CAPTION: The remains of the 3rd century synagogue at Arbel in the Galilee.
In this post, I discuss the concern that Israel's Law of Return violates Liberal and Leftist principles.
One of Israel's founding laws is called the Law of Return. This law says that if you are Jewish, you have the right to immigrate to Israel and become a citizen. In this post, I discuss the concern that Israel's Law of Return violates Liberal and Leftist principles.
MOTIVATION AND BASIC FACTS ABOUT THE LAW OF RETURN: As I see things, the Law of Return has three motivations.
A few other basic facts about the Law of Return, often cited by its advocates:
OBJECTIONS: The Law of Return is controversial. Here are some prominent objections:
RESPONSES: Objection 1: The Principle of Equality under the Law Objection 1 rests on a mistake so egregious that I worry that it looks like a straw man; I include it only because one does actually hear people say things like this, and, more charitably, because there are other, less-obviously-flawed objections in the vicinity. The problem with objection 1 is that it misconceives the scope of the principle of equality under the law. The point of the principle is that all citizens of a state should be treated equally under the state's laws. And in Israel that is arguably largely the case, at least at the level of what is written in the lawbooks. (Issues of de facto differences in enforcement and of biases in the culture that seriously impact people's quality of life are another question, where I think there is room for a lot of reasonable criticism.) The principle says nothing about how the state must relate to non-citizens. Compare: every state accords its own citizens privileges that it does not accord to non-citizens. Surely this does not violate the principle of equality under the law! The less-obviously-flawed objection in the vicinity says that every state should relate to non-citizens in ways that are neutral with respect to their ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, etc., including in the state's immigration policy. While this objection has some plausibility, I'm not persuaded. That is due to the point made earlier in the "Other Basic Facts" section: because Israel is a democracy, Israel is only guaranteed to serve as the vehicle by which the Jewish people determines its own fate if the majority of Israel's population are Jews. It's worth noting that preserving the right of self-determination is less of an urgent matter in countries with more demographic depth. In Russia, for example, the ethnic Russians far outnumber any other group. So Russia can absorb huge numbers of culturally very different people, without that coming anywhere near to threatening the Russian people's right to determine its own fate. In Israel that is not the case. Objection 2: Correcting Historic Injustices I'm actually willing to concede that the Palestinians have a pro tanto right to return to all of their ancestral homeland. (I acknowledge that this concession is rejected by the vast majority of Zionists, including leftist and liberal ones.) But I think that the application of this right to what is now Israel (that is, pre-1967 Israel) is superseded. That is, unrestricted return of Palestinians would violate Jews' right to have their own independent state. This is because the Palestinians would then be a majority in Israel and would be able to outvote the Jews on every issue of importance. (They would, for example, almost certainly vote Israel out of existence.) There is no doubt that in that scenario, Israel would cease to be the vehicle by which the Jews determine their own fate. That being said, I repeat my claim (see Liberal and Leftist Zionism and One State vs. Two States) that Palestinians have a right to a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza-- that is, alongside (rather than in replacement of) the Jewish state. Palestinians can to some degree correct the historic injustice of the Nakba by returning to a Palestinian state. I also think that in the context of a negotiated, two-states-for-two-peoples solution, Israel should provide an agreed-upon amount of compensation to an agreed-upon number of Palestinian exiles / descendants. And even before that, I think it should:
The point is, I don't reject the idea of trying to mitigate historic injustices. I just don't think that a people can reasonably be asked to sacrifice its independence in order to mitigate someone else's injustice. (I'm aware that many commentators will want to turn this point around and say that Zionism did exactly that to the Palestinians. For further discussion of that point, please see the comments on my post about Jewish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries.)
3 Comments
Horazio
7/3/2019 01:16:51 pm
I wanted to add two small points about the Law of Return (btw, it should be שבות, not שובה). The first one - which defenders of the law frequently note, but its opponents rarely acknowledge - is that it's not such a unique law after all. Similar laws exist in a number of European states, including Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, etc. And, for what it's worth, while anyone can convert to Judaism and become a Jew, one cannot "convert" to become an ethnic Estonian or Pole. So in this regard the Israeli citizenship law is extremely liberal: I don't think there are many other peoples that one can voluntarily join, independently and prior to acquiring the citizenship of that people's nation state.
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LiberalZionist
7/3/2019 06:59:41 pm
Thanks Horazio!
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Horazio
7/4/2019 11:32:50 am
Right, my pet theory is indeed similar to your motivation #3. What I thought was distinctive (and weird) about it is that according to it, the philosophical/legal justification for granting Jews the right to settle in Israel isn't (strictly speaking) the fact that they are Jews. Rather, it is that they belong to the group of people that are the best candidates for being descendants of the citizens/subjects of the ancient Jewish kingdoms, and the fact that they are Jews is merely proxy for that. (I realize that virtually no Zionist would want to justify the Law of Return this way. Even I wouldn't really want to justify it this way - it's admittedly a pretty whacky idea. I just think it's an interesting line of justification for those who dislike "tribal" citizenship criteria. Even from their point of view, tribal criteria that are used as an - even indefeasible - proxy for another - non-tribal - property that determines citizenship, seem more acceptable.)
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