Sub:He is the first Arab citizen of Israel to hold a senior position at Tel Aviv University. „The fact that the university can tolerate people like me shows that new areas have opened up,“ he says
On the face of it, there is no particular reason to choose this time to talk with the head of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Political Science, and when I called him up, he professed astonishment. But Dr. Amal Jamal knows, of course, that his appointment to such a senior position at one of Israel’s two major universities is cause for a story: Not because he is an expert in the teachings of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, but because he is the first Arab to have achieved this status.
Naturally, I asked him about his identity: One may quickly skip over the expected response: “I’m a human being” Nor is there any need to linger over his complaint about interviewers and the Israeli media in general: “When they speak with an Arab, they inevitably drag him into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,“ he has grumbled. But this is virtually unavoidable. Not only is the new department chair an Arab; his position involves him in the socialization of young Israelis “the vast majority of them Jewish” and in their training for positions of leadership in the country’s elites and, of course, for making political decisions as well. Two of his books deal with the Palestinian national movement and one of the subjects he teaches is the history of Zionism. So much for the introduction. The story really begins when Jamal was in ninth grade and comes to its decisive turning point when he was in the army.
He was born in 1962 in Yarka, in the Western Galilee, to a Druze family; his father worked for a time for the Prison Service. They were seven brothers and sisters. He was a good student in a track that emphasized mathematics and physics and thought of going on to study at the Technion. He was also good in English, and was part of the first generation of young Israelis that started to think about America. In high school, he didn’t really have any political awareness yet, though on Student Day, he chose to teach his classmates Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream“ speech. He enlisted in the IDF as expected, and didn’t agonize over it at all; he was assigned to the Border Police. It didn’t take him long to realize that it wasn’t for him. Today he describes himself as a pacifist.
On the eve of Independence Day in 1982, two in his group of five soldiers ( “three Jews and two Druze”) had to stay on duty at the base. One of the Jews, Jamal remembers him well – said that the three Jews should go and the two Druze should stay on the base, since Independence Day wasn’t their holiday. And that is what happened: The two Druze soldiers stayed. Jamal had plenty of time to think: “What’s mine, what’s not mine, how did I end up here, what am I, who am I” In time, he concluded that it was only the Israeli circumstances that had created a particular designation for the Druze, while it was really a religious identity that belonged to the Arab national and cultural domain. Therefore, Jamal sees himself as an Arab.
He refuses to say whether or not he supports army service for the Druze.
At the entrance to Yarka, there is a large map of Israel, made of stone. The name Yarka is etched in letters slightly bigger than those used for the name Jerusalem, perhaps in expression of the weight the local identity carries in this town. As in Jerusalem, in Yarka there are people who wear traditional attire, and as in Jerusalem, there is a sense of public neglect and private wealth, with discount shopping malls that draw buyers from all over the country and some homes that look as if they were imported directly from Herzliya Pituah.
The town itself was not hit in the recent war, but several Hezbollah rockets fell nearby. During the war, Jamal and his family were in Philadelphia, where he was a guest lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.
They live in a three-story house that is practically a palace. The guest rooms are furnished with solid, dark leather couches and armchairs; the walls are adorned with large oil paintings in heavy gold frames – scenes from the life of the European nobility. One room has purple seating cushions arranged on the floor in the traditional manner, but Jamal says they are hardly ever used. His wife, Randa, is a librarian; their children attend school. After their stay in the United States, they sometimes feel more sure of themselves in English than in Hebrew. Given the choice of “human being,” “Israeli,” “Arab” and “Palestinian,” the eldest son, Iyad, chose without hesitation to say that he is a Druze.
A warm man who chooses his words carefully, Jamal says that his Arab identity is just as potent as his Israeli identity: Israel has managed to create a unique identity for the state’s Arabs, yet has not managed to detach them from their Palestinian identity. Thus, one could say that they are Palestinian Israelis. No, there is no point in asking which takes precedence, or to which he is more loyal: This isn’t mathematics.
He studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and then went to Berlin, where he earned a doctorate. His dissertation dealt with the process of building a Palestinian state and the role of civil society in it. The fact that he is an intellectual, a graduate of the Free University of West Berlin and not a politician who graduated from the Communist University in the eastern part of the city, makes him a more interesting person than MK Azmi Bishara. Like Bishara, he does not accept Israel’s definition of itself as a “Jewish and democratic” state; he does not identify with the symbols of the state because, he says, they are religious-Jewish symbols: He would like to add secular-civil symbols.
He wants Israel to be “a state of all its citizens,” i.e., for it to ensure collective rights for the Arabs, in order “to strengthen their citizenship.” Among other things, he means self-administration in civil areas such as health, environment and so on. And he would like Israel to grant Arabs cultural autonomy, including on education, following the model that is in use with the ultra-Orthodox sector, for example. He supports in principle the establishment of an Arab university, but fears that its academic level would be too low. He is in favor of voting for Arab political parties, and one of them got his vote. He thinks that the Arab politicians are too preoccupied with their personal conflicts and are not doing enough to represent the interests of Israeli Arabs as a minority. He advocates amending the Law of Return and making it a law of equal naturalization.
