Gideon Levy
Gideon Levy is telling his society, Israel, “to wake up and smell the coffee.” But he knows: the settlers have taken over the government.
You can’t change the rules that way, one fine day. And the rules were set long ago: It’s their land, the land of the settlers; they’re the masters of it and can do anything there. Only a distorted double standard would permit a change in the rules due to a minor injury to the Israel Defense Forces. Only in the name of a distorted double standard could you be shocked about the recent acts, which were by no means the most serious or cruel.
Of course Israel has the right (and duty ) to change the rules, but such a change must be revolutionary and be carried out across the settlement enterprise, halting it entirely and changing the illegal, unethical and intolerable reality that exists in our backyard. The government isn’t interested in such a change. The IDF isn’t either, and it’s doubtful most Israelis want such a change. But anything less than that is hollow lip service, nothing more than a small wave on the hull of this decades-long enterprise.
Meantime, Jeffrey Goldberg (who ripped off my Beinart reporting without acknowledgement) writes that Israel must “declare war” on violent settlers:
These fanatics represent a perverse branch of Zionism. There is a war in Israel between Jews who believe that Zionism is a movement seeking Jewish national equality, and those who believe that Zionism is about the redemption of the lands of the Bible — all the lands of the Bible, ideally — in the name of God. This maximalist view, which would be alien to Zionism’s founders, is a catastrophe for Israel, Jews and Judaism.
If the Netanyahu government were to announce that it was repurposing Ketziot to accept violent settlers, and that settlers who attack a soldier — or uproot an olive tree, or burn down a mosque — would be buying themselves a long-term stay in an unforgiving prison, it would send a clear message. And it would show the world that the Israeli government, and not a collection of racist and extremist rabbis, makes Israeli policy.
Goldberg’s scenario is a fantasy for American readers. As Levy makes clear, there is no willingness in Israeli society to take on the settlers. It won’t happen. They’re deeply embedded, and have been since Ben Gurion adopted Revisionist ideas in the 1940s, shocking Hannah Arendt. And what we see is the outcome: endless, racist colonization. When has the song ever been different? Michael Walzer issued the same fantasy in Dissent nearly three years ago— extirpate the settler movement.
The Israelis have to form a government that recognizes the Palestinians’ right to a state of their own, defeats the settler movement, and begins the evacuation of the settlements…. Move the settlers out and the army in.
I know: Walzer and Goldberg are trying to move an American Jewish audience to act. But the years pass, and nothing happens, even as Palestinians are shot and killed for trying to access their village’s water. Does a crisis ever figure as a crisis to these intellectuals?
Some awareness of these pogroms, which have unfolded for decades to a brownskinned people while Goldberg and Walzer try to redeem Zionism with intellectual finger exercises, is why Peter Beinart came up with the honest and grounded answer of granting those Palestinians who live under occupation voting rights over the government that is sending troops and settlers to deprive them of their lands.
“These fanatics represent a perverse branch of Zionism.”
If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s an anti-Semite. Damn it, those settlers are some of the best, most devoted, most observant Jews in the world! The only Jews that have the cajones to try and live up to the example set by the ancient Israelites, or something like that.
I never thought I would live to see the day that Jeffrey Goldberg would embrace anti-Semitic tropes. Hmmm, Goldberg, Goldberg…. I wonder if that is really a Jewish name. Certainly no real devoted Jew could ever disparage those brave settlers.
The whole fucking country is a “settlement enterprise” – no shit they can’t control the radical settlers. Excuse my language, but seriously, file this post’s title under “Sky Still Blue”
This nonsense from Goldberg about “national equality” vs. “redemption of the land of the bible” – is actually an argument that has one side of the coin battling the other.
But, you know, whatever, what do I know? – I just find it fascinating/frustrating/enraging that jewish folks are shocked by the settlers, when they themselves buy into the same nonsense – namely that “The Jews” are a separate and distinct “people” apart from the rest of humanity. Reason 9,876 why this will never be solved within the “jewish community.”
I think what will be most painful is the dismantling of the myths of Zionism.
The notion that there Is Another Kind Of Zionism, that notion is what keeps the liberal Zionists going.
But as you said, Ben-Gurion adopted the revisionist version from beginning.
