaders like David and Solomon, but also about the
prophets who gave them a hard time when they (frequently) betrayed their
vision. In the theological imagination, Israel exists because of a
covenant, a treaty, between God and his people. But the terms of this
pact are provisional, containing a severance clause if Israel doesn’t
keep its side of the bargain.
And, as described in Leviticus, the consequences of such a failure
are catastrophic: “But if you [Israel] will not listen to me and carry
out all these commands … I will set my face against you so that you will
be defeated by your enemies.” Secular people can happily ignore this as
a dusty old book. But those on the religious right, who claim the Bible
as their title deeds, ought to take the provisional nature of their
contract more seriously. And the call of the ram’s horn is an
appropriate time for such much-needed reflection. Remember, you
yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt. @giles_fraser
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