False Dichotomies

“In his article “How is Zionism different from other forms of nationalism?” Sean Lee argues that Israel is an “ethno-religious democracy” that must be opposed by universal liberals. I accept that there is a fundamental incompatibility between universal liberalism and Zionism, although I don’t agree that the gaps are as vast as they’re often made out to be. Leaving that aside, though, let’s work on the assumption that the continued existence of a Jewish State is irreconcilable with universal liberal values.

The raison d’être of the State of Israel is the defense and advancement of the Jewish people. For a Zionist, when universal liberal values conflict with this raison d’être, the latter must prevail. Though these conflicts do exist, they are not terribly widespread. Even Lee acknowledges that “Many of the inequalities…are not unique to Israel. If we look at education rates of young Arabs in France or Hispanics and Blacks in the US, we’ll find similar inequalities in situation and even opportunity [sic]. Likewise, for infrastructure.” He goes on to claim that what singles Israel out are its inequalities of citizenship, but doesn’t really go into specifics, aside from the poorly chosen example of military service. In choosing that example, he ignores the ongoing efforts to encourage more Israeli-Palestinians to do national service (efforts which have been predictably opposed by anti-Zionists).” Read the rest at +972 blog.

This is an open letter from Nic Schlagman in response to a letter by Aron Adler last week that was circulated widely around the Jewish world.

Dear Aron,
I take comfort from reading your kind and heartfelt words about your experiences patrolling the Egyptian border, and your feelings on the importance of offering dignified refuge to those who have suffered as we suffered.

Like you I am an oleh, although from the UK, l and have been living in Israel for 6 years now. Many of my friends do the same reserve duty on the border, and show the same kindness and compassion to those they find stumbling out from the night, often injured, from the nightmare of their past life and their journey to Israel.

My involvement in this story begins when they arrive in Tel Aviv. For the past 3 years I have been involved in running shelters for pregnant women, single mothers, and children, first as Shelter Manager and then as Humanitarian Coordinator for the African Refugee Development Center. I do this partly in honor of the people who assisted my grandparents and great grandparents when they arrived in the UK, just before the Holocaust swallowed up those who stayed behind. Read more

The ever vigilant Phil Weiss brings us news that the Nakba has finally made it to the pages of the New York Review of Books, in the form of a critical review of David Grossman’s latest novel, To the End of the Land, by Patricia Storace. Weiss highlights “three devastating excerpts of the review.” First, Storace objects to Grossman not pointing out that “Ein Kerem [where the protagonists of the novel live] was once Ain Karim, a Palestinian village whose inhabitants were driven out in 1948…Ora’s stone house with arched windows and decorative floor tiles must surely be one of the Palestinian villas….the neighbourhood is little more than a name and a décor. Without its historical or social setting, we cannot fully grasp what living there might mean. We sense oppressively that we are being told one story to distract from others.” It is a strange, overwrought complaint. Storace does know that Ein Kerem was once Ain Karim; presumably other readers know this too, maybe even some Israeli ones. Surely she does not expect an author to spell out every last bit of historical background for his reader? A novel is not a work of history. And maybe Ein Kerem’s past as Ain Karim is more potent when left unmentioned. Read more

This is a guest-post by Nick D

Even by the abysmal standards of pro-Palestinian advocacy, and I write this as a strong supporter of the Palestinians’ right to statehood, Deborah Orr’s article (“Is an Israeli life really worth more than a Palestinian’s?”) was breathtakingly stupid, as well as deeply unpleasant in its trivialisation of a serious issue and empty show of moral concern. It was, however, emblematic of a certain style of  ostensibly pro-Palestinian politics, one concerned much more with image than substance, with glib rhetoric over logical argument, with a facile and easily digestible morality that presents a straightforward picture of victim and villain. The first task of those who consider themselves friends and allies of the Palestinians should be to rid the movement for justice of its false friends, and Orr is a prime example of the commentator who lazily piggybacks her way to a cheap point on the suffering of a region. The incoherence of her argument should be the first signal that she really doesn‘t care – that her whole article is a dog-whistle to the prejudices of her readership rather than an attempt to make a serious comment. She begins by asserting that it is widely held that the exchange of Shalit for over 1000 Palestinian prisoners amounts to a victory for Hamas, and that the deal has also made Netanyahu look weak. Orr then follows this by suggesting that this means the world has become “inured to the obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian”. This is absurd. If the world had indeed accepted the idea, would you not expect the media reaction to be the reverse – to acknowledge that both sides had received a fair deal, that 1000 Palestinians are indeed equivalent to one Israeli?  To acknowledge that Hamas has had the better of this bargain doesn’t at all imply the kind of calculus Orr claims it does, without any appeal to logic. Read more

Micah’s excessively-titled ‘On being a naïve, self-hating, single-issue sympathy tourist (or some notes on the Jewish civil war)’ isn’t a particularly original auto-da-fe. He grew up a ‘liberal Zionist’, an avid reader of Amos Oz and David Grossman, and believed that if Israel got out of the territories then all would be well. His Damascene conversion came with the “disproportionate” Operation Cast Lead, when he decided that the Zionist project had been a bad idea in the first place; a courageous stance, he thinks, especially given the Jewish Chronicle’s hatred for all things anti-Zionist.

Of some interest, however, is the following: “I had begun to ask whether Zionism and the creation of Israel had been ‘good for the Jews’, or indeed anyone else?…I could now see what a disaster this project was turning out to be for Jews and Judaism.” Like Micah, I’d accept that Israel has been bad for the Palestinians. No matter who is most responsible for the conflict, the creation of a Jewish State has meant their dispossession, slaughter, dispersal, and immiseration. If there will be peace, Israel will have to sincerely acknowledge the role it has played in Palestinian suffering. The Palestinians and the wider Arab world will have to do the same.

