15 November 2020
Quote from Abba Eban’s Personal Witness: Israel Through My Eyes
1992, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York
Chapter 30, p 650
The idea that national freedom is indispensable for Bosnia Herzegovina while military rule is reasonable for the Palestinian people defies all logic. Sin 1967 the issue has always been how to reconcile Israeli security with Palestinian freedom. This cannot be achieved without an integrative process in the relations between the peoples that inhabit the Land of Israel.
This issue is particularly acute in the mood and atmosphere of the 1990s. It is extraordinary that any large body of Israelis would not take heed of what the Hebrew phrase calls “the spirit that hovers over the generation.” The Europeans call it “zeitgeist” or “l’esprit du siecle.” The central theme of the last decade of this century is not nuclear war, but the structure of states and the inter play of nationalities. When Jefferson announced that “governments derive their just posers from the consent of the governed,” he was expressing a moral vision, not a living reality. The world of Jefferson was a hierarchic world. Consent of the governed was a very rare commodity.
Two centuries later, Jefferson’s dictum is the theme and spirit of the age. The world is closing its mind to coercive jurisdictions. Power retreats before freedom. Rulers yield to their erstwhile subjects. It has happened in Moscow and Warsaw, in Budapest and Sofia, in Bucharest and Tirana, in Prague and Vilnius and Riga and Estonia. Even in Croatia and Slovenia. Yes, and above all, in South Africa. How will Israel claim to be the “only democracy in the Middle East” if it remains one of the diminishing number of states in which 1.8 million people under the jurisdiction cannot vote or be elected, have no control over the government that rules their lives, cannot mover freely, cannot manufacture anything that might compete with Israeli produce, are not allowed to sleep at night inside the country where they to to work at reduced wages, and are subject to penalties, curfews, detention and other rigors that would not be applicable to them if they were Jews or even Arab citizens of Israel?
To be or not to be is not Israel’s question. How and what to be is the question. The existence of statehood was never the whole of the Zionist ambition. The nature and quality of the new society occupied the minds of our founders more obsessively than its constitutional forms. There is no other state anywhere whose structure is marked by such sharp discontinuity as that which describes the relations between the area of Israeli democracy and the areas under military rule. How can a society aspire to any degree of social harmony if it rules over an alien nation more than a third of its own size without a single mutual bond of flag, tongue, faith, historic experience, national solidarity, common allegiance or juridical and civic equality?