“In the belly of the whale: Portraits from a fractured Israel”

The above-titled book, by the journalist Ruth Margalit, is a collection of profiles of political and cultural figures published between 2015 and 2026. It’s interesting and I learned a lot about these people and their difficult choices they need to make. Some of the people Margalit interviews are on the left, politically (which is where Margalit stands) and some are on the right, but in all the interviews you get a sense of the constraints under which they’re operating.

I’d say that the underlying theme of this collection of essays, even though Margalit does not say so explicitly, is Israel’s herrenvolk democracy—that’s the term used by some political scientist to describe a political system such as apartheid South Africa or the pre-civil-rights U.S. south that is democratic for the dominant ethnic group. (For two takes on Israeli democracy, see Smooha, 1997, and Sa’adi, 2000).

A term such as “herrenvolk democracy”—or, for that matter, “democracy” itself—is not precisely defined, for many reasons: no country gives equal rights and powers to all its residents; the term “ethnic group” is not always clear (for example, was Britain a herrenvolk democracy before they introduced universal suffrage?); there will always be some rights and privileges outside of democratic control; there are different sorts of representative democracy; etc etc.

That said, central to Margalit’s book is the tension between the democracy and political freedoms enjoyed by the dominant ethnic group in Israel/Palestine, and the systems that govern others within the territories. This has been a commonplace ever since the founding of Israel and has been stressed repeatedly by observers both inside and outside the country—just for example, I happen to have a book of essays by Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler containing an article from 1962, “This Year in Jerusalem,” which concludes:

The souvenir shop I stopped at in Nazareth dealt in the usual bogus articles, water from Mary’s Well and so forth. The enterprising Arab proprietor, however, also sold little bags of earth; half of them labelled ‘Earth from the Holy Land, Nazareth’, the printing superimposed over a cross; the others reading ‘Earth from the Holy Land, Israel’, a blue Star of David fixed above. I laughed. The Arab laughed. And it was with this shrewd irreverent Arab that the land of Israel came full circle for me. This Arab’s gift for survival and self-evident humour seemed profoundly Jewish to me, more Jewish than the sabra. I could identify with him. A lawyer I met in Jerusalem told me that he had served on the Gaza Strip when Israel had occupied the zone in 1956. ‘Don’t forget they’ve been there for fourteen years. Many have died out and others are not proper refugees at all. They were born in Gaza, they’ve never even seen Israel. The figure of one million is an inflated one too. When a man dies they don’t hand in his ration book, but go on claiming his food.’ ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘if the Jews are entitled to come “home” after two thousand years then the son of an Arab refugee is a Palestinian too?’ ‘All right. Conditions in their camps are deplorable. However, the conditions I lived under in Dachau were worse.’

That was from an outsider. Margalit is an insider, writing 60 years later, mapping some of the fault lines of this political and social arrangement.