When Jews need Arabs

On 7 January 1952, during one of the most bitter debates in the history of Israel’s parliament, Menachem Begin turned to the Arab members of the Knesset and urged them not to take part in the vote on whether Israel should enter negotiations with Germany over Holocaust reparations. Their right to vote, he argued, was legal but not moral. The real votes had already been cast by the Jews murdered in Treblinka and Auschwitz. That same day, speaking at a mass demonstration in Jerusalem, Begin declared that the Israeli government would cease to be a Jewish government, and would lose its moral legitimacy, if it negotiated reparations with Germany.

In retrospect, three principles can be discerned in his words, all of which continue to haunt Israeli politics: the Jewish dead have a vote; Arab citizens have one only in theory; and those who sit down with the other forfeit their Jewish legitimacy.

Seventy-four years later, as the formation of a new Israeli government may depend on the votes of Arab representatives, remarkably little seems to have changed. There is a disturbing resemblance between the dispute over German reparations, which brought Israel to the brink of civil conflict, and the controversy surrounding the possibility of a government led by former army chief Gadi Eisenkot that would depend on the support of Arab parties.

The 1952 Luxembourg Agreement was not born of goodwill alone. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s government sought an agreement with the people Nazi Germany had attempted to annihilate, although only 11% of Germans supported reparations. When the agreement came before the Bundestag for ratification, Adenauer depended on votes from the opposition Social Democrats. The young Israeli state desperately needed money to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees. West Germany needed to escape its moral isolation and return to the community of nations.

Israel itself had made the connection explicit. In a statement to the Allied powers in March 1951, it declared that Germany’s rehabilitation among the nations could not proceed until the question of reparations had been settled. Nobody could grant Germany forgiveness on behalf of the six million murdered Jews. But the very willingness to sit down at the negotiating table allowed the Federal Republic to demonstrate to the world that it was prepared to assume responsibility for its past. Germany could not confer that standing upon itself. It needed it from those it had attempted to destroy.

The Jewish state, founded to free Jews from dependence on the goodwill of other nations, may now need the partnership of its Arab citizens to save its democracy.

The comparison requires a crucial distinction. This is not an equation of Jews or Arabs with Nazis, nor of the crimes committed against them or their scale. The Nakba is not the Holocaust. Nor is the recognition required in each case identical. Germany had to acknowledge its responsibility towards those it had persecuted; Israel must recognise the right of its Arab citizens to participate in government.

Yet in both cases, a national community discovers that its future depends on recognising those it has harmed and grown accustomed to treating as outsiders. Germany needed the Jews because of what it had done to them. Israel needs its Arab citizens for reasons that go beyond parliamentary arithmetic. It needs them because of the Nakba, the military rule imposed on Arab citizens after 1948, the expropriation of their land and the Nation-State Law. It needs them because, for nearly eight decades, official and unofficial Israel has found ways of telling its Arab citizens that their equal citizenship exists on paper alone, and that their votes do not count like those of others.

Together, the anti-Netanyahu bloc and the Arab parties hold 67 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. On 5 November, both Arab parties endorsed Eisenkot’s bid to form a government, giving him the backing of a parliamentary majority in the presidential consultations. Whether that support can be translated into a governing coalition remains uncertain. Most of the Jewish opposition leaders say they want to save Israeli democracy, yet struggle to accept that doing so requires giving up the Jewish monopoly on political power. The fantasy of Jewish sovereignty that depends on no one else has itself become the principal obstacle to Zionism’s rehabilitation.

We know something of the psychological price of such recognition from 1952. The fury over reparations was never merely political. It touched on the question of what may legitimately be done in the name of the dead. For many Israelis, refusing all contact with Germany had become part of the meaning they gave to their loss.

Something of that difficulty has resurfaced today. “You murdered your son,” a bereaved father shouted through a megaphone outside Eisenkot’s home this week. One father hurled at another the accusation no bereaved parent can bear to hear. I have nothing to say about the inner life of the man who shouted those words. But the accusation no longer belongs to him alone, and it has been directed at the wrong address. The prime minister who was in office on 7 October 2023 does not live on that street.

The possibility of a government dependent on Arab parties arouses anxieties in Israel that go far beyond ordinary political disagreement. Perhaps one reason is that such a partnership might mark the beginning of the immense work of mourning that awaits Israeli society. Recognising Arab citizens as partners in the country’s future would require the Jewish majority to relinquish not the memory of its dead, but the belief that their memory obliges it to continue seeing the other as an enemy.