There is no doubt at all that Israel has genuine liberal straings in itself, still more so than any other country in the Middle East. But those straings were much stronger before and now mount to something akin a whisper in the desert, slowly fading away.
As you wrote a few weeks back, the anti-assimilation ads, warning against marrying American Jews, is a sign how far away the Israeli psyche truly is.
It’s another country. Many American Jews have these romantic notions they nurture from afar, and there is still this Ashkenazi, secular elite breathing in Israel. But they are under siege from all directions. Academia is the last bastion, and to some degree the courts, that they have left. But all sieges come to an end unless there is help from the outside.
And this is the specter that worries me. Some Jews have become so deeply Zionist that we could easily see Jews attacking and even killing other Jews as the process of Israel’s dream of a Jewish state slowly winds down. The settlers, as you correctly point out, are not ‘a fringe’. They have been supported since the founding – and it’s been the Labor governments who have expanded them the most, notably Ehud Barak’s administration as one recent example.
The settlers will never be removed. Ever.
This is the simple reality that American Jews are slowly but surely coming to grips.
And the American Jewry have grumbled but done nothing to stop this. There has not been any significant pressure to stop Israel’s expansion from the Israel Lobby.
They have made a huge bet that American Jews’ ethnocentrism will beat their liberal sensitivies. And to some extent, sadly, they have been proven right as long as they could demonize the other side and make these parallel fantasy worlds Of The Other Zionism you could buy into. When that slowly evaporates, how many American Jews will continue to support Israel?
Mearsheimer predicted that eventually, most Jews would be in the ‘Great Ambivalent Middle’, the New Afrikaaners like Bret Stephens, Malmcolm Hoenlein, the Commentary crowd and many others will go down all the way. The Righteous Jews, on the other hands, will begin as a minority(Judt, Finkelstein, yourself and many others) and then expand more and more into the mainstream(Alterman, Friendman, Cohen and so forth).
Forget the Christian Zionists. They are merely footsoldiers, little else. What matters is American Jewry. The fate of Israel will be determined inside the Jewish community in America, not anywhere else.
Although in absolute numbers the likudniks are still a majority, the trend is in their opposite direction and accelerating.
The first stop is within liberal Jewry, and liberal intellectual Jewry. That’s why the writings of Remnick, Friedman et al are so important. That’s why this article is a sign of the times:
http://www.thenation.com/article/162756/apartheid-steroids
After a critical mass inside liberal Jewry has decided to actually make real opposition to the direction of Zionism, the real battle will begin. And we will see how many can truly be liberals, even when it’s their own people and not someone else(Afrikaaners, American Southern Whites etc).
My guess is that it won’t be enough people, but a significant minority is enough. Finally, I think, outside pressure will help. The likudniks will appeal notions of anti-Semitism to keep the ship intact, the draw Jews together and let ethnocentrism trump liberalism as more and more outside pressure increases.
‘The world is against us’.
‘We are seeing another Holocaust in the making’.
Masada.
Its never too late.
The steps to peace though are:
1. Moratorium on settlement construction
2. Negotiation
3. Ratification by legislatures
4. Ratification by populace
5. Implementation
Step one is the key one that is delayed. It is an electoral process by which hearts and minds are persuaded, then a more liberal administration is elected, then liberal policies are implemented.
How do you know you were “ripped off”? There are dozens of times that I see phrases or concepts of mine in others’ articles. When that occurs, either I am guessing wrong, or I’m honored. Both wins.
Whoever frames the occupation of the West Bank in terms of religious fanaticism must be willfully wearing a nice pair of blinders.
It’s upsetting that people who claim to be familiar with the history of this region still write as though the problem is Jewish radicalism. It isn’t.
The problem always was and still remains the Israeli government’s policy of territorial expansion. The settlers/colonists are merely useful idiots. I don’t know what it’s going to take to get people to understand this simple point.
The Israeli government is merely and simply tolerating Jewish religious rhetoric because it knows that said rhetoric serves an interest, much like Hertzel’s talk of a Jewish homeland and a return after 2000 years served a purpose. How was Israel supposed to colonize and settle the West Bank after 1967 if it didn’t support some religious mythology? It couldn’t.
But keep using the settlers as though they are the nail holding the entire door to peace sealed shut.
And this is all old news as the Israeli public has been trained like monkeys to accept this false paradigm where the settlers are the epitome of all the country’s ills.