Eisenkot

Forty-eight turned into 67. That’s because the Joint List and Ra’am recommended Gadi Eisenkot to form a Government. While both the Joint List and Ra’am are supported by Arab Israeli voters, these are two different kinds of voters. My concern with lumping them together is not prejudice but a lack of discernment.

From a completely neutral – civic – standpoint, these two Arab parties and the two charedi (ultra-orthodox) parties that won Knesset seats are no different: None of them are Zionist. That is concerning.

I want to be clear on the distinction between being a Zionist and being a Jewish nationalist. A Jewish nationalist, like Avigdor Lieberman – whose Yisrael Beytenu accounts for seven of the aforementioned 48 seats – prefers sitting with non-Zionist Jewish parties instead of non-Zionist Arab parties.

While I certainly see the risk of including even Ra’am in a coalition, I believe their inclusion is much better for the future of Jews than either of the charedi parties. That’s because we should be able to deal with the challenges of the Jewish community that are internal outside of a nation-state framework, such as Israel.

In contrast, the challenge of non and anti-Zionist Arab citizens of Israel can be approached only through the infrastructure of the state. We do not share a Torah with Christian and Muslim Arabs.

The civic dimension matters to me because I am an American Jew, and I understand that the robust civic framework of the United States is what allows me to fully engage in society and the economy.

The challenge of having a 20% minority, as Israel does in the case of Arabs, is real. The apt comparison, as Einat Wilf points out, is not African-Americans; it’s Russian-speakers in Latvia or – Ukraine. The Arab citizens of Israel share a language – and most, a religion – not only with their stateless neighbors east of the green line, in Gaza, and Lebanon; they share them with hundreds of millions of Arabs in the region. Therefore, the challenge to a robust civic life in Israel is greater than in the United States.

The Jewish nationalist approach, overwhelmed by this challenge, despairs and prefers non-Zionist Jewish to non-Zionist Arab citizens of Israel.

Bringing a charedi party into the governing coalition – in addition to Ra’am – is a decision that Eisenkot may make, and I support him, but we must be clear-eyed about why Zionism is not merely “Jewish nationalism.”