Two days ago I noted the intense backlash from Israeli leaders toward Mairav Zonszein’s op-ed in the New York Times, “How Israel Silences Dissent.” In that piece, Zonszein said she would rather be out of the Jewish Israeli family than be part of the “exclusivist ethno-religious nationalism” that increasingly dominates that society.
The piece continues to generate controversy. Tablet’s piece is vituperative. Who is this pipsqueak to express an opinion, and why is the Times dignifying it with an elite audience, writes Liel Leibovitz, before resorting to Dershowitzian hasbara:
With each sentence, the society that Zonszein describes looks less and less like Israel as it is—a country struggling against a host of existential threats, imperfect like any other democracy—and more like a cartoonish term paper that an undergraduate might produce on deadline after hitting the bong.
If Zonszein is far from the finest thinker and writer, it is much more difficult to excuse the Times this lapse of judgment. If the newspaper truly believes Zonszein’s premise, it should push its reporters on the ground to do their jobs and report on these very serious allegations…
Lisa Goldman of the New America Foundation points out: “it is fascinating to watch the self proclaimed moderates respond as reactionaries.” Liberal Zionist Ben Murane echoes that idea: “The tidal wave of full-time, paid spokespersons who’ve attacked @MairavZ‘s NYT oped just proves her point.” Robert Mackey of the Times has also supported Zonszein.
The piece is generating light:
New data shows that 73% of complaints about Israeli police brutality are never investigated — Elizabeth Tsurkov.
51 percent of Jewish Israelis would boycott businesses that employ people who criticize the Israeli army http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-24-of-jewish-consumers-boycott-arab-businesses-1000975251 …
Poll: 24 percent of Jewish Israelis boycott Arab businesses —Zonszein.
El Al won’t put in place policy on ultra-Orthodox men who refuse to sit by women http:// — Zonszein.
The author provides more documentation for her piece in a new article at +972 saying that the backlash just proves her point:
How sad it is that the rhetoric of human rights, about ending the occupation, guaranteeing equal rights and questioning what solution would be best for the conflict – all concepts embraced by the international community – is considered radical or fringe in Israel – an attack on it..
All those who decided that what I write is fringe, unacceptable, hysterical, un-journalistic or disingenuous, are propagating the hegemony.
She ends by citing Israel’s divisiveness in the broader Jewish community, which she suggests would stop if Israel actually was a democracy.
Those who insist on marginalizing dissent are themselves perpetuating a reality in which Israel is the single most divisive issue in contemporary Jewish politics, instead of a normalizing and uniting factor. Instead of encouraging Israel to become a “normal” country whose existence is not constantly in question, such voices continue to elevate Israel to a symbol, a value in and of itself.
At +972 Dahlia Scheindlin chimes in, saying that “Israel’s [Jewish] Left forgot what dissent really means:”
If we really believe what we say, we need to face the fire. My heroes are those who fought for their beliefs even at great personal cost, and they weren’t silenced.
These writers are creating the new middle ground in the US debate. It’s post-Zionist ground: Jewish folks who are embarrassed about Zionism and want Israel to start being a real democracy. That was the sense at Lisa Goldman’s interview of Hagai El-Ad of B’Tselem in New York a couple weeks back for the New America Foundation. The Gaza massacres were treated as a thoroughgoing outrage, the Israeli government as thoroughly unreliable. The old Zionists who stood up to yell at El-Ad were stared at in bafflement, and ignored.
In this new space, liberal Zionists have no real place. The so-called leftwing Meretz organization in the U.S., Partners for a Progressive Israel, is attacking Zonszein, who used to work for them. These progressive Zionists are just as concerned as Leibovitz is that a deep critique of Zionism as a flawed ideology is entering the US discourse, in the New York Times and from a former member of their organization.
Hillel Schenker, a leader of the Meretz group, seeks to paint Zonszein as a “radical”:
1) I don’t like her comment that “The vilification of the few Israelis who don’t subscribe to right-wing doctrines is not new.” What she means is the few Israelis who think like her in the radical peace camp. …
3) She criticizes “The Israeli peace camp — which remains obsessively focused on stopping settlement expansion and pursuing the ever elusive two state solution…” What exactly is the alternative that she is proposing?
Is she detaching herself from Israeli society — giving up the struggle?
