In 1872 Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck launched a campaign to suppress the power of the Catholic Church in Germany. This struggle, subsequently dubbed “kulturkampf,” or battle for civilization, was meant to consolidate the newly emergent Reich against the ultramontane dictates issued from Rome. The Iron Chancellor knew how feeble the national feeling in his country still was, and thus he tried to bind the various Teutonic peoples by united struggle against a common foe.
Rather than becoming the glue that further unified the infant nation, however, internal rifts were magnified by what was viewed by many Rhineland and Bavarian Catholics as a heavy-handed attempt to forge unity from above by a mostly Lutheran, Prussian administration.
In the empire’s Eastern provinces the struggle was seen as part of a larger assault by the Imperial Government against the area’s predominantly Polish character and thus aggravated further the already tense feelings between local Germans and Poles. Hence, an effort launched in the name of national unity resulted only in the disruption and alienation of large segments of the population. By 1878 the whole movement was scrapped as a failure and replaced by an equally disastrous anti-socialist crusade.
These lessons have not been absorbed by current Israeli Interior Minister Avraham Poraz, whose strenuous efforts to import his own version of the kultukampf to an already severely embattled land will only open a Pandora’s Box of chaos and dissension.
Particularly harmful are his attempts to promiscuously bestow citizenship while paying no regard to the potentially negative consequences of his actions. Starting with an attempt to grant citizenship to sports stars and other public figures, he has since given native rights to the Black Hebrew sect (whose blatantly illegal presence in the country has been retroactively rewarded) and now intends to do the same to children of Israel’s large foreign worker population. This is in direct contradiction to Israel’s essence as a state and its very reason for being.
Israel was created as a Jewish state, for Jews. It was not made to give refuge to Nigerian hairdressers, Romanian brick-layers or Chinese short-order cooks. But Poraz seeks to eliminate the specifically Jewish character of his country and replace it with the typically faceless rabble today encountered in most Western nations.
His disregard of things Judaic has blinded him to the future results of his ideological assault-work. He does not see that you cannot forge a fake Israeli “state of citizens” out of an inorganic mess of varied peoples. The efforts by West European, Canadian and United States governments to implement similar programs have so far been complete failures. Two examples will suffice: Belgium now boasts the Arab European League, whose avowed goal is the
introduction of Islamic law on a Europe-wide scale. Its leader, the Lebanese Dyab Abu Jahjah, has openly rejected integration into European society and has sought to have Arabic recognized as Belgium’s fourth official language.
The linguistic-cultural struggle now taking place in many American states is another trenchant instance of this growing international problem.
Poraz, the consummate ‘postmodern’ Israeli politician who has turned the Interior Ministry into a private fiefdom, seeks to dispense citizenship like a feudal lord distributing largess to the peasants. In his blind egotism, he fails to comprehend the true nature of a community. A state is nothing but the living composite of the history and culture of its inhabitants. Permitting someone to become a denizen of such an organism is a favor that is granted, not a right that is owed. (Israel differs somewhat from the norm in this respect, but even so, it is obligated in theory to give all Jews national privileges, not provide a haven for the refuse of Eastern Europe and the Third World).
Citizenship certainly is not a tool which should be used and abused for personal prejudices and political power-mongering. Nor must it be awarded on the basis of athletic achievements or cheap sentimentality. The nineteenth century founder of Young Italy, Giusepper Mazzini, once claimed he loved all people because he loved his own people. His belief that both domestic and international comity would result from the harmonious self-development of national groups is not shared by Poraz. By attempting to drown the local character in an undifferentiated sea of mass-men, the interior minister has shown that his anti-Jewish ideology means more to him than internal concord and cohesion.
What would unite this new Israeli people? Lacking a common history, ethnicity, religion, culture etc., the answer would be: nothing. Israel would then truly be the illegitimate Frankenstein creation that much of the world already feels it is.
Rather than harvesting the fruits of a unified nation-state, Israel would suffer the bitter blight of internal rivalry. Jews would find themselves gradually being pushed into minority status in their own state by a combination of Arabs and the offspring of foreign laborers. This is not what Zionist visionaries or pious Jews in all ages yearned for. Yet if the interior minister continues to have his way, the Zionist dream will become the Israeli nightmare.
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