Victor Gordon

At Limmud this past Sunday, I attended your lecture (“The only democracy in the Middle East?”) expecting to be presented with unassailable facts becoming of an academic of your stature. Perhaps then, you might explain what prompted you to present your audience with the following glaring inaccuracies.

Prof Friedman responds – see below

The fact is that 93 per cent of Israel’s land cannot be sold to anyone, Arab or Jew. Of this land, 80 per cent is state-owned and leased long term to Israeli citizens through the ILA (Israel Land Authority).

The ILA leases land to both Israeli Arabs and Jews without discrimination. In 2005 the Israeli attorney general declared that the 13 per cent of the land belonging to the JNF since 1901, originally for lease to Jews alone, should also be made available to Arab citizens. Only the remaining 7 per cent of the land is privately traded as a commodity to any willing buyer.

Secondly, you declared that Israeli passports bear the designation “Jewish” or “Arab” and not the all-encompassing  appellation, “Israeli”. This is blatant misinformation. Israeli ID cards (carried by all citizens from the age of 16) stated the ethnicity of the individual until this practice was terminated in January 2005. It has never applied to passports.

Finally, you referred glowingly to a “long-term hudna” offered to Israel by Hamas without explaining that a truce of this nature, devoid of any permanent peace treaty, is worth no more than a blank cheque to enable Hamas to rearm, reorganise and replenish over a lengthy period before resuming its attacks from a position of greater strength. 

Long-term hudnas have a maximum term of 10 years and are neither a truce or genuine ceasefire, but merely a tactical tool to gain military advantage. 

Distortions like these leave the uninitiated with a completely false take of the true facts and are unbecoming of someone who regards himself as an authority on his subject. May I respectfully suggest that in future a smidgen of care might be advisable?

Pretoria

If you enjoyed this tête-à-tête, be sure not to miss
the comments below, and the follow-up story
“Abu Mamzer” joins debate & Gordon has much more to say

Prof Steven Friedman responded to Victor Gordon’s letter in the print edition of Jewish Report. Here is what he wrote:

I am glad Mr Gordon feels that I am an academic of stature. I am equally glad that the “glaring inaccuracies” he identifies are not inaccurate at all.

On land: The situation up until 2005 was that the vast majority of land in the State of Israel (Mr Gordon says 80 per cent – most sources put it at 93 per cent) could be sold only to Jews.

Mr Gordon is correct that, in that year, the Israeli attorney-general ruled that it was discriminatory to make the land available to Jews only. However, he also ruled that a compensatory arrangement should ensure that the overall amount of Jewish-owned land in Israel remains unchanged.

So the principle of land allocation on an ethnic basis is still intact, which is the point I made at Limmud.

On nationality and citizenship: There is no such thing as Israeli nationality – all citizens are allocated an ethnic nationality. Attempts by Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens to secure court rulings that they are Israeli national, have repeatedly failed. Most Israelis are categorised as “Jewish” or “Arab” by the state, but there are more than 130 nationalities which can be used by the state to categorise Israeli citizens. 

This is far more than a symbolic point, since some 30 Israeli laws give people afforded Jewish nationality, privileged immigration and naturalisation rights as well as access to land and employment. The system is discriminatory, which is another of the points I made at Limmud.

On Hamas’s offer of a hudna or truce: Mr Gordon is guilty both of factual inaccuracy and passing off opinion as fact. While the current ceasefire offered by Hamas would last for 10 years, it has made other offers, which are still n the table, of 30-year or indefinite ceasefires.

It would be interesting to hear from Mr Gordon why it would make sense to offer a permanent ceasefire in order to re-arm? Even 10 years seems like an awfully long time to lay down weapons if you plan to take them up again.

Mr Gordon makes assumptions about Hamas’s motives – these are not facts. It is unethical to claim that I was misleading people simply because I happen to disagree with Mr Gordon’s assumptions.

Finally, if the Israeli state was willing to negotiate in good faith and it shared Mr Gordon’s fears about rearmament, it would be entitled to place this issue on the table in negotiations and to demand that guarantees against rearmament be enforced.

The sad reality today is that an opportunity to end the violence through negotiation, has been on the table since 1997, when Hamas first offered an indefinite ceasefire. The Israeli state’s refusal to negotiate, has cost many Jewish and Palestinian lives and it is the duty of anyone who shares the age-old Jewish reverence for life, to use all peaceful and legal means to press the Israeli authorities to negotiate a peace agreement.

Professor Steven Friedman
Director, Centre for the Study of Democracy
Rhodes University/University of Johannesburg