The Problem with Oppression
May 17, 2015

Last week my daughter and I took a wonderful vacation to Charleston, S.C. Among other sites, we visited Ft. Sumter, where the first shot of the Civil War was fired. There we witnessed and toured the Slave Mart Museum, located in the space once occupied by one of the largest slave markets in the Old South. It's a very educational, self-guided tour, on which it became patently obvious that slavery was not the goal. The goal was an easier life through economic prosperity for white southerners. Slavery was the means. And in order to achieve that goal in South Carolina, the first State to withdraw from the Union, where, by 1730, there lived more people with black skin than white skin, whites passed laws enabling them to control the lives of enslaved people. Those laws, often cruel, removed the dignity and humanity of plantation workers, but with a different goal: economic prosperity for white land owners. The slaves were a means to an end, mere property. Slaves' humanity was removed because treating them as human would have rendered unachievable the great prosperity the south enjoyed.

And the entire time I visited the museum I could not remove modern Israel from my mind. Israel's overall goal is security, for its Jewish inhabitants and citizens to live without fearing for their lives. The means for achieving that goal today involves separating Arab Israelis from Jewish Israelis, limiting where Arabs can live in some cases within the State of Israel, separating in some instances, not all, between citizens according to Jewish or Arab background, and often teaching suspicion, sometimes called caution, of the Arab minority.
And because of that suspicion, Bibi Netanyahu could pull off a last minute election victory by claiming that Arabs were being bused en mass to the poles to exercise their democratic right to vote, and thereby creating panic of "the enemy within."

And here's where some of you are going to not like this post: I could not help but think that the necessity for security is doing to Israel what the necessity of economic prosperity did to the South. You see, oppressing people, no matter what the goal, inevitably leads to subjugation and removing human dignity. The motive for oppression is irrelevant.

To remain in control of security, nearly every government of Israel has kowtowed to the ultra-Orthodox, and therefore The Jewish State is the only democracy in the world that does not allow religious freedom to all Jews. It's the only democracy in the world that limits the right to marry among its citizens, and therefore hundreds of thousand of Israelis are not permitted to marry legally in Israel. The Chief Rabbi of Safed has prohibited renting to Arabs or selling them property. Rabbis have demanded that soldiers not evacuate settlements on the West Bank, even if the government of Israel orders a withdrawal. And last summer, Sayed Kashua, an Arab Israeli Hebrew writer of novels and a columnist for Haaretz chose to leave his homeland rather than suffer the indignities of being an Arab citizen of Israel's democracy.

The current government of Israel wants to limit the power of the Supreme Court, the way the Kansas Governor wants hold sway over the State Supreme Court and refuses to enact an order of the court to increase money for education. The current government of Israel seeks to put in place a Basic Law stating that Israel is a Jewish State, and not just a democracy; and while no one knows exactly what that mans, it appears a means to Constitutionally further limit the rights of non-Jews.

I fear for Israel, and that fear extends to the Jewish people. As goes the State of Israel, so goes Jewish history. An Israel that oppresses its Arab minority will fail. Amos Oz recently wrote that the Prime Minister is poised to take on the entire world, and certainly sees himself and the world's savior from a nuclear Iran.

A non-democratic Israel will never be the State of the Jewish people, no matter how much Hebrew is spoken or how many Jewish holidays it keeps. And ultra-Orthodoxy is neither Judaism nor expressive of the soul of the Jewish people. Israel is losing its way, as the south lost its way by oppressing human beings. It is not too late. I pray Israel turns from its oppressive direction, and once again lives by the prophetic spirit: "What is it that the Lord requires of you? Only to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God."