THE NEW YORKER SLAMS ISRAEL- WITH HELP FROM BERNARD AVISHAI…SEE NOTE PLEASE
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/05/israel-independence-day-and-its-future.html
BERNARD AVISHAI’S ANIMUS TO ISRAEL IS BEST SUMMED UP IN THE TITLE OF HIS OPUS MINIMUS : The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy…RSK
It has been a week since John Kerry apologized, with a certain recalcitrance, for having suggested, in an address to a closed-door meeting of the Trilateral Commission, that Israel was at risk of becoming “an apartheid state.” While Israel prepares to celebrate its Independence Day on Tuesday, the White House has declared a “pause” in its peace efforts, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has rallied lawmakers to admire “the lone stable democracy in the Middle East,” and Martin Indyk, the chief U.S. negotiator, has returned to Washington. Susan Rice, who was known to be skeptical of Kerry’s gambit, is coming to consult with Prime Minister Netanyahu about the Iranian nuclear negotiations. It seems as if Israel has managed to ditch the talks while keeping its friends.
Israelis who seek a stable democracy, however, are feeling betrayed by the Obama Administration’s hasty retreat, and they are regretting Kerry’s expression of regret not because they like the word “apartheid” but because they don’t like American effeteness. These Israelis have been heartened by Kerry’s strong drive to achieve two states (which Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon dismissed as “messianic”)—and to mobilize a democratic Israeli majority against a fierce minority who take occupation for granted. In clarifying his original statement, Kerry insisted, “I will not allow my commitment to Israel to be questioned by anyone.” But one cannot simply have a “commitment to Israel”; one must be committed to one or the other vision of Israel’s future—to one group of Israelis over another.
This idea remains difficult for people outside the country to grasp. The risk for the future is not that the Green Line separating Israel from the West Bank will disappear, and the Israeli majority—and hence Israeli democracy—will be compromised. The risk is that the forces of “settlement” are winning. Over time, these forces—whom Netanyahu has drawn into his coalition, and with whom he probably sympathizes but cannot easily control—have assumed commanding positions in the Likud Party, in key ministries, in the Army, and in the legal system. It would be insensitive, given the horrors of Jewish history, to call these people fascists. So let us say that they include ultra-nationalists who traffic in xenophobic grievances, religious messianists who are unashamed of racist claims, militarists who regard liberal Tel Aviv as decadent, proponents of civil solidarity who scoff at legal constraints, wards of the state who depend on a command economy, and acolytes of authoritarian “spiritual leaders.”
Israel proper remains democratic in essential respects—I am writing this without fear of censorship—and the occupation can continue without entirely undermining the free institutions that Israeli citizens, including Arabs, enjoy. But the forces of settlement cannot organize for endless occupation without also advancing a conception of the Jewish state that blows back onto civil life. Thus, for example, the Minister of Education subverted the authority of the Council on Higher Education to elevate a college in the West Bank settlement of Ariel to university status; children will be taught the Holocaust in school as early as kindergarten; housing investment is skewed toward the settlements, which get almost twice the financial support from the state as local authorities inside the Green Line.
For all this, the word “apartheid” doesn’t quite capture what’s been happening here, even in the territories. Apartheid in South Africa protected a regime of white owners whose original wealth was almost entirely extractive, built on the labor of black Africans in mining and farming. South Africa could not have had a two-state solution: you couldn’t partition the land and separate the owners from their captive labor force. The political economy of Israel, by contrast, grew out of intentional separation. The pioneering Zionism of the nineteen-twenties and thirties was meant to cultivate autonomous “Hebrew labor” and economic self-sufficiency. Its real heir is the globalized Hebrew culture of greater Tel Aviv, which has become a greenhouse for technology start-ups. Most of Tel Aviv’s young people would be thrilled to break Israel apart from the Middle East and float into the sea toward Cyprus.
The young people of Jerusalem and “Judea and Samaria,” as the settlers call the West Bank, live in a very different reality. Most are educated in ultra-Orthodox schools of various kinds, and many in self-segregating yeshivot. Each year on Jerusalem Day, as many as fifty thousand youth now descend on the Old City to bully Arab merchants. They see themselves as having returned to a sacred center—one that would be threatened by the existence of a Palestinian state, however feeble. They want to preëmpt this with the magical Zionist word hityashvut, or “settlement.”
Theirs is a grotesque version of what pioneering Zionism achieved. To see what future they have in store for Jerusalem, you need only go to Hebron. The historic commercial center, adjacent to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, has been under direct Israeli control since 1998. Then, the center was teeming with about two and half thousand Arab venders—fruits, vegetables, glass, pottery, olive-wood knickknacks—and included the bustling Al-Shuhada Street. Today, central Hebron is a ghost town: two square kilometres, block after block shuttered. Some buildings were closed by the Army, notionally to protect eighty or so settler families from “terror” during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Other buildings have simply been abandoned, their former residents exhausted from having to enter via back alleys and rooftops after their front doors were welded shut, or from caging their sills to keep their widows from being broken by settlers armed with rocks.
When I was there in March, I stopped at the grave of Baruch Goldstein, which the settlers are turning into a shrine. Goldstein is the physician who, in the winter of 1994, opened fire in the mosque at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, killing twenty-nine people at prayer and wounding a hundred and twenty-five. His tombstone reads that he died al kiddush hashem, “in sanctifying the name of God.” Over a thousand apartments have been emptied of people, and seventy-seven per cent of businesses have been closed. Units from the Israeli Defense Forces patrol and train here. Settlers dutifully push baby carriages along eerily quieted streets, including Al-Shuhada, where Palestinians are no longer permitted to set foot.
These settlement forces count on the fast-growing ultra-Orthodox population for their ideal of Jewish hegemony in the land of Israel, which Netanyahu announced he wants to enshrine in a so-called “basic law,” which would have constitutional standing. They prevail in elections not because they outnumber people with more moderate views but because the political center—including more highly educated citizens—has become so cynical about peace that they’ve cleared the field.
The occupation began in 1967. The mean age in Israel is thirty, meaning that most voters have never experienced the country without the occupied territories. Weather maps show Ariel, not Ramallah. Unlike the immigrants of a couple of generations ago, most young Israelis don’t have deep ideological motives. Rather, their political views are impressionistic and contradictory, formed by pundits who, above all, claim to abhor naïveté and venerate toughness.
Until last week, Kerry was viewed as passionate, gritty—and, perhaps, a little dangerous. He gave the peace process leadership, infusing it with responsibility and personal investment. He had a friends-close-but-enemies-closer relationship to Netanyahu. But this pressure was what the Israeli peace movement needed. If Kerry had promoted his own vision, it would no longer have seemed naïve for young Israelis to confront the settlers for screwing things up with Washington.
Kerry’s apology just stokes Israeli cynicism about Netanyahu’s rivals—that they’ll be outfoxed, that peace is a mirage. No doubt these things are being said in Ramallah, too. As the Kerry-led negotiations foundered, the Prime Minister’s poll numbers spiked. Moderates on each side need to trust in something powerful without having to trust the other side. Kerry provided this, but now he—or his President—has backed down (though a senior American negotiator conceded that settlements “sabotaged” the talks). Young Israelis notice these things. You don’t take on armed settlers promising a Zionist dream palace for the sake of Palestinians who hate you, liberals who think life is fair, or a Secretary of State who hasn’t learned that, for the Israelis to whom he matters, love means never having to say you’re sorry.
Photograph by Lior Mizrahi/Getty.
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