False Dichotomies

There’s not much new in the Omar Barghouti vs. Bernard Avishai debate, and I’ve dealt with a lot of the issues raised elsewhere, but Barghouti does make one point that urgently needs to be challenged: the idea that BDS is simply a movement concerned with dispassionately implementing the demands of “justice” and “equality” in such a way that would be standard for resolving similar conflicts elsewhere. This, as I hope to demonstrate, is false. Read more

While I was in India I received a series of emails from my friend Dan (name has been changed). Excerpts from his emails are published below.

Dear Alex,  I’ve found a flat. Finally. It was a real balagan, but it’s over now. Great location – downtown, just off Ben Yehuda. Didn’t you live there once? The rent’s cheap, too. One room-mate. He’s called Mohammed.

The whole process was worse than finding a job, or a girlfriend. First I saw a few places in Bakaa and Emek Refaim, but they were too far out for me. Besides, I don’t want to get into that Anglo scene – Ulpan was quite enough for me. I narrowed the search down to MercazHa’ir, Rehavia, and Musrara. And Nahlaot. Musrara was my favourite, though. Do you know it? It’s easy to miss, off behind the Russian Compound, next to Mea Sharim and on the edge of East Jerusalem (the Palestinian part). It’s full of old Arab houses – I suppose they were kicked out in 1948 – and was settled by Mizrahim. It’s where the Israeli version of the Black Panther movement began.

Why am I telling you all this? Surely you know it already.

Most of the population are underprivileged, but there are also some Haredim. There’s a lot of gentrification at the moment. Many of the buildings are being renovated and transformed into penthouse, duplexes, and studios. Living alone is beyond my means right now, so I stuck to the older buildings. They’re a bit run down but with lots of character. I saw one flat advertised on Homeless, called up, and was invited for an interview. It was like a semi-urban kibbutz, I mean they share all the expenses, even food. They’re all vegetarian and live rather frugally, but it was a great place with an atmospheric old courtyard, and really cheap – only a thousand shmeks.

There were three of them at the interview – the other flatmate was out. Two of them were students, at the Hebrew University I think, and the other one worked with disabled children. Someone else who had a spare room in a flat with Rehavia worked with disabled children; sometimes it seems that’s what everyone in Jerusalem does for a living. I was nervous because of my Hebrew but they didn’t mind me speaking in English. I told them about my background etc., and what I’ve been doing here. Thankfully they weren’t put out when I said that I worked for a left-wing organization (not like a religious guy in Talpiot – he was really into the idea of having me as a room-mate until I told him who I worked for). At the end I made sure to ask lots of questions, to show that I was interested, and then they asked if I was neat and tidy and whether I minded noise, because one of them’s a musician. I thought it went well.

They called me for a second interview with the flatmate who hadn’t been there that night. Then they rejected me.

Don’t you think it’s stupid? Anyone can pretend to be normal for half-an-hour. The only way you can find out what someone’s really like is by living with them for a few weeks. And if they’re so left-wing and egalitarian, why make such a big deal of the selection? They made it clear that they wanted someone who would contribute to the life of the flat, and wouldn’t just shut themselves off in their room every night, and I didn’t have a problem with that. It would have been good for me. Still, I thought it was a bit much, like I was being interviewed for a law firm or something. I left London because of stuff like that. Still, it doesn’t matter now. I’ve found Mohammed. Don’t know much about him yet, though, and I’m too tired to tell you about the place. Didn’t mean to get so carried away with the flats that rejected me, but I thought it might interest you. Anyway, hope you’re having fun in India. When you coming back? Did you find what you were looking for? We miss you here.

Take care,Dan Read more

Yuval Diskin has become the latest ex-strongman to express views that one might describe as leftist. First, he laid the blame for the impasse in the peace process squarely at the door of the Netanyahu government: “Forget the stories they tell you about how Abbas is not interested in negotiation”, he said. “We are not talking to the Palestinians because this government has no interest in negotiations…The government is not interest in solving anything with the Palestinians, and I say this certainly.” Second, he expressed his opposition to a military attack on Iran, at least at present, while stating his low personal opinion of Messrs Netanyahu and Barak: “I have seen them up close. They are not people who I personally, at least, trust to be able to lead Israel into an event on such a scale, and to extricate it.” Read more

This is a guest post by Benjamin Kerstein

Early in World War II, George Orwell wrote that pacifism “is only possible to people who have money and guns between them and reality.” Much the same could be said of modern American liberalism, especially Jewish liberalism; that is, if Peter Beinart’s new article in the New York Review of Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” [1] is anything to go by.

