That they ratified the compact despite the objections of their twin gurus, Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua (and despite a fatwa by Shulamit Aloni) – who insisted that it must refer only to “a state of Jews and all its other citizens” – is certainly a miracle. It might even be considered as an important victory over efforts by post-Zionists to discard the Jewish affinity for Israel, and sever its ties with Diaspora Jews.
It is arguably also a miracle that the two poles, secular elites and haredi rabbis, finally talked to each other, and even reached agreement on certain basic tenets underlying our life here, however vaguely defined. For too long leftist elites – which argued that it was imperative to talk to Arab terrorists, because peace must be made with enemies, etc. – did not deign to listen to the Orthodox community, or, God forefend, deliberate with “settlers.” Haredi organs, for their part, defined such meetings as “criminal offenses” that empower transgressors.
But precisely because this compact represents such a wide consensus, and may have a great impact, especially on a younger generation – whose knowledge of Judaism and affinity for it grows increasingly more tenuous – it is vital to examine it carefully, and so better understand what Israeli ethos it expresses, and what are its strengths and weaknesses.
The framing of the new compact was initiated by Israel Harel, an eloquent spokesmen of the “settler” community. It was embraced by the Rabin Center first, then by the Avi-Chai Foundation, and they jointly sponsored it. Harel, and former minister Yuli Tamir, assembled the group, later led by General Uzi Dayan, by the usual networking among the hevre (fellas).
It evolved into a fairly accurate representation of the public arena, usually dominated by a small group of public sector figures from the bureaucracy, the educational, cultural and media establishments, army brass, lawyers, rabbis and a few peripheral figures representing the new establishment of feminism, Mizrahim, etc. It also included the scions of the Rabin and Barak families, and even a token representation of establishment “business people.” No one else could join the deliberations or comment on them. The public was not informed what its “representatives” were cooking up, to convince it that their approach was judicious and in the public interest.
A typically top-to-bottom exercise in elitist “democracy,” it lent the compact its Utopian, abstract quality, a serious problem, though its drafters seemed unaware of it.
The compact is tellingly different from our original Declaration of Independence in how it justifies our right to reestablish an independent Jewish state.
The original declaration first asserted a biblical “birthright,” an ancient “historic and traditional attachment” to the land. Only secondarily did it offer the nation’s trials and tribulations in exile, and the Holocaust’s great calamity as additional urgent reasons for restoring Jewish independence.
The compact reverses this order. Expressing “the culture of victimhood” that derives rights mostly from suffering, it first cites Jewish homelessness, “persecution” and its “historic catastrophe” as a “supreme and existential necessity” that bestows “complete moral justification that the Jewish people should have a national home of its own?”
Only then does it mention the “profound and unbroken (Jewish) connection to its land” as a basis for “the right of the Jewish people to lead a life of sovereignty in the land of Israel?”
The tendency to prefer the easily manipulated moralistic arguments to strong legal claims – probably for fear of being challenged by those who consider international law (before it was co-opted by the UN political mob) colonialist oppression – results in the failure of the compact to even mention rights that the original Declaration of Independence considered paramount.
The compact mentions the UN partition resolution but not the earlier legal affirmation of Jewish independence rights in the League of Nations “Mandate”, when land rights in the toppled Ottoman Empire were allocated (creating, incidentally, all the Arab states whose legitimacy no one challenges).
Altogether, the compact (unlike the US Declaration of Independence) defines rights without concomitant obligations and advocates the distribution of wealth without encouraging its creation or protection. It proposes no legal instruments to safeguard the implementation of the fine but vague sentiments it professes. Its essentially Utopian approach underlies many of the problems it wants to address rather than offer pragmatic, workable solutions.