Mairav Zonszein is a bilingual and bi-cultural American Israeli who worked for our organization nearly a decade ago, for about a year… She’s reached an important milestone in her career with this NY Times op-ed–
But we haven’t been silenced. We’ve just failed to make our case. For a dozen years, we have failed to win a majority in the Knesset. We have failed to convince other Israelis that the cost of holding onto the occupied territories is greater than the dangers of relinquishing them. In Zonszein’s analysis, this is because a right-wing cabal has shut us up, and there’s little we can do about it.
. . . Rather than whine in the New York Times about how we’ve been silenced, we need to figure out how to speak to other Israelis so that they will listen. The answer is not to convince readers of the New York Times that Israel is no longer a democracy. The answer is to accept that Israel is a democracy, and that democracy demands that we speak to our fellow citizens and listen to them, that we persuade them rather than dismiss them. Zonszein argues that democratic politics in Israel are hopeless. The fact is, it is in Israeli democracy that our greatest hope lies.
>> IMHO Efron is not offering an answer. If you believe in democracy, believe in democracy. The problem with Jewish democracy (Zionism) is that it keeps getting more Jewish and less democratic.
Not surprising, given that Israel was envisioned and establish as, and continues to be maintained and defined as, a “Jewish State” – a religion-supremacist construct primarily of and for Jewish Israelis and non-Israeli Jews.
“Liberal Zionists” (such as R.W. and Peter Beinart) have stated that they are comfortable with Israel:
– having a constitutionally-enshrined, permanent majority status for Jews; and
– being able to re-draw its borders whenever it feels the need to excise any large, non-Jewish demographic (even though it would render stateless Israeli citizens).
Does Obama have a laptop or an I-pad and if so does he have his own password.How can he not be aware of these facts about Israel.Does he not read a newspaper–ever.
Doesn,t Michelle have access to print media or social media.Does he ever discuss this with Michelle.
Do they live in a bubble and do Obama,s only briefing,s on the I/P issue come from the lobby or Nietanyahu.
This is surreal .Imagine, the most powerful man on earth playing the part of ” The man in the iron mask”.
America held hostage by a pip squeak nation for decades.What a cluster f–k the US is.
In Efron’s world, it’s up to the leftists to convince the remaining Israeli Jews who can vote that they really should be nicer to the Palestinians. The idea that the Palestinians should get to vote is not even considered.
It’s like the “moderate” white opinion in the South during the Civil Rights movement: “sure, some of Jim Crow is distasteful, but we still need to be convinced to enact equal rights as a matter of benevolent overlordship, and black southerners/northern Civil Rights supporters haven’t managed to convince us to do that yet. They should work harder.”
They just don’t see Palestinians as people. Simple as that.
The Scheindlin piece is partly critical and partly supportive–she says that Israeli Jews generally do have space to dissent, but that’s less true of Israeli Palestinians.
I didn’t agree with this–
“Jumping to the convenient accusation that Israel as a state conspires to silence dissent, Efron argues in a point I take to heart, ignores the fact that anger against the Left during the war came largely from regular people. It’s an easy deflection of self-criticism: maybe the Left should think about why it has failed to make its case more convincingly about what’s wrong with Israeli policy.”
One of the modern day myths about democracy is that somehow democratic decision making automatically sprinkles magical ethical fairy dust on whatever decisions are reached, so that dissenters are at fault for not making their case. But (using my favorite analogy), white racist Southerners in the 1950’s had a democratic system (if you were white) and they didn’t reach correct ethical decisions regarding how blacks were to be treated. And people who dissented were sometimes murdered. The South changed due to outside pressure and not because peaceful dissent working entirely inside the society suddenly made racists realize that they were wrong.
It’s perfectly possible–in fact, it happens all the time–that one can have a system which is democratic for some, and which the voting majority deliberately and knowingly chooses policies which oppress others. This goes all the way back to classical Greece.
I’m a little sick of hearing “Israel is a democracy” as a defense. They’ve democratically chosen to have an apartheid-like system in the West Bank, to keep the Gazans in a vast prison, and to commit war crimes. Three cheers for democratic decision making, I guess.
Instead of encouraging Israel to become a “normal” country whose existence is not constantly in question, such voices continue to elevate Israel to a symbol, a value in and of itself.
Love this. Yes.
As far as Efron’s statement marginalizing the importance of reaching NYT readers, I disagree: Israel couldn’t afford the luxury of being the kind of country that it is without strong US backing, both financially and at the UN. Changing minds on this side of the Atlantic is as least as important as changing them in Tel Aviv.
Nice seeing these cracks in the edifice.