Ze'ev Hanin. Political scientist Ze'ev Hanin on how Jews crossed multiculturalism with nationalism
The Iranian nuclear program and the Syrian crisis are the focus of talks being held in Israel by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The positions of the two countries on these issues are different.
In particular, Israel sharply opposes Iran's nuclear developments, not even excluding military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, and Russia is blocking the adoption by the international community of tougher sanctions against Tehran. Other examples of differences in views between Russia and Israel include relations with the Palestinian group Hamas: in Israel it is considered a terrorist organization, while in Russia Hamas leaders are accepted and negotiated with them.
On the attitude towards Russia and its foreign policy in Israel, where almost a quarter of the country's Jewish population comes from the country former USSR, says Israeli political scientist, professor at Bar-Ilan University in Jerusalem Zeev Hanin:
Russia as a phenomenon, as a symbol, occupies an extremely important place in the public consciousness of Israelis. Historically, the generation of the founding fathers of the State of Israel comes from the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Russian Empire, therefore, elements of Russian culture, worldview, and way of life have largely become part of what we call the Israeli Zionist Jewish ethos. Although many of the descendants of this generation of founders do not realize, or at least do not pay attention to, the Russian origin of these elements - from Zionist songs to Russian melodies to the influence of ideological movements that were in Tsarist Russia.
The second point: Russia is a state that participated in the Cold War and was in the camp opposite to modern Israel. It is important to note that remnants of such ideas still exist among a certain part of the Israeli intellectual and political elite, but their influence is small today. Russia at the level of public consciousness has never been considered an enemy of Israel, even in times cold war. At the same time, we cannot say that Russian-Israeli relations have reached the level of that very strategic partnership that many people talk about, for the simple reason that Israeli interests and Russian interests in our region do not always coincide.
Russia and the countries of the former USSR gave Israel almost a quarter of its current Jewish population. Does this have an impact on Israeli politics?
It is enough to pay attention to the fact that before each Knesset election, Israeli politicians almost make a pilgrimage to Moscow, believing that good relations with Russia mean good relations with Russian-speaking Israelis. In practice this is not the case at all. Most of the people from the former Soviet Union is not a community that is under the unconditional influence of Moscow. They are, of course, interested in having good relations between Russia and Israel, just as any community of immigrants from a particular country is interested in ensuring that this country does not fall into the category of enemies of the state of which they are citizens. According to all public opinion polls, we see that the overwhelming majority of Russian-speaking Israelis are by no means supporters of the idea expressed from time to time that a strategic partnership with Russia can be an alternative to Israel’s strategic partnership with the United States, for example.
- How do people in Israel feel about Russia’s contacts with Hamas, and about the fact that Hamas leaders are being received in Russia?
I would say that the history of Russian-Israeli relations after 1991 can be divided into two periods, both periods coinciding with the premiership of Benjamin Netanyahu. During Benjamin Netanyahu’s first tenure, Russian-Israeli relations were built on an “all or nothing” model. If the Russians maintain contacts with the enemies of Israel, that is, they participate in the development of the Iranian nuclear program, supply weapons to Syria, receive leaders of terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and so on in the Kremlin and on Smolensk Square, then, of course, there is no talk of partnership and cooperation in both these and other areas is simply out of the question. During Netanyahu’s second term in power, and current Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman played a significant role in this, a different model took hold. At the most simplified level, it can be formulated this way: putting pressure on Moscow at certain points is counterproductive, the Russians will do what they do, so certain topics, although we do not agree with them, to put it mildly, can be put aside and try to develop relations in areas where you can develop. These areas are quite diverse. This is, firstly, an economic package that is colossal, from Israeli infrastructure projects to joint projects in the field of space, the development of biotechnology, right up to joint defense projects, which is no small thing. Drones are on everyone's lips, but it's not limited to them.
The second plot, of course, is connected with the fight against international terrorism, from which Russia suffers no less than the countries of the region in which Israel is located.
