What Israel tolerates

We’d like to see our educational system encourage peace, not breed enmity. We know that those who grow up believing lies won’t aspire to coexistence.

By JPOST EDITORIAL
nakba day_311 reuters (photo credit: Sharif Karim / Reuters)
nakba day_311 reuters
(photo credit: Sharif Karim / Reuters)
It is legally permissible in Israel to agitate against the country’s very existence, to declare its Independence Day a day of mourning, to liken its birth or what happened to the Arabs in the course of its birth to a calamity (nakba in Arabic) and to indoctrinate the young that a Jewish state is by definition a grievance and that grievances must by rights be redressed.
In other words, it’s perfectly legal in today’s Israel to regard Israel as illegitimate and a candidate for termination.
None of the above was changed one whit by the so-called Nakba Law, which the Knesset passed last week. Contrary to some tendentious propaganda, the new legislation doesn’t criminalize lamenting our state’s creation, its continued existence or annual birthday. It doesn’t muzzle free speech or the freedom to rouse opposition to the very notion of selfdetermination for the Jewish people in their own sovereign entity. Indeed, Israel permits a remarkable degree of unabashed hostility to and attempted subversion against its own survival.
What changed last week is that the Knesset enacted prohibitions against using state funds to delegitimize Israel and to bewail the fact that it managed by the skin of its collective teeth to endure a concerted onslaught by seven Arab armies upon it on its first day, when it was outmanned and outgunned, a mere three years after the Holocaust.
Israel still officially tolerates the depiction of the nascent nation’s success in repelling its enemies’ genocidal designs as a catastrophe that must be rectified.
But now the Jewish state has made it clear that it no longer wishes to bankroll its own demonization and to fund incitement against itself.
It is furthermore significant that the law doesn’t so much as mention the word nakba – which, while often understood to refer to the catastrophe of Israel’s founding, is also widely understood, including by Israeli Arabs who are not hostile to Zionism, to refer to the catastrophe that befell their community in the course of Israel’s founding, including the destruction of villages, large-scale exile and the loss of their hegemony. Nor does the law specify Israel’s Arab population.
It states that “any state-funded institution or one that is supported by the state, will be barred from allocating money to activities involving the negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people; the negation of the state’s democratic character; support for armed struggle, or terror acts by an enemy or a terror organization against the State of Israel; incitement to racism, violence and terror and dishonoring the national flag or the national emblem.”
THE ABOVE is being portrayed in some quarters as tyrannical and racist.
MK Ahmed Tibi (Ta’al) charged, from the Knesset podium, for instance, that the latest legislation is analogous to the Wannsee Conference in Berlin (where the “Final Solution” was formulated in 1942).
Presumably, it would not serve Tibi’s interest to recall that on May 1, 1948, two weeks before the declaration of Israeli independence, then-Arab League Secretary-General Azzam Pasha warned: “If the Zionists dare establish a state, the massacres we would unleash will dwarf anything which Genghis Khan and Hitler perpetrated.” This is what Israel thwarted.
While Israel justly focuses on the dissemination of hate beyond its frontiers – especially in the Arab world – it cannot shirk responsibility for what happens in Arab schools within its own jurisdiction.
Rewriting history to fan the flames of hostility is an abuse of free speech, an exploitation of the freedom to falsify. But no law in Israel deprives anyone of the right to fabricate. The latest statute, however, stipulates that this not be done at the Israeli taxpayer’s expense, for example, in state schools.
We’d like to see our educational system encourage peace, not breed enmity. We know that those who grow up believing lies won’t aspire to coexistence.
We don’t have to compulsively finance the misrepresentation.