The Democratic Argument
The existence of Israel is anyway itself an obstacle to democracy among her neighbours. The very natural nationalist resentment that the existence and conduct of Israel causes to Arabs makes them a difficult people to govern. If the Americans had set up a German community in Wales which had led to two wars and many incidents between Wales and the rest of Britain, could we be sure that democracy would last in Britain? In addition, the Arabs are engaged in an attempt to unify themselves in one form or another, and, as John Stuart Mill laid down, representative government is more likely to be a hindrance than a help in unifying a people.
Israel, after all, is able to be a democracy only because she drove beyond her borders three- quarters of the Arab population of the area and refused to allow them to return. (She then
'It is my rather painful duty to have to announce a severe drop its dividend paymentS this year.'
propagated a myth that it was the Arabs who persuaded them to go.) 'A national home can be established for one people in the country of another,' said the historian of Arab nationalism prophetically in 1938, `only by dislodging or exter- minating the people in possession.' The crucial difference between Israel and South Africa is that the great majority of Mr. Ben-Gurion's Bantu are now outside the country. li. the Arab popula- tion had been allowed to remain in their homes and the State of Israel had survived, Israel would not now be a democracy and would have been driven to similar forms of repression to those practised in South Africa. Zionists can argue that at least they do not depend on cheap Arab labour and that therefore Mr. Ben-Gurion's apartheid can and does work, but it is not self-evident that it is less liberal and enlightened to refuse people their proper rights in their own country than it is to refuse to allow them into their own country at all.
The final and best argument in favour of Israel is that it exists; it is an accomplished fact. You cannot put the clock back twelve years, say the Israelis—having just put it back eighteen hundred years. There are now two million Jews in Israel, and their wholesale removal would cause untold suffering and is quite unthinkable Equally un- thinkable is that the West could stand by and watch the Israelis being massacred, though it is worth remembering that the only recent mas- sacres (three of them) have been of Arabs by Jews, not the other way round. But, granted this, what actually is the accomplished fact that Israelis talk about, and do they themselves accept it? Or do they accept it only in the sense that what they have now got is the most that they can hope for at present, but is only a part of what they hope to get in the future? Mr. Cooke acquits the Israelis of having expansionist aims. Mr. Tay- lor is less sanguine. He believes that the basic Zionist aim of the ingathering of all Jews in the whole of historic Palestine, i.e., Israel and Trans- jordan, remains unchanged. And certainly a glance at a map, Zionist pronouncements, and past Zionist history, all support his view. But whichever belief is correct, Israeli insistence on unlimited immigration into Israel means that they are not merely asking the Arabs and everybody else to accept Israel as she now is, but asking them to accept the prospect of a greatly strength- ened and much more heavily populated Israel —which on any view carries dangers of expan- sion. The fact they talk' about is not yet accomplished.
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