And the third, delicate point, which is connected, for example, with the Iranian nuclear program. There are constant messages from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to Moscow that it might make sense for the Russians to look at the situation more broadly and understand that the problems that Russia may have if Iran gets atomic bomb, can be in no way less than they can be with Israel. Moreover, Israel may very well be far from first in line in this case. If we look at the evolution of the Middle Eastern concept Russian Federation, then we will see that the Russian leadership tried to somehow get closer to the Sunni belt, that is, moderate pro-Western Sunni regimes, but little came of it. At the next stage, we saw attempts to bring Russia closer to the Shiite belt (Syria, Iran), and as we clearly see today, the effectiveness of such an approach is a big question. Therefore, today we are witnessing Russia’s attempt to build some kind of system of multi-vector relations, in which Israel occupies an important place. Actually, Putin’s current visit to Israel, even at the symbolic level, suggests that Russia is once again ready to try to stand in the Middle East not on one leg, but at least on two legs. One support can be the Shiite or Sunni camp, and the second, of course, Israel. In this case, there is a basis for attempts to find mutual understanding.
HANIN Zeev(Vladimir Emmanuilovich; born in 1959, Zaporozhye), political scientist. In 1981 he graduated from the department of history and English language of the Yaroslavl State Pedagogical Institute named after. K. D. Ushinsky; in 1989 - postgraduate studies at the Institute of African Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow and defended his dissertation on the topic “Internal political struggle in Nigeria in 1979–1983.” In 1981–92 taught at schools and universities in Zaporozhye, headed a research center at the Zaporozhye regional administration. In 1991, as a fellow of the Soros Foundation and the British Council for Cultural Relations, he completed a scientific internship (postdoctoral fellowship) at the Institute of Russian and USSR Studies at the University of Oxford in the UK.
In Israel - since 1992. He was a teacher and researcher at the Department of History of the Middle East and Africa and the Center for Russian and East European Studies. Cummings Tel Aviv University, Department of Political Science and Center for Jewish Education in the Diaspora. Joseph Lookstein Bar-Ilan University Center for Jewish Studies Chase University of Jerusalem. Since 2009 he has been teaching (since 2013 as a professor) at the Department of Political Science and Political Regional Studies at Ariel University in Samaria.
As a guest lecturer, he gave courses and series of lectures at the universities of Oxford and North London, the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Moscow State University, the universities of St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Minsk, Baku and Riga, and also participated in dozens of scientific conferences in Israel and abroad. He was chairman of the organizing committee of two scientific conferences held at Bar-Ilan University and dedicated to the study of the transcontinental Russian-Jewish diaspora. He was a member of the Bureau of the World Association for the Study of Israel. He was an advisor to the Jewish Agency's education department. Since 2009 - chief scientist of the Ministry of Aliyah and Absorption, responsible for departmental science.
For many years, he made political comments on the Voice of Israel radio, the Israel Plus TV channel, and Radio Liberty. Khanin is an expert analyst at the Moscow Institute of the Middle East, where his monographs “Russians and Power in Modern Israel” (2004), “The Third Israel” were published. Russian-speaking community and political processes in the Jewish state at the beginning of the 21st century" (2014) and "Party and political structures and the electoral process in Israel at the beginning of the 21st century" (2014), as well as numerous articles. As a leading expert on socio-political processes in the Israeli Russian-speaking community, Khanin is one of the most active social scientists in Israel, whose works are distinguished by a thorough analysis of the material and the absence of ideological bias.
