Threats of the future vision

[Violet_Crumble]

By Meron Benvenisti

It isn't clear whether the leaders of the Arab public will succeed in arousing serious public discussion in the wake of the publication of the "future vision" they have presented, which includes formulated demands for a more egalitarian division of the public space in Israel. Chances are that the discussion will be limited to intellectual circles and to Shin Bet security service investigators, and the challenge that has been posed will earn the most efficient answer: It will be scornfully ignored. After all, it is hard to imagine the Jewish public allowing the Arab minority to show it, in a straightforward way, the picture of the binational reality that prevails in Israel in fact. Rather, it will reject the audacious demand for the creation of legal, political and cultural arrangements for administering this binational reality.

For 60 years, the discussion of "the problem of Israel's Arabs" has been going on in the usual runaround of "oppression and discrimination" and its remedies - "thickening of infrastructures," increased representation in public administration, construction of more classrooms - and not necessarily because of a Jewish aspiration to ignore the depth of the ethnic rift.

The Arabs themselves, apart from radical intellectuals, have not been eager to raise demands for collective equality and communal autonomy, out of fear that this would serve as an excuse for the authorities to take revenge on Arab institutions, as has indeed happened in the past.

The focus on the question of discrimination, which can be remedied with development budgets and patronizing activities undertaken by do-gooders, has enabled the Jewish majority to repress the binational tension by means of an oxymoron: "a Jewish and democratic state," and by means of academic hairsplitting on "balance and proportionality" between the contradictory values embedded in that phrase.

The challenge of the "vision of the future" is not new in its contents but rather in the identity of those who are presenting it: no longer marginal intellectuals, but rather the Palestinian-Israeli establishment itself - the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee and the Committee of Arab Local Council heads. It turns out that the Palestinian-Israeli collective's process of crystallization has reached the point of maturity. Its leaders have succeeded in formulating an agreed-upon position demanding collective equal rights, and this inevitably must lead to a process of questioning the Jewish hegemony over the entire public space. From the moment the demon is allowed out of the bottle, there's no returning it, and the emergence of consensual democracy that creates a new balance of collective rights is only a matter of time.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/801780.html

[oberliner]

1. A single binational state or two states living side by side?

Which of these outcomes should people be working towards?

[bemildred]

2. Personally, I think the whole idea of "having your own state" is overdone.

What you really want is to be part of a LARGE state that is well run, preferably with no ethnic group with any large preponderance of population, a melting pot in other words, with the means to deal with any external threat.