Two provocative and important columns about the Israeli left appear in today’s Haaretz. In one, a professor named Yigal Levy argues that “Israeli NGOs are entrenching the occupation“:
In the past decade organizations such as B’Tselem, Machsom Watch and even Breaking the Silence have entered the vacuum in the government’s control over the army and in the senior command’s control over the field units. …
It suffices to read military advocate general Avichai Mendelblit’s statements about those organizations in an interview with Haaretz in 2009: “The organizations are a channel for passing on information about very important things, to make the IDF’s activity normative… I strive to reach the truth and they are really helping us with this.”
In other the words, the organizations whose activity the Knesset wants to restrict are part of the army’s control system over its forces. Machsom Watch supervises the roadblocks and B’Tselem documents, thus monitoring soldiers’ aberrant conduct while on duty. As for Breaking the Silence, it has recently proved its documentation system is better than the army’s. …
Even if the leftist groups’ intention is to ensure upholding Palestinian rights, though, the unintentional result of their activity is preserving the occupation. Moderating and restraining the army’s activity gives it a more human and legal facade. Reducing the pressure of international organizations, alongside moderating the Palestinian population’s resistance potential, enable the army to continue to maintain this control model over a prolonged period of time.
In the second column, poet and journalist Yitzhak Laor attacks what’s left of Israel’s “radical left” for failing or, in his view, not even trying to build a serious political force that would speak to the grievances of ordinary Israelis, both Jews and Arabs:
The government cannot be changed without mobilizing those on whom it rests. A country where the cost of living, including the price of water, is rising beyond the ability of a working person to pay for them, where poverty is spreading, where a large percentage of the youth don’t want to serve in the army and, with some political persuasion, could become opponents instead of “draft dodgers,” does not have to slide rightward…
Instead of addressing such bread-and-butter issues, he charges, the left has fallen into
the “human rights politics” of nongovernmental organizations, which has become a well-financed, paralyzing serum throughout the West, a substitute for changing the government. …
The energy is concentrated, if at all, on two points of friction with the occupation – the separation fence and East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
It’s more difficult and demanding to create opposition all over the country. But doesn’t the government have any other weak points?
Both columns, especially Laor’s, strike me as a little harsh and undialectical – after all, just as in this country, it’s not so obvious how actually to build a more effective left, and as far as I know, the authors of these columns are not doing any better at it than the activists they criticize – but their critiques are worth thinking about.
Meanwhile, for a more positive take on Breaking the Silence, the New York Review of Books’ blog site has published a nice review by the always-eloquent David Shulman of BTS’ powerful new compilation, Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies 2000-2010. Too bad the review apparently won’t appear in the paper version of the magazine.