Author of the monograph “Documents on Ukrainian-Jewish Identity and Emigration”, which contains a large selection of annotated documents from the archives of Ukrainian authorities of the Soviet period concerning Jewry and “ Jewish question"(London, 2003). Some of the materials in this monograph, together with documents collected and commented by B. Morozov, were published by the Tel Aviv University Publishing House in Hebrew. Co-author of the books “Identity, assimilation and revival: Ethnosocial processes among the Jewish population of the former Soviet Union” (together with V. Chernin, in English and Hebrew; 2007), “Without a doubt, Israelis: Russian-speaking citizens in the country and abroad - culture and identity" (together with A. Epstein and M. Niznik; in Hebrew; 2011) and "Jewish youth in post-Soviet countries" (together with D. Pisarevskaya and A. Epstein; 2013).
Author of many dozens of articles and individual chapters in collective monographs on socio-political problems of Israel, Africa, Eastern Europe and contemporary Jewish communities in Eastern and Central Europe, published in Russian, English, Spanish and in Hebrew. Was a guest editor special numbers journals “Jewish Political Studies Review” and “Diaspora”, as well as co-editor of three published in 2007–2010. collective monographs on English. Scientific editor of the book " Six Day War and the Jewish movement in the USSR. Essays social history"(2008).
Dr. Ze'ev Hanin, a lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University, visited the Israel Cultural Center in Moscow with a lecture and spoke about the portrait of modern Israeli society, as well as how it manages to balance between multiculturalism and nationalism. Lenta.ru publishes the main points of his speech.
Where are the Jews in Israel from?
There was a time when Israeli society was based on a melting pot system - Jews arriving from diaspora countries had to leave behind their past and integrate into what was commonly called Israeli Zionist culture. Over the past 25 years alone, according to the Organization for International Cooperation and Development, 1 million 400 thousand migrants from different countries have arrived in Israel.
From 1949 to the present day, there have been two large aliyahs in the country (“ascent”, repatriation of Jews - approx. "Tapes.ru"). The first is the arrival of people from the countries of the East and Africa, then the number of repatriates was almost the same as the number of residents of the country. The second is from the former USSR; a total of 1,109,863 people have come to Israel since 1989.
The peaks of the waves and what came before them show the structure of Israeli society, which is divided into three broad categories: First, Second and Third Israel. We use these terms to show the layers that make up the country's society. If from the late 70s to the early 80s we perceived it ideologically as a single whole (while cultural differences were ignored), today Israeli society has become multicultural, but not in the generally accepted sense.
European multiculturalism is built on the idea of ignoring ethnic differences. There is civic nationalism: everyone who has, for example, a French passport is French. Ethnic French, Germans, and English believe that this is enough, but then it turns out that multiculturalism and civic nationalism are not enough to just declare. That is why the melting pot, which stopped functioning around the 50s, exploded. As a result, we have a situation in which all these ideas (including nation-building), based on the model of national multiculturalism, do not work.
There are three ways out of this situation. First: pretend that nothing is happening - that is, engage in the adaptation of migrants (if not the first generation, then the second or third is integrating). The second way out: return to classical nationalism - a small group adheres to this approach; in Europe they are called the new right. The third way is to strive to combine these two approaches, and the small but proud country called Israel almost succeeded.
Israel is not limited to Jews
To say that the Israeli model is relatively ideal is to step on the throat of one's own song. Today it is trying to combine the ideas of a modern liberal state with the idea of ethnic nationalism (“Zionist state”, “state of the Jews” or “Jewish state”). The first term means that Jews are in the majority, and the second means that symbols and values should be based on Jewish tradition.
Then a long discussion begins about what constitutes Jewish tradition. Although Jews are indeed the majority in Israel, the structure of society is not limited to them. About two months ago, data was published according to which the country's population is approximately 8.4 million people. In 1948 it was about 872 thousand people, that is, over 70 years it increased 10 times.
Three-quarters of it is Jewish, about 5 percent is “other” (those who arrived under the Law of Return but were not registered as Jews). The Office of Statistics identifies them in a separate category: family members, children of Jews, grandchildren of Jews, non-Jewish spouses. Previously, the bulk of the “others” came from the former USSR, but in lately most come from Western Europe, USA, Latin America. These are Israelis who are neither Jews nor Arabs.