The work of mourning does not require us to abandon our dead. It requires us to let go of something of the stories through which we have learned to live with their deaths — above all, the story that gives those deaths their meaning through the continued existence of an enemy.

This interpretation cannot be applied to every bereaved family. But it may help explain the intensity with which the prospect of Jewish-Arab political partnership is rejected. Opponents of negotiations with Germany also feared that any agreement would lead to the Holocaust being forgotten. The opposite happened. Remembrance does not require us to preserve the other as an enemy for ever.

In 1952, Israelis had to recognise that negotiating with Germans was not the same as forgiving their crimes. Today, Jewish Israelis must recognise that political partnership with Arab citizens does not mean surrendering their own right to national self-determination. In both cases, the distinction is between fidelity to the past and captivity to it. Today, it is also the distinction between Jewish self-determination and Jewish supremacy.

Adenauer signed the reparations agreement when only a small minority of Germans supported it. David Ben-Gurion secured a narrow parliamentary majority for opening negotiations, two days after stones had been hurled at the Knesset. In both cases, dependence preceded its recognition.

Those who insist that Israeli society must first recover from the trauma of 7 October before sitting down with Arab citizens are demanding something history did not grant even to leaders greater than themselves. Eisenkot, who said before the elections that he did not want the support of Arab parties, will now have to decide whether he intends to lead public opinion or merely follow it.

But the Luxembourg Agreement also offers a warning. During the very years in which Adenauer’s government was paying reparations to Jews, numerous former Nazis were returning to positions within the German state. Reparations could serve as a substitute for genuine internal reckoning and for the transformation of German politics and society.

A government relying on Arab support might be a first step towards dismantling Netanyahu’s political legacy. Yet the processes of national exclusion and democratic erosion in Israel began long before Netanyahu. If Jewish-Arab political cooperation remains an isolated expedient, it risks becoming a substitute for the deeper transformation Israeli society must undertake itself.

And yet the reparations agreement emerged from a recognition of mutual dependence, despite six million reasons to reject such dependence for ever. What began as a cold political arrangement gradually created interests, connections and relationships between Jews and Germans that nobody could have foreseen.

Political partnership with Israel’s Arab citizens need not begin with affection either. It can begin with the recognition that Jews and Arabs have something to lose together.

Arab citizens are under no obligation to rescue Zionism. Nor should they be expected to serve as a lifeline for those who refuse to recognise them as equal partners. They have political demands, national rights and aspirations of their own, independent of the Jewish need for rescue. Genuine recognition means accepting that they are not instruments for the rehabilitation of Israeli democracy, but equal participants in shaping it.

Yet Arab political leaders, too, face a choice. Mansour Abbas, leader of the Islamist Ra’am party, has not ruled out joining a government. The Joint List, which refuses to assume responsibility for Israel’s occupation or military operations, has left open the possibility of supporting a government from outside the coalition. Both parties have now recommended Eisenkot to the president, despite their reservations about the Jewish opposition’s political agenda. But recommending a candidate to form a government is one thing; sustaining that government, from within or without, is another. Each option carries a different political price.

Partnership, however, cannot be reduced to a joint effort to remove Netanyahu. It must entail a political order in which mutual recognition of national rights does not depend on either side surrendering its identity.

Here the historical analogy reaches its limit. The Luxembourg Agreements were concluded between states and Jewish organisations. Jewish-Arab partnership within Israel would be an expression of shared citizenship. The fact that such a partnership is perceived as an extraordinary national concession reveals how far Israeli democracy still has to travel from formal democratic procedures towards substantive equality.

The movement that sought to free Jews from dependence on others may discover that recognising its dependence on the other within its own society is precisely what could save it from the nationalism that threatens to consume it.

Germany needed Jews in order to return to the community of nations. Today, Zionism needs Arabs in order to return, first and foremost, to the community of its own citizens — and perhaps to the community of nations as well.

Eran Rolnik is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and historian. He serves as chief physician at the Israeli Ministry of Finance’s Office for Personal Compensation from Germany. Since 2025, he has faced disciplinary proceedings before Israel’s Civil Service Disciplinary Tribunal in connection with opinion articles critical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.