Last year, Jamal published an article citing a number of moral justifications for the collective rights he wishes to see granted to Israeli Arabs, including the assertion that by defining itself as a Jewish state, Israel cannot grant full equality to Arabs and thus is obliged to compensate the Arabs for the injustices of the past. The first argument is the weightiest and, in Zionist terms, the most problematic: The Arabs are “the indigenous population” in this country; the Jews came here as “a colonialist settler movement that denied them [the Arabs] their basic collective right to self-definition.”
Jamal does not tend to take this argument to its ideological conclusion: Because if the Jews came only as colonialist settlers, then Israel indeed has no moral right to exist. According to the Zionist ideology, they returned to their homeland after 2,000 years of exile. One manifestation of this is the reverence accorded by some Jews to the grave of Khoushi Ha’arki, who was an aide to King David: The grave is located in Yarka; the Druze settled in Yarka in the 11th century. Jamal is not a Zionist, but he is not fond of this debate: It’s just not relevant, he says. On this point, he tends to be very pragmatic: You can’t ignore reality. He believes that cultural autonomy for Israeli Arabs will resolve things for them as citizens of the state. He believes in two states for two peoples; he also believes that most Arabs recognize the need to live with Israel.
He recognizes the “right of self-definition” of the Jews who live in Israel; he presumes that they will remain a majority. However, he does not recognize the right to self-definition of the settlers in the territories. If both are “settlers,” what’s the difference? Jamal says the difference is that Israeli Arabs within the State of Israel enjoy civil rights, while the Arabs of the territories are completely denied such rights. Citizens of Israel are therefore entitled to “self-definition” and the settlers in the territories are not. This is also his position regarding the call being heard in numerous universities in the world to impose a boycott on institutions of higher education in Israel.
Again, Jamal chose his words carefully: “Just as I’m not in favor of boycotting the Knesset, I’m not in favor of boycotting academic institutions. Even though I think that Israeli academia has not played the most positive role and, in many cases, has taken a problematic pro-occupation stand, I still think that academia has a very, very important role in reflecting social and political processes and in criticizing them…”
Pardon me for interrupting, but what is the “not the most positive role and the problematic pro-occupation stand” ?
“A role that is very, very negative and very, very serious, both in giving legitimacy to the occupation and in transforming the policy in the territories into an ideology. I think that Western academia in particular should conduct hard-hitting talks with Israeli academia. That I do support. And the asking of tough questions. I look, for example, at the way subjects like history, archaeology, political science and sociology are taught: For many years, they were very much in keeping with the establishment. In recent years, critical voices have been heard, but this change is not strong or deep enough, it’s not sufficient, in my view. On the other hand, I think that a distinction must be made between Israeli academia within the borders of the Green Line and the Israeli academia that is developing in the territories.”
Like Ariel College?
“Yes. I will not have any academic connection with Ariel College. I have a problem with such a college. How can academic freedom be maintained in a place where there are two and a half million people without human rights? Even though they also have Arab students, and they publish ads in Arab newspapers, this doesn’t make them into something legitimate. I’m not calling for a boycott of the college in Ariel, but if it happens, I could understand it.”
Why Ariel and not Sheikh Munis? Tel Aviv University is built on its ruins, isn’t it?
“The difference is that Israeli Arabs are citizens; this gives the state legitimacy. The Arabs of the territories have no rights and there is no intention of giving them rights. I also think that a boycott of academic institutions in Israel is not politically effective.”
With South Africa it was quite effective.
“This is the mistake that people make, comparing Israel to South Africa.”
In one of your articles, you described Israel’s policy in the territories as apartheid.
“Again: In the territories, not in Israel. I say “ Let’s help Israeli academia convince the state to give up the territories. And there has been some progress. The fact that Tel Aviv University can tolerate someone like me shows that new areas have been opened up. I want to make use of this to promote values that I believe in.”
When he tried a few years ago for a position in the political science department at Hebrew University, he was told that the department was not yet ready for an Arab lecturer. As a citizen whose profession is political science, he believes that the country’s democratic future is in peril. Israel has never had a full and enlightened democracy, and in the past 40 years, the state has been ruling over 3.5 million people who are without rights. The violence of the occupation has percolated into Israeli society; the quality of government is very poor. There is no well-organized institutional functioning, there is a lot of corruption and many political appointments. Public opinion surveys indicate that public trust in the systems of government, including the Knesset, the cabinet and the courts, is steadily eroding. At the same time, people are looking for a strong and authoritative leader. This is especially dangerous in the absence of a constitution, a democratic culture and final borders. Therefore, he is very worried, says Jamal.
Only someone who feels a deep affinity for a country could be so concerned about its future.