Beinart’s missive is the latest in what is swiftly becoming a literary subgenre in its own right, in which liberal Jews express their agonizing moral struggle with Zionism and Israel in deeply emotive and despairing language. This is not, quite frankly, a particularly new genre, as liberally inclined Jews have always had a somewhat awkward relationship with Zionism; whose partisans have, generally speaking, come from either the socialist left or the nationalist right, both of which have found a certain kinship with Zionism’s recognition of the limits and drawbacks of traditional liberalism. Read more

Everyone knows that Israel/Palestine is one of the easiest conflict zones in the world for activists to visit. This is one of the reasons it receives such overinflated coverage in the international media. While some people do get turned away, a vast majority of internationals who want to travel to the West Bank are able to do so. This arrangement is based on the status quo that those who intend to travel to the West Bank for political purposes don’t make too much of an issue about it upon their arrival in the country.  Read more

A couple of months ago, in London, I witnessed what one might call a Luis Suarez moment. I was on the Northern Line, where a group of drunken British men were standing around doing what drunken British men do. Nothing threatening at first, just songs and inaudible bawdiness, but then one of them began saying something about blacks. His friends immediately realized that he had crossed a red line and tried to quieten him down, without much success. A young woman walked over to the group and told them that their behaviour was unacceptable; then, at the next station, as if from nowhere, a couple of transport policemen appeared and ordered the men to leave the train.

The appearance of the transport policemen must have been a coincidence, but I was impressed with the quiet and dignified way the problem was dealt with, particularly the young woman, who firmly but without hysteria told the gang that their behaviour was unacceptable.

I tried to imagine a similar response to racism on a public bus in Israel, without much success. Israel clearly has a much bigger problem with casual – and indeed explicit – racism than the United Kingdom. I don’t know anyone here who hasn’t heard someone make a remark about how the only good Arab is a dead Arab or something similar. And sometimes, this racism gets even more sinister. Following the tragic bus accident in February, when ten Palestinian children were killed, a number of people drew attention to the celebratory remarks posted by a number of young Israelis on Facebook. Some responded by claiming that these were isolated cases. As a sober piece on Channel Ten television demonstrates, this wasn’t the case. Although the programme didn’t cite any opinion polls on the subject, it’s clear that many young Israelis, from all sorts of different backgrounds, responded in a similar vein to this tragedy. The Channel Ten feature was a thoughtful, carefully documented examination of the problem, complete with practical suggestions as to what to do about it. Read more

“Liberal Zionism is a contradiction in terms,” is the premise of Yousef Munayer’s debut post on Peter Beinart’s Zion Square blog, where he seems to have been enlisted as the token anti-Zionist. First, he says that Liberal Zionists “construct an artificial dichotomy between the states and the settlements; they pretend that the Israeli State and its settlements are somehow separate or separable.” Specifically, he objects to Beinart’s use of “undemocratic Israel” to describe the West Bank, as opposed to the “democratic Israel” inside the Green Line. Munayer goes on to point out that settlements exist because of the policies of successive Israeli governments, which is why BDS must “target the state, not just the settlements”. Read more

The critical praise for The Stranger’s Child was probably inevitable, and in many ways reflects the ecstatic reception given to Jonathan Franzen’s similarly uninteresting epic, Freedom, in the United States. Both novelists’ previous works – The Line of Beauty and The Corrections respectively – were superior, and The Line of Beauty was a worthy winner of the 2004 Booker Prize. But one acknowledged classic should not mean a free pass for subsequent works; particularly as The Stranger’s Child is so obviously inferior to its predecessor. Read more

Sometimes the BDS crew remind me of the manager of a mediocre football team desperate to convince everyone that their team is brilliant. When a football manager uses every result (no matter how poor) as evidence that the great change is imminent, you know that they are destined to remain in mediocrity. When he’s honest about the team’s strengths and weaknesses, however, it’s a sign that they might yet become a force to be reckoned with.

In +972, Sean O’Neill argues that BDS is on the verge of achieving widespread support. His evidence? Norman Finkelstein’s declaration of civil war on the boycotters. Demonstrating that the BDS movement remains habitually unable to deal with honest criticism, O’Neill declares the interview “a sign that the ground is shifting on Israel/Palestine issues”, without producing much evidence to back up this claim. The following is all he could come up with: “I recently witnessed BDS’s growing clout at a meeting I attended with a woman working with an Israeli artist helping set up a series of salons in New York to explore and question the Birthright Israel programs, and the idea of a “birthright” in general. The project sounds very interesting, and the woman was visibly frustrated at their inability to find people willing to work with them in the city. They are partially funded by the Israeli Consulate, and as a result have had the proverbial door shut on them by activists, artists, and professors, Arab and Jew alike. This would have been incomprehensible five years ago, when I first heard of the BDS movement at the annual Bil’in conference and it was, at that point, divisive even among conference attendees.” Read more