Non-Arab Arabs
About 20 percent of Israel's population is Arabic-speaking. For many years they were recorded as Israeli Arabs (with the exception of the Druze and Circassians, who initially managed to prove that they were not Arabs).
Druze are carriers of a separate identity. Some consider them to be descendants of the Crusaders, others - immigrants from the Caucasus, others - a group of the population professing a specific form of monotheism. Israeli Druze are quite loyal, serve in the army, get an education, and so on. Druze cities are considered cities of special economic development.
It’s the same story with the Circassians - these are the descendants of the Caucasian Circassians, who were taken to Palestine after the defeat of Shamil. In fact, most of them are Circassians. They speak very vaguely about their roots, but they are also patriots, they serve in the army. Their youth mostly switched to Hebrew. Some time ago, the Circassian community asked for permission to transfer the teaching of general education disciplines into Hebrew, but continue to teach sacred disciplines in Arabic. The Ministry of Education saw this as a threat to the stratification of the Arab community in Israel, and therefore the request was rejected.
As for the rest of the Arabic speakers, interesting phenomena are happening among them. For example, Christian Arabs. In most Arab countries, Christians were the bearers of a local version of nationalism. If you look at the nationalist movements in Morocco and Algeria, you will see them in the forefront. A person's status there was determined by religion, so Muslims had full rights, but Christians did not. When the opportunity arose to replace religious identity with national identity, Christians found themselves in the forefront.
If you look at the Arab movements of the Israeli collective, it turns out that Arab or Palestinian nationalists see themselves not so much as representatives of Israeli national minorities, but as part of the larger Arab world. Israeli public opinion for a long time perceived Christian Arabs as part of this discourse.
We recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Arab Spring. Over the years, it has become clear that the only group of Arabs who can count on a high standard of living is those who live in Israel (excluding citizens of the principalities Persian Gulf). The same can be said about the Arabs of Judea and Samaria.
In the Israeli Arab environment, a process of gradual detachment began to occur. First in line are Christians, whose level of education is invariably higher than that of Jews from Eastern countries. Their family structure is approximately the same as in the Jewish environment. Three years ago, a breakthrough occurred - the Israeli Ministry of Internal Affairs allowed those wishing to register themselves as Arameans (Assyrians). The ideologists of this movement insist that they are not descendants of Arabs. Then it turned out that in the Muslim environment there are other population groups of non-Arab origin. Now there is a revival of ancient identities everywhere, and, according to our experts, approximately 35 percent of Muslims are Kurds.
The state must somehow decide in this situation. The first option is to slow down this process, when the authorities make it clear that they see a single Arab collective that has its own leaders. So Benjamin Netanyahu once decided to get involved in the Arab sector, and 15 billion shekels were allocated for its development. Netanyahu met not with representatives of the public, but with deputies from the Arab list. This is the approach that has been adopted in the last 20 years: we are comfortable when there is one address, and we are not interested in all the ideas of stratification.
The second approach: the state must support a different identity. This fits well with the idea of multiculturalism. The question of the border arises: does this mean that Israel is inhabited by Druze, Circassians, Arabs, Palestinians, as well as Russians and Ethiopians, who accidentally became Jews by origin? That is, should we implement the European model?
The third option: we now have Israelis, and the Jewish character of the state is what was important at the previous stage. Or, conversely, there is the Israeli Jewish collective (this is the titular nation), within it there are its own subgroups, but their collective identity is more important. All other groups are fully citizens of the country, they have not just a right recognized by the state, but also an individual and group identity supported by it, while they are “others”, they must recognize the Jewish status of the country.
There is currently a debate on this topic in Israel. From the point of view of the European understanding of liberal democracy, there should not be any titular nation in Israel. But the Israelis are not ready to give up the Jewish character of the state. How then to deal with multiculturalism? It turns out that these things are not always contradictory. There may be a fully multicultural country that gives rights to any ethnic group, but above all this stands Israel as the Jewish state.
