In an interview on Israel

Tell me about Israel and the Family of Nations.

Well, this is a book which I wrote with a young historian, Alexander Yakobson, and it’s a call for Israel to be more liberal and more concerned with human rights and at the same time for Israel to merge with the democratic family of nations.

How do you lay out the arguments?

The argument is that the Zionist revolution sought to turn Jewish civilisation into a nation state like all nation states and under the rule of international law. And we take one issue after another and we show that there is no inherent contradiction between Israel as a Jewish state and any other nation state. It has been received very well and is a bestseller in Israel. It was also critically successful in France and we rewrote it especially for the English edition. 

You sound as if you’re fairly optimistic about the future.

I’m not so sure. Israel faces grave dangers but I’m optimistic about Israel becoming more liberal. It is a well-kept secret that Israel has become more liberal over the past 30 years. The dangers are obvious. One is the external one and I don’t have to elaborate on this. A nuclear Iran is a mortal danger for Israel and because Israel is so small and vulnerable to even simple gunfire from across the border. Yesterday Eilat was bombarded. Today the north is being bombarded and no place in Israel is immune from being bombarded from across the border. Then there is the internal danger, that the productive element of Israeli society, the element that serves in the army and is the backbone of the economy, would be outnumbered by those elements who do not serve and do not participate in the economy of the country, that is, mainly Muslim Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox. Their rate of participation in the civil work force is very low.