[Salon] Israeli Supreme Court rules citizens can be stripped of status for ‘breach of loyalty’ – Mondoweiss

[Todd Pierce <tepierce@outlook.com>]

Scroll down to get beyond “political theory” background and context. 

I know how ignorant of “political theory” I was, as a “conservative” (and don’t tell me I was unique in that; but I worked to rectify that later after military retirement in graduate study of “Political Theory”  to understand the “theory” driving the US to becoming such a “military despotism” in its foreign relations) having relied on Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind” as a “starting point” in my study of the  “Ancients.” And not realizing that Bloom’s/Strauss’s tactic of invoking the “Ancients” was a sophisticated deception to utilize “ancient tyrannical thought,” to justify the same today. That was Strauss’s and his “Apostles” who came to inhabit the Claremont Institute, Hillsdale College, the University of Dallas’s “Politics Department, and now their many off-shoots, way of presenting a militaristic state as the “ideal State.” While subverting its democratic/republican (small d, small r) character as contrary to popular thought, Socrates and Plato, and worse, Xenophon, the “main” Ancients for the Straussians, West and East Coast, were supporters of Sparta, and hostile to Athenian democracy, as I.F. Stone showed. But this article: http://rousseaustudies.free.fr/ArticleCartledge.htm, and extract below does an even better job, and makes the connection to Rousseau as well, and Rousseau’s “Democratic Majoritiarianism.” Which the attached 1943 article by Robert A. Nisbet shows clearly, with Nisbet later known as a conservative sociologist. I contend that to offer a defense to the increasingly “totalitarian” (Sheldon Wolin called our system “Inverted Totalitarianism” back in 2003) character of our “regime,” we need to know and understand the “political theory” of the "programmatic thinkers” of today, beginning with what is the underlying “Weltanschauung” of a nation which "rules citizens can be stripped of status for ‘breach of loyalty’.”    

So here, to go along with the attached article, Rousseau and Totalitarianism, is a brief explanation of the “Ancient’s” that Straussians and their Apostles constantly turned to, with Rousseau in that mix, as Strauss and his friends studied him intensively as well:

Extract begins: "As it turned out, the political element of the Spartan peace terms included nothing more specific than a restoration of the 'ancestral constitution', i.e. some sort of oligarchy. For internal Athenian consumption, the Thirty's own cant word was apparently epanorthosis, 'rectification', of the politeia (Ath Pol 35.2), i.e. not ex nihilo/tabula rasa construction from ground up, but 'reformist' remodelling (Schuetrumpf in Eder 1995: 273). For external, Spartan consumption, however, Kritias gave that 'rectification' a decidedly laconizing aspect: 30 = Gerousia including the 2 kings; 5 Ephors = 5 Ephors; 3000 citizens = roughly the size of the Spartan citizen body (Krentz and even more Whitehead). It was, anyway, laconizing enough for Sparta to be willing to grant the 30 a Spartan garrison when the domestic opposition began to make itself seriously felt. 

"In light of this background, Socrates' conduct under the 30, not least his staying in the city, can be usefully reviewed. A plausible historical reconstruction might run as follows: Socrates' decision in 404 to stay in the city was was not just a matter of geography: 'the men of the City' stood for the counter-revolutionary oligarchic Athens as opposed to 'the men in the Peiraieus', who represented what was left of Athenian democracy; so when he became enrolled as one of his former pupil Critias's 3000 citizens, he was knowingly throwing in his lot with a revolutionary - both anti-democratic and laconizing - oligarchy. 

"Thereafter, we can well imagine that Socrates, like Plato (or the author of the Seventh Letter), had been disgusted by the behaviour of the 30, as of course had others of the 3000, not to mention the wealthy metics like Lysias and Polemarchos, sons of the Kephalos in whose house the Republic is set. That wouldn't, however, affect the main point: which would be that Socrates had once valued Spartan eunomia as a potentially practicable model for a renewed, remade virtuous Athens - in other words, that he was a laconiser of both the pragmatic-political and the political-theoretical kinds. In short, Aeschines's rhetorical and of course strictly false claim half a century later, that the Athenians had killed Socrates the Sophist for teaching Critias, might be emended to read 'for teaching Critias - the laconizer'. 

"Most of that's admittedly highly speculative - but not, I submit, intrinsically implausible. What of his followers? Here we're on more solid ground, though not necessarily all that much more so. . . .