But I do not understand how anybody can sincerely argue that Israel has been bad for the Jews. Assessing this question is tricky. Measuring the happiness of an individual is hard enough. Doing the same for an entire people is exponentially more difficult. And it would be cheating to resort to counterfactuals, although it would be nice if Israel’s prophetically-inspired Jewish critics were to ponder what might have happened had Israel lost in 1948 (clue: look at the Nakba that took place in the few areas the Arab forces managed to win). Read more

Like children without an invite to their classmate’s birthday party, the Israeli far-left has had to jealously watch on as the J14 demonstrations have grown bigger and bigger, culminating in this weekend’s protests, which were the largest in Israel’s history. Outside Israel, pro-Palestinian groups have been unmoved. Ali Abunimah tweeted with a shrug that J14 was “like whites protesting for better incomes in 1985 South Africa, leaving out apartheid because it’s “too divisive””. Inside Israel, though, there has been a split between those who agree with him and those who have decided to try and influence J14 from the inside.

Joseph Dana and Max Blumenthal are two anti-Zionists who have chosen to remain in the jealous children camp. In an article entitled “The Exclusive Revolution”, they predictably take the J14 organisers to task for not demanding an end to the occupation as part of their platform. They argue that this is because J14 is resolutely Zionist, and hence excludes the Palestinians and their litany of legitimate grievances against the Jewish State.

Like Abunimah, their argument that a protest against socio-economic conditions is not a protest against the occupation is rather banal, but it is also typical of the myopia and dogma that has increasingly consumed those campaigning on the fringes of the Israeli left. This is unfortunate. It’s true that the occupation is both immoral and increasingly harmful to Israel’s prospects, both in the security and socio-economic sphere. But instead of asking why J14 isn’t dealing with the problem, the far-left should be asking why its activists remain unable to mobilise hundreds of thousands of Israelis out onto the streets. Read more

In 1993, according to a recent article in the Guardian by Pankaj Mishra, current Israeli President Shimon Peres met with BJP leader LK Advani and advised him that the best way to secure long-term Indian control over Kashmir was by settling non-Kashmiri Indians there. This neatly encapsulates the differences in Israeli and Indian policies when it comes to their occupied/disputed territories. Given the obvious injustice involved in maintaining control over a territory against the will of its population, it’s sometimes difficult to take a step back and ask why Israel and India have been so stubborn about maintaining their control of Palestine/Kashmir despite the conflict this causes. But if we are to assess future prospects for Kashmir/Palestine, we have to address the question head-on. Read more

“The United Kingdom and Israel are currently under the sway of massive political unrest. In both countries, the cause of this is systemic economic problems, reflected in increasing public dissatisfaction with neoliberalism, but the contrast between the nature of the unrest is striking: the UK gets riots, while Israel gets some of the most inspiring political protests in generations. Why the difference, and what lessons can be drawn from it?

Socio-economic factors alone do not provide the answer. The failure of neoliberalism justifies massive political protests but it does not justify rioting. The people of Beer-Sheva’s Schunat Daled live in equally poor conditions to the people of London’s Tottenham. Contrary to what Eyal Clyne intimates, however, there is little sign that Israelis will turn on one another in the way that the rioters in the UK have done. So while economic distress explains the timing of the unrest, we have to look deeper into the political cultures of both countries to answer why Britain witnesses unfocused rage while Israel sees the possible birth of a new political movement. My unfashionable explanation for the difference, having lived in both countries, is that Israeli is a nationalist society and Britain is a post-nationalist one.” Read the rest at The Propagandist.

“Imagine, as many did at first, that the perpetrator of the horrendous terrorist attacks in Norway had been a Muslim associated with Al Qaeda. Imagine that right-wing bloggers and commentators had seized on this fact for political capital and had accused Muslim ideologues and politicized clerics of bearing indirect responsibility for the crime. The left would be outraged. They would correctly emphasize that you can’t tar whole communities with the barbaric actions of one individual. They would condemn the crime but call for caution before casting the net of blame far and wide. Or perhaps they would even describe the massacre as “blowback” for Western crimes against the Arab world.

Of course, Anders Behring Breivik, who was responsible for the attacks, is not a Muslim; he is an extreme right-wing Norwegian whose worldview combines elements of neo-fascism, Islamophobia and far-right Zionism. So the normal rules don’t apply. Many left-wing commentators feel perfectly free to deploy the same tactics they routinely condemn as outrageous when used by their opponents. Not coincidentally, those at the forefront of these efforts — on sites like Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss and Tikkun Olam — are also those who were first to highlight Breivik’s sympathies for right-wing Zionism. Their strategy is to exploit the awful events in Norway for dubious political gain.” Read the rest at the Jewish Daily Forward.

When I first heard about the Israeli housing protests, I thought about a poem from an old Noam siddur. I can’t find it online, but I remember it longing for a “roof over my head in Jerusalem” with a “skylight” and “room for my books”. Sentimental, of course, but also a neat encapsulation of the Zionist dream. So it should come as no surprise that housing prices is the issue that has driven Israelis out of their neoliberal slumber.

The cost of living continues to rise but most salaries remain stagnant. While not everything is expensive, many costs are way out of proportion with what most Israelis earn each month. Tolerance for this state of affairs, at least until now, has two explanations. First, Israel understands itself primarily as a western country. This means that Israelis are keen to have access to western luxuries, even if the costs are prohibitive. Second, economic growth over the last twenty years, and the feeling that careful financial management left Israel largely immune to the worldwide recession, makes it difficult for the population to break free of the myth that ‘they’ve never had it so good’. Read more