In practice, it works like this: Israel today recognizes all non-Jewish groups as collectives. Arabs and Druze have their own form of national autonomy - their own courts, schools, and so on. There is a question about academic transformation at Nazareth. There is also politics here - Israel is interested in Israeli Arabs receiving education here.
Now Arabs who were educated in Damascus are returning to the country. One can only guess what ideas they come back with. For example, recently there has been talk that the first ISIS (Islamic State) cell was registered in Samaria; the organization’s activities are prohibited in Russia - approx. "Tapes.ru").
Israel is a democratic country
Israel, with its system of autonomy, is a liberal democratic country that guarantees rights to all citizens. In some ways, these rights are even greater than in most European powers, at least on a symbolic level.
For example, why is Israel more democratic than Britain? In some ways we are still a British colony (case law, status Supreme Court), but we do not have a requirement that only a Jewish Jew can be president, and in Great Britain only an Englishman can become king.
In practice, in Israel there is no difference between the inhabitants of the country of different origins. At the group level, the state also supports all communal and structural entities. For example, state-funded schools in the Christian and Muslim sector are as close to the private education sector as, for example, the ultra-Orthodox ones. At the same time, Christians complain; they believe that there is an element of discrimination in this: the state finances the ultra-Orthodox almost 100 percent, and they only receive 70 percent.
In general, the Ministry of Internal Affairs transfers the authority to conduct civil registration (marriages, divorces, community membership) to religious communities, which must act in accordance with tradition. In this sense, we can say that our country is a liberal democratic country, operating in the spirit of the concept of multiculturalism.
The only point where there is disagreement with Europe is nationalism. The Europeans went all the way; they declared that individual and collective autonomy extended to national status. If until recently, for example, in France, national and ethnic identity were regarded as the same thing, today there is civic nationalism.
In Israel, this step was never taken, since it was created as a state of the Jewish people. If he ceases to be one, then his existence will become meaningless. Second point: if we were located somewhere between Tver and Luxembourg, perhaps there would be no problem, but we are in the Middle East. Now the Middle East has come to Europe, so Israel proceeds from the fact that to be a Jewish state means to be a European, democratic, highly developed state.
How Israeli multiculturalism works
Netanyahu was in Moscow several years ago and at a meeting with the community shocked the audience by saying that there are three great powers: China, the USA and Google, and Google is Israel. Today, there is not a single transnational company that would not open its research and development center here. The last to “break down” was Kaspersky, which opened its center in Haifa.
An intelligent person is considered to be one whose first grandfather, then father, and then he himself graduated from the university. In a situation where it is simply impossible to outbid technology companies, the general context and level of education of the population is important. In Israel it was possible to achieve high level education precisely because it is a Jewish state. The alternative for it, if it ceases to be such, is the state of the Arabs, an ordinary Middle Eastern country.
Therefore, we have a number of reasons why Israeli society is not ready to give up “Jewishness.” Firstly, most of our brothers still live in the diaspora, and we cannot make decisions for everyone. Second, Israel is a Jewish state in accordance with its stated goals: to provide Jews with physical and economic security. And third: we exist so that every Jew can realize the inalienable right to live among his people.
For many decades, our state leaders rejected Israeli imperialism and did not position themselves as the state of all the world's Jews. Today the situation is different, given that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a conflict with the entire Arab world. We are interested in Israel once again being a pan-Jewish project. If you look at surveys of American Jewish youth, 20 percent of respondents say Israel is important to their identity.
Recently there was a meeting of the Knesset Commission on Aliyah, Absorption and Diaspora. The deputies said that they should not impose an orientation toward Israel on student organizations. The main task is for young people to preserve their Jewish identity. I'm not sure that this can be done by abandoning Israel. It is important for migrants that they have their own country (one of the reasons why, say, in Canada, Jewish schools are of very high quality and diaspora Zionism is generally developed).