'Are you aware ... that Lycurgus the Spartan would have made Sparta no better than any other city if he had not inculcated in it the greatest obedience to the laws? Don't you know that the best leaders are those who are the most efficient in making the people obey the laws, and that a city in which the people are most obedient to the laws has the best life in time of peace and is irresistible in war?' Socrates then turns to praise 'concord' and, using a specifically Spartan term (gerousia), rams home the necessity for a compact between the gerousia and aristocracy, on the one hand, and the ordinary citizens, on the other, so that the latter do obey the laws. The barrage concludes with a string of praises for the 'law-abiding man'. 

. . . indeed, now he presents Sparta, Lycurgan Sparta, as simply better than any other city, without demur from Hippias. There is, however, conspicuously no discussion of the merits of the laws themselves: what is praised is Sparta's Lycurgus-inspired law-abidingness, or eunomia.

. . . . 

"Of course, the correspondence of Kallipolis' 3 classes or castes with Spartan society is not exact: the rulers of Sparta, the citizen elite, correspond not to the Philosopher Rulers but to the Warrior Guards of the Republic. Yet it was, I believe, the exemption and abstention of all Spartan citizens from productive labour that gave Plato the clue to the practical side of Callipolis's arrangements. Wilamowitz thought the idea was mediated to Plato via Kritias, but that's surely not a necessary hypothesis. How then would I explain or explain away Plato's slashing attacks on Sparta? Partly as a consequence of his irreconcilably different epistemology. But partly also as a smokescreen: precisely because Sparta HAD so deeply imbued Plato's ideals, he had to distance them from the real, contemporary Sparta that he knew enough about to know that it was in so many ways not - or perhaps more precisely no longer - an obvious ideal to imitate.

"Finally, and briefly, the question of practicability: few today, or probably then, have thought that the ideal cities of either the Republic or the Laws were especially practicable, but that's no reason for supposing Plato himself did not believe them to be and intend them to be so taken. (Whether they were intended also as an activating charter for counter-revolution in democracy and status quo maintenance in oligarchy - as Wood & Wood have argued - is a rather different question.) But if we assume that Plato DID intend his ideals to be realized, then it is at any rate worth pondering that one reason why he might have believed they could be realized is the very same reason which, despite all the differences between them, I shall suggest animated the laconism of Rousseau. To that I now turn.” End extract, read the article to understand better today’s politics).

Pertinent extract of Rousseau and Totalitarianism:

"Granted that the political cynicism of Machiavelli, the absolutism of Hobbes and Hegel, and the Nietzschean celebration of force are conspicuous factors in the working of the total state, they are nonetheless not those qualities which compose its essence. Such elements are, in the philosophical sense, accidental. They have, along with anti-Semitism, the secret police, and the denial of civil rights to minorities, abounded in the history of European states, and it would be strange indeed if they did not enter into the operations of the total state. What distinguishes totalitarianism from anything in the history of Europe since the late Roman empire is not the presence of factors within the political government so much as the radical relation between state and traditional society. It is recognition of this point which brings Rousseau clearly into view as one of the intellectual sources of totalitarian- ism. Machiavelli, Hegel, Nietzsche, even Hobbes, in their respective theories, left the structure of non-political society largely intact. The Leviathan of Hobbes, while fettering religion, the family, and associations, did not abolish their separate existence. In Hegel the existence of traditional society is held basic to the realization of the ideal state, and Nietzsche's attitude toward the- monistic state is one of aversion. It is in Rousseau's absorption of all forms of society into the unitary mould of the state that we may observe the first unmistakable appearance of the totali- tarian -theory of society. More perhaps than any other theorist, Rousseau, by the sheer brilliance of his style, has popularized that view of state and society which underlies totalitarianism and which has indeed made possible the acceptance of the total state in this century. It is a mistake, and perhaps a dangerous one, to find the essence of totalitarianism solely in its dictatorial form of government. It is at best a superficial analysis which pro- fesses to see in National Socialism only another variant of political autocracy, all of a piece with the divine right abso- lutisms of the seventeenth century. Such analysis can have unhappy consequences if it alone is to become the basis of our preventive measures at home. We are hardly prepared intellectually if we feel we can take refuge in an educational system which simply warns its students to beware of in- dividual despotism and doctrines of force and absolutism. Totalitarianism, if it arises in America, will not make its ideological appearance so crudely. (Well, Trump’s an exception to that, but his fellow Trumpites and the so-called “rival” party’s militarists aren’t.) 

