American Jews Reject Israeli law providing citizenship to any Jew.
A campaign by American Jews to publicly reject the legal and financial privileges offered to them by the State of Israel has received more than 1000 supporters in its first week.
The campaign, dubbed ‘Breaking the Law of Return’, invites American Jews to reject the Law of Return, which grants immediate citizenship to all Jews and those with Jewish ancestry, and is offered in tandem with an extensive system of special benefits and services for new Jewish arrivals to encourage and facilitate their immigration.
"The Law of Return creates an ethnically exclusive citizenship," Dr Amy Kaplan, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-founder of the ‘Breaking the Law of Return’ campaign told The Media Line. "Anyone who can claim a Jewish grandparent has this automatic right to ‘return’ to this land while Palestinians who were dispossessed of that land, in 1948 and 1967 and most recently in East Jerusalem, can’t have that same right. We see this as unjust and want to repudiate that right."
"The American Jewish community has been defined by a kind of automatic support of everything Israel does," Dr Kaplan said. "Some assume that Israel belongs to us as a second home that shouldn’t be criticized. But lately there has been a growing opening for dissent within our community, and we want to contribute."
Kaplan said some initial supporters have come from Zionist backgrounds.
"I grew up in a Zionist household and was a Zionist youth," she said. "But my outrage at Israel’s attack on Gaza last year spurred me to get involved, as I feel personally implicated in the violence that it perpetrates in my name."
Anna Baltzer, a Jewish American activist and co-founder of the ‘Breaking the Law of Return’ campaign, said that for her the campaign speaks both to her identity as Jewish and American.
"As a Jewish person I oppose what Israel is doing in my name but I also protest that they are doing it with my tax dollars," she said. "My government has been giving more money to Israel than any other country in the world, more than we give to all of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It’s a lot of money, used unconditionally to support Israel in direct violation of our own arms control laws, international laws, and common decency."
Baltzer said the organizers hoped to build a broader campaign around the initial call for Jews to repudiate the Law of Return.
"People have a hard time with the idea of making a statement and it not being tied to some kind of action," she said. "What does it mean to renounce a right? I can’t really renounce it because I still have it. So I see it as a public commitment to boycott that right as part of a growing global Palestinian-led movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. We’re also using it as an educational tool and hope that building a community around this statement will help us to organize related campaigns around this issue."
The dispute over Israel’s Law of Return extends back to the 1948 war when around 800,000 Palestinians fled the territory that became Israel. The degree to which these Palestinians fled voluntarily or were driven out by pre-state Jewish forces is a matter of extensive debate among Israeli, Palestinian and international historians.
What is clear is that following the 1948 war and the subsequent establishment of the State of Israel, the Palestinian refugees were not allowed to return and the new Israeli government took control of somewhere between 500,000 and 4.1 million acres (2,000 to 16,500 square kilometers) of abandoned or confiscated Palestinian land, according to differing Israeli government estimates at the time.
Following the passage of U.N. resolution 194 calling for Palestinian refugees to be allowed to return to their homes, in 1950 Israel passed the Law of Return, giving all Jews and those with Jewish ancestry the right to immediate Israeli citizenship. Some saw the Law of Return as the fulfillment of the Zionist dream of a state acting as a homeland for all Jewish people, some as a tactic to offset a demographic ‘threat’ posed by the remaining Palestinian population, and some as a strategy by Israel’s principally secular Jewish government to undermine the influence of religious Jews on the country’s politics.
Israel meanwhile passed a series of laws to formalize state ownership over what was termed "absentee" Palestinian land and property. "Absentee" was defined as any Palestinian who had left their usual place of residence for any other place within Israel or outside the country. The legislation was worded in such a way so as not to apply to Jews.
The result was that Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war, as well as many Palestinian citizens of Israel internally displaced by the fighting (referred to as "present absentees"), were unable to return to reclaim their land or property. 3 to 3.5 percent of Israeli land is owned by Palestinians today, as compared to 48 percent in 1948, and the United Nations has registered over 4.6 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants.
Legal efforts by Israeli and Palestinian rights groups to challenge the Law of Return have failed, and a large majority of Israeli Jews adamantly defend the law.
Yehouda Shenhav, a sociology professor at Tel Aviv University and editor of Israel’s leading critical theory periodical Theory & Criticism, welcomed the campaign.
"Zionism is based on religion, nationalism and ethnicity," he told The Media Line. "I think that this campaign has the ability to break the link between religion and nationalism, or between religion and citizenship in Israel."
"Some people cast the Law of Return in terms of nationalism and deny its racial underpinnings," he said. "But it’s a racist law. A Jew can come and a Palestinian born here cannot, and you cannot really manage a non-racial civic nation if you bring all these Diaspora Jews."
"So I think it’s a beautiful idea and a nice gesture even if symbolic," Professor Shenhav said. "Especially because I spent many years as an academic in the U.S. and I can tell you that it’s harder to criticize Israel in America than it is in Israel."
Professor Shenhav said he welcomed the campaign in light of American Jewish support of the settler movement in Israel.
"American Jews are a menace to normalcy in Israel," he said. "It’s painful to see all these American Jews with incredible privileges that Palestinians do not have just come here and buy land, sell land and build all kinds of institutions for Jews only, all in contrast to Palestinians who are not even allowed in."
But Uri Avnery, an Israeli author, former parliamentarian and founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement, said that while he sympathized with the campaign’s intentions, it was tactically misguided.
"At this moment I think it’s the wrong tactic and the wrong time," he told The Media Line. "It will only turn Israeli public opinion against the peace movement."
"It’s a good question whether the Law of Return should be there," Avnery said. "It’s an unnormal law created at an unnormal time at the beginning of the State of Israel to make Israel a refuge for all Jews after the Holocaust.”
"The law is discriminatory, but there are much more urgent discriminations in Israel to abolish," he said. "So while the Law of Return is quite unnecessary today, aside from an empty symbolic gesture I think to try abolish it will mean nothing, send a bad signal and do no good whatsoever."
Dr Moshe Maor, a political scientist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem who studies the radical left, framed the campaign in the context of a radical Jewish left intent on delegitimizing the state.
"The Jewish radical left has criticized Israel’s policies and undermined Israel’s overall legitimacy for years," he told The Media Line. "These kinds of campaigns pose a major threat to Israel as they ignite anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli feelings abroad.”
"According to the radical left the Law of Return is discriminatory legislation because only Jews can enter Israel and get citizenship immediately," said Dr Maor. "This of course is not accepted by the Israeli Zionist center, which feels that no discrimination is created by the Law of Return. In 1947, the General Assembly of the UN adopted a resolution for the establishment of a Jewish state. So, the ticket to enter Israel is given to Jews only, but in Israel itself, there is no legal discrimination whatsoever."
Dr Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist and the chairman of NGO monitor, an Israeli organization that seeks to expose a perceived anti-Israeli bias in non-governmental organizations, argued that such campaigns ultimately seek to delegitimize the existence of the State of Israel.
"It’s always easy to find a group of Jews on the fringes of society who make some noise and who are embraced by pro-Palestinian organizations," he told The Media Line. "Their entire purpose is to provide more legitimacy to the Palestinian narrative which is focused on repealing the 1947 UN resolution which led to the establishment of the State of Israel. This is just another variation on that theme."
"If there was a French group that denied the right of the French to live in France and demanded that the French language be replaced by a kind of international culture it would get absolutely no publicity," he added. "But because it’s Israel it gets attention."