If you are a Jew, but you say that Israel has nothing to do with you, then who are you? At the same time, to be a full-fledged Israeli, you need to have some other affiliation. This is how our multiculturalism works. As you can see, it does not abolish either the Jewish state or the titular nation, but it does not contradict democracy either.
Israel as a country that won the NEP
If we look at what is going on in 80 percent of the titular nation, we will see the following: for a long time this team was built on the principle of a melting pot. The repatriate was told that he must forget his galut past (galut - dispersion, the forced stay of the Jewish people outside their native country - approx. "Tapes.ru") and should become part of the Israeli Jewish community as soon as possible. Hebrew played an important role in this process, because Hebrew culture is liberal, socialist and secular.
Relations between the secular part and the religious community were built on a model of mutual exclusion (what is called the secular religious status quo, which Ben-Gurion once achieved). The agreement was this: everyone has their own garden, the meeting takes place in the middle. Jewish holidays- nationwide, kashrut in all government institutions, but at the same time the religious community recognizes the secular part of society.
Ben-Gurion and his team believed that religious groups were a temporary phenomenon, destined to disappear in two or three generations, and religious leaders believed that the rest would play enough with secular Zionism and return to tradition, so they too could wait two or three generations.
Until the early 1960s, Israel waged a cultural war against two languages: Arabic and Yiddish. Arabic was the language of the enemy, and Yiddish was the enemy of languages: productions in Yiddish were fined, the publication of newspapers in Yiddish was prohibited. As a result, in the 70s the army began to experience a shortage Arabic with 700 thousand immigrants from Arab countries.
This is not the Stalinist regime; Israel was then the country of the victorious NEP. Until now the Israeli system political parties is a reserve of the 20s of the USSR: Socialist Revolutionaries, Social Bolsheviks, Cadets and others. The melting pot broke down at the turn of the 70s and 80s, and at the same time the Second Israel began to enter the political arena. There was the Black Panther movement, which led to a situation where society was ready to accept the “other” who suddenly became a cultural trendsetter. As a result, there was a demarcation between the elite culture of the First and Second Israel, which occupied its niche in popular culture - from clothing to music and the tradition of municipal government.
In the 90s the situation changed again. When the so-called “golden million” arrived, Israel was ready to accept it too. Immigrants from the Soviet Union are now underrepresented, for example, in the legal and journalistic systems, in military service. At the same time, there are a lot of them in the field high technology, open education, open media, that is, where the traditional elites of the First and Second Israel are not involved. Repatriates have mastered niches that were either empty or simply did not exist, because each subsequent wave of repatriates comes and offers something different.
Vladimir (Zeev) Hanin(born in 1959 in Zaporozhye) - Israeli sociologist and political scientist. Blackberry Academic Supervisor for Sociology and Political Science.
Before aliyah
In 1989 he defended his dissertation at the Institute of African Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences, dedicated to problems relationships between political parties and informal power structures in Eastern countries.
In 1991, as a fellow of the Soros Foundation and the British Council for Cultural Relations, he completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Institute of Russian and USSR Studies at the University of Oxford, UK.
In Israel
Repatriated in 1992
He worked as a teacher and researcher at the Department of History of the Middle East and Africa and the Center for Russian and East European Studies. Cummings University of Tel Aviv, and also collaborated with a number of other educational and research institutions.
Since 1998, he has taught political science at Bar-Ilan University, where he initiated the creation of a master's program in Russian and Eastern European Studies in 2008.
Since 2009, he has also taught at the Ariel University Center in Samaria. His courses are devoted to Israeli society and the socio-political role of immigrants from the USSR and the CIS in Israel.
As a guest lecturer, he gave courses and series of lectures at the universities of Oxford and North London (UK), the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Moscow State University and the International Solomon University in Kyiv, and also participated in dozens of scientific conferences in Israel and abroad.
IN present moment- Chief Scientist of the Israeli Ministry of Absorption.