But, any and all militaristic societies always demand “absolute loyalty,” in order to maintain “consensus,” as it was put in writings from the 1950s and 1960s. 

https://mondoweiss.net/2022/07/israeli-supreme-court-rules-citizens-can-be-stripped-of-status-for-breach-of-loyalty/?ml_recipient=61513710054671367&ml_link=61513677386286204&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2022-07-24&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines

Israeli Supreme Court rules citizens can be stripped of status for ‘breach of loyalty’

Rights groups expect the law to be used disproportionately against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 20% of the state’s population.

Yumna PatelJuly 23, 2022

Israeli settlers wave Israeli flags near Damascus gate during the ‘flag march’ in Jerusalem on May 29, 2022. (Photo: Jeries Bssier/APA Images)

Israel’s Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the state can revoke the citizenship of people on the basis of “breach of loyalty,” a law that rights groups say is a dangerous and “illegitimate law.”

Such actions that could constitute a breach of loyalty or trust include anything the state finds as “terrorism”, espionage, and treason. Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel said the law will likely be used to disproportionately target Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 20% of the state’s population. 

The ruling was made in response to two appeals filed by Adalah and Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) on behalf of Palestinian citizens of Israel who were convicted of being involved in attacks that resulted in the death of Israeli citizens. 

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Following their conviction, the state moved to revoke their citizenship, based on Israel’s 2008 Citizenship Law, which allows the Israeli Interior Ministry, with district court approval, to revoke citizenship based on “breach of loyalty”. 

Thursday’s ruling accepted an appeal by the groups in the cases of the two Palestinian citizens of Israel in question, citing “serious procedural flaws” in their specific cases, Reuters reported. 

But the court ruled that the law itself was constitutional, and could be used in other cases to strip people of their citizenship, even if such an act would leave the person stateless. 

In its ruling, the court noted that there was “no constitutional defect in the arrangement that allows the revocation of the citizenship of a person who committed an act that constitutes a breach of loyalty in the State of Israel, such as: an act of terrorism; an act of treason or serious espionage; or the acquisition of citizenship or the right of permanent residency in a hostile state or in hostile territory.”

“This is so, even if as a result of the revocation of his citizenship, the individual becomes stateless, provided that if the individual becomes stateless, the Interior Minister must grant him a status of permanent residence in Israel or another designated status,” the ruling stated. 

In response to the ruling, Adalah and ACRI released a joint statement, saying “the Court’s decision is very dangerous as it also upholds the constitutionality of this “breach of loyalty” law.”

“This decision paves the way for the continued use of this illegitimate law, contrary to international law. The Supreme Court reached this decision, although it acknowledged in the ruling that no such law exists in any other country in the world,” the groups said.

‘Selective & discriminatory’

In its years long fight against the policy, Adalah and ACRI have argued that it is used specifically to target Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have a population of around 2 million, and are largely treated as second-class citizens in Israel. 

According to Adalah, since the Citizenship Law was amended to include the “breach of loyalty” clause in 2008, the possible revocation of citizenship was considered in 31 cases, none of which involved a Jewish-Israeli citizen.

The court’s ruling on Thursday, however, rejected the groups’ argument that the law was being used in a “selective and discriminatory manner” exclusively against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Adalah and ACRI said this was despite the fact that they provided the court with a number of “serious incidents” after 2008 in which Israeli Jewish citizens attacked Palestinians, which did not result in any requests for revocation of citizenship.

Chief Justice Esther Hayut said in her ruling that since only three requests for revocation of citizenship were submitted by the Interior Minister to Israeli courts for approval, “it is insufficient to point to a pattern of discrimination.”

The group’s slammed the decision, saying that following the Supreme Court ruling,  discriminatory law “will likely be used exclusively against Palestinian citizens of Israel.”

Last year the Israeli Ministry of Interior revoked the permanent residency of Palestinian human rights lawyer Salah Hammouri from his hometown of Jerusalem, on the basis of “breach of allegiance” to the state, paving the way for Hammouri’s forced deportation. 

Prisoners rights group Addameer condemned the decision at the time, saying it was the culmination of years of targeted harassment by the Israeli government against Hammouri for his human rights work, including arbitrary arrests and imprisonment. 

Hammouri is currently being held in Israeli prison under administrative detention, a policy used by Israel almost exclusively against Palestinians that allows for imprisonment without charge or trial, often under “secret evidence.”

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Attachment: Rousseau and Totalitarianism Author(s)- Robert A. Nisbet (optimized).pdf
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