Every person needs an identity from the time he reaches the age of self-consciousness: He receives ethnical identity and national identity, and acquires cultural, social, religious and political identities, etc.
● National identity is the basic asset accorded by a state to each one of its citizens.
● A person receives his ethnical-biological identity at birth, from his parents.
● A person formats by himself his religious identity, and this is his personal matter.
Our state confronts, without success, identity problems of its non-homogeneous population. In many states, which also have a non-homogeneous population, the identity matters do not represent “problems”. For example, France:
Like any normal state, France learned from history that in order to assure its stability, its integrity and its very existence, a state must differentiate its citizens’ national identity from their ethnical or religious identity and, indeed, France accords the French national identity, as an inseparable component of his citizenship, to every one of its citizens, including millions of ethnic Arabs, ethnic Germans, ethnic Bretons, ethnic Basques, ethnic Corsicans, and myriads of ethnic Hebrews, ethnic Romanians, ethnic Russians etc.The French identity doctrine is in the consensus of the national French leadership, and the French national institutions do their utmost to cultivate the French identity among all its citizens. The French identity constitutes the binding common denominator, thus achieving stability.
But let us imagine for a moment that France would have had leaders similar to our own leaders in their level of thinking and responsibility. The result? In this type of nightmare, France would have bonded the national identity of its citizens to their ethnic identity, and would have had national minorities, – millions of Algerian Arab minorities (“Algerian Arabs, holders of French citizenship”, as we have “Palestinian Arabs, holders of Israeli citizenship”, as part of the over a million ethnic Arab citizens of our state identify themselves nowadays), millions of German minorities (“Germans, holders of French citizenship”) etc.
In a worse nightmare, the national identity would have been bonded to the religious identity too, and the French Catholic Church would have had the prerogative of deciding the appurtenance to the French identity (as, in our state, the rabbinical institutions have the power to decide who is a “Jew”, “Yehudi”). In such a case, France would have divided its population into French and national minorities which would represent a ”demographic problem”. France would incur a series of discriminations and ethnic conflicts, would lose its base of stability and equality, with the Alsacean German minorities, for example, deciding not to identify with France and with the French people, but to seek their national identity and identification in Germany (as some ethnic Arabs in our country, who identify themselves as “Palestinian Arabs holders of Israeli citizenship”, seek their national identity in the Palestinian Authority or even in Greater Syria, into which, they hope, Palestine should be incorporated).
But there is no need to worry for the future of France, since this nightmare situation is imaginary: The French leaders are wise and responsible; there is no “demographic problem” in France since one hundred percent of its population have, by definition, the French national identity, and there are no national minorities who need to fulfill “national rights”, because France is an egalitarian state of all its citizens (“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” are France’s basic principles and not just a slogan), and projects its national identity onto all of them, separating it from religion.
Even retrograde states as for example, Iran, the national Persian state, in which, according to a research published recently by the Persians themselves, only 51% of its population are ethnic Persians, the others being Turkmen, Kurds, Arabs, Armenians, Bakhtyari, Azers, etc., differentiates its citizens’ national identity from their ethnic or religious identity. For the sake of its stability, its integrity and its very existence; it is the state of all its citizens, each citizen having the Persian national identity.
Political parties and incompetent, irresponsible leaders have deprived our state of the essential prerogative of projecting its national identity upon its citizens, and gave the religious institutions the power to decide the national identity, with the religious institutions imposing the religious identity, “Judaism”, as a surrogate to the Hebrew national identity. “Judaism” cannot be the national identity of all the citizens of the state (not even the national identity of all the ethnic Hebrews, because “Judaism” is a belief, and the majority of the Hebrews, who are secular, cannot or wish not to be subordinated to rabbis or to religious institutions).
The state was created, and is disintegrating now in a chain of discriminatory ethnic and religious conflicts, because of the disregard of the millenary Hebrew identity, which never ceased to exist.
The Hebrew identity is natural, inborn, the only one which can be a common denominator to all the ethnic Hebrews in the world as well as to all citizens of the Hebrew national state, with no difference in race, ethnicity, religion, community, as in all democratic national states.
The crisis caused by the vacuum on the issue of national identity has consequences:
- Among the secular ethnic Hebrews, three phenomena emerge from the crisis of identity: the first is the “return to faith” to the only identity that runs a marketing campaign, financed by budgets extorted from the state’s treasury, the fundamentalist form of ultra-orthodox “Judaism”; the second is the adoption of different, sometimes eccentric, identities in Nepal, India, Tibet etc.; the third is estrangement from the country and even leaving it (“Yeridah”).
- Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from mixed families are deprived of their right to the national identity of the state, and are tagged as “Goyim”. This situation will lead to an imminent explosion.
- The ethnic Arabs in our state cannot be included in the “Jewish” national identity, and are rightly reluctant to be branded as minorities (“Meyutim”), second hand, discriminated citizens. It is important to mention that the majority of them wish to integrate into the state even though it is not projecting its national identity onto them. This vacuum of not conferring the state’s national identity to the ethnic Arabs is exploited by nationalist Arab movements which, serving foreign interests, push these Arabs towards a Palestinian-Arab national identity, working to mobilize them for “national aspirations” and for confrontation with our state. The nationalist Arab movements of our country act without any fear, because they realize that our state, chained down by the religious institutions to the Jewish definition, is unable to project its national identity onto them, thus enabling them to claim legitimacy in adopting alternative national identities of other entities (the Palestinian Authority or Syria). Political leaders like Ahmed Tibi, Azmi Bishara, Hashem Mahameed incite the ethnic Arab citizens to fight for “national aspirations” and to adopt a Palestinian-Arab national identity which serves the interests of the enemies of our state, and even manifest publicly their identification with these enemies as, for example, when Azmi Bishara, former member of the Knesset (MK) laid a wreath of flowers, paying homage at the tomb of Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shkaki in the Palestinian Martyrs Cemetery near Damascus, the organization responsible for murdering hundreds of civilians in our state and abroad (Was he prosecuted? Was he even blamed?), or when former MK Hashem Mahameed called at a terrorists meeting in Gaza to “continue the struggle through all means”, these means being, then, massacres by explosions in busses and public gatherings (Was he prosecuted? PM Ehud Barak appointed this MK to the highly classified “Foreign Affairs and Security Committee” of the Knesset as an elections deal payoff. So much for principles and morality).
Next Chapter – The Hebrew National State