Stav Shaffir, 34, became a political leader in Israel during the social justice protests of 2011, the tent protests, and then became a Labor member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. Shaffir left the parliament and establishment parties last year when she saw that Labor leaders, Amir Peretz and Itzik Shmuli, were willing to fold in with Netanyahu in order to end Israel’s political crisis. Now she is the leader of the Greens Party in Israel.
Shaffir is a hero to American Zionists (she believes the ideology of Jewish democracy and homeland) and she lately had a talk with the Israel Policy Forum on the decline of the Jewish political left in Israel. Shaffir maintains that the people are way more leftwing than the political class, but they’re not being represented because the rightwing government has the upper hand and has used its advantage to dominate the parliament and the media. I’m going to put aside my cynicism about “liberal Zionism” to pass some of her thoughts along.
Shaffir says that the Israeli Jewish street is actually becoming more and more progressive; over 60 percent believe in the two-state solution. But the left in politics is utterly demoralized by more than 40 years of largely rightwing governments. The left has “no belief in their ability to win….it lost the ability to take leadership,” and Netanyahu has exploited that lack of belief.
The centrist party Blue White is the biggest manifestation of that loss of belief. In three elections they managed to deny Netanyahu a majority. “Victory was very much in our hands. Leadership just decided in the very last minute to give it all up.”
Shaffir said the government has been taken over by the settler movement. She described her own effort as a parliamentarian to expose how much Israeli government money was going to settlements. But the demoralized left was afraid to join her fight. They even feared violence.
“Instead of fighting against settlement funding– one of the core values of the extreme right wing within government– most people on the left in politics were afraid to touch that subject. It was too scary, it created too much political leader fear, mainly. It would get them exposed to even violence, as some of us who fought that fight experienced so often.
“So these kind of things: Not being able to answer the core fight of our time, being the fight for our democracy, for the law itself, for human rights and civil rights, for a separation between us and Palestinians and a real border like in any other normal country. For the end of the conflict, for peace… The leaders of the left decided to give it all up to try and flatter the right wing, and even at times to try and pretend to be more right wing.”
Shaffir reflected that Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had to contend with “violence and threats” when he signed peace agreements, before he was assassinated by a rightwing extremist in 1995.
When Shaffir sought to expose illegal uses of Zionist “Settlement Division” moneys, “I started getting all these warnings from Labor Party leadership that I should stop… It’s not something you want to get into. We don’t need to get in these kinds of fights with the coalition, with the government. It’s a too delicate issue and all of this kind of nonsense.”
In the end she found that Labor was corrupted, it also was benefiting politically from the Settlement Division. That corruption is reflected in the willingness of Labor to sign on to Gantz’s Netanyahu’s annexationist plans– which she says represents “a complete loss of the Zionist dream and of the future of Israel as Jewish and democratic.”
No one talked about that in the election. There were just two discourses in the elections. One was Netanyahu’s “very racist discourse,” a degree of public “hatred” that “I cannot believe can still happen in 2020,” aimed at the Joint List of largely-Palestinian parties. The other discourse was Netanyahu or Not Netanyahu.
Shaffir fears that the center-left’s betrayal of its own voters by signing on with Netanyahu and annexation will further damage the left and take years to fix.
She said the left has lost “the foundations of democratic infrastructure” in Israel: media and parliament.
The media compete to support Netanyahu’s rightwing agenda, she said. “Actually the media became almost entirely rightwing if you count the amount of media exposure that rightwing leaders get versus leftwing leaders or opposition figures in general, you see it gets to 75 percent rightwing.” There is not nearly enough representation in the media of Palestinians or women. On national security issues, women are almost never given a platform.
So the left lost the ability to “to talk and show and expose people to the truth.” Media are highly concentrated and small in Israel. For Hebrew readers there are 3 big newspapers, 3 big media channels. “We need to see much more competition, but a competition over who is telling the truth and not over who is more flattering to the right wing.”
Netanyahu has also dominated the Knesset, often in anti-democratic ways. He jokes on Instagram about corruption, inuring young people to the normality of sleazy politics. And so the people lost their ability to influence politicians, Shaffir said.
P.S. Despite Shaffir’s alarm about racism, there was very little in her discussion about the power of the Joint List and what it means to the future of the left. She is only really interested in Jewish politics, and she speaks about “separation” from “the Palestinians.” It is a continual amazement to me that such attitudes are considered liberal by Americans. But liberal Zionist organizations had almost nothing to say about the racism against Palestinians in the recent elections.
STAV SHAFFIR: Red hair, hazel eyes, fair complexion, who can doubt that she is a direct descendant of the original inhabitants driven out by those swarthy Arabic invaders?
It’s like the ‘shoot and cry’ syndrome: talking about universal values and how much you like them and want them, but in practice: Zionism, privileges for Jews
“ It is a continual amazement to me that such attitudes are considered liberal by Americans. ”
Yes, well, it shouldn’t be. A great many affluent American liberals are largely the same. They mostly don’t care about Palestinians or any of our foreign victims unless their suffering can be blamed solely on Republicans, at least in their own minds. Try telling liberals about Yemen in 2016 when it was Obama’s war. They didn’t care. Didn’t want to hear it, made excuses for it. For the most part they don’t really care about the poor or the working class either except to the extent they can be persuaded to vote for a corrupt jerk like a Biden. They had a chance to vote for Sanders who on domestic issues actually lives up to the values liberals claim to care about and the liberal elites trashed both him and his followers every chance they got. Not saying Sanders was perfect. But compared to the other jerks? There was no comparison.
The NYT comes out with what is supposed to be a huge series on inequality in America. I doubt it was entirely coincidental it comes out after it is clear the senator from the credit card companies is the certain Democratic nominee. They cosplay at being radicals when there is little danger that any President might make serious proposals to deal with the problem.
@Keith
Right on! If the color of her hair is natural, she could be of Irish descent. However, she is most likely of eastern European descent, i.e., Ashkenazi.
In any event, we know that the vast majority of Israeli Jews have no genetic relationship to the ancient Hebrews.
“The Racist Gene” Haaretz, June 21, 2017: EXCERPT: “In 2013, the results were published of a study by the prominent British geneticist Martin Richards, who specializes in researching the maternal genome, which passes from the mother to all of her descendants. Richards researched the maternal genetic ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews. And lo and behold, he discovered that 80 percent or more (!) of the maternal genetic makeup of Ashkenazi Jews derives from European women – goys, heaven forbid. Gevalt! Devoid of any gene originating in the Land of Israel.”
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fgene.2017.00087/full
Front. Genet., 21 June 2017 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2017.00087
“The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish”
“Recent genetic samples from bones found in Palestine dating to the Epipaleolithic (20000-10500 BCE) showed remarkable resemblance to modern day Palestinians.”
EXCERPTS:
“The non-Levantine origin of AJs [Ashkenazi Jews] is further supported by an ancient DNA analysis of six Natufians and a Levantine Neolithic (Lazaridis et al., 2016), some of the most likely Judaean progenitors (Finkelstein and Silberman, 2002; Frendo, 2004). In a principle component analysis (PCA), the ancient Levantines clustered predominantly with modern-day Palestinians and Bedouins and marginally overlapped with Arabian Jews, whereas AJs clustered away from Levantine individuals and adjacent to Neolithic Anatolians and Late Neolithic and Bronze Age Europeans.”
“Overall, the combined results are in a strong agreement with the predictions of the Irano-Turko-Slavic hypothesis (Table 1) and rule out an ancient Levantine origin for AJs, which is predominant among modern-day Levantine populations (e.g., Bedouins and Palestinians). This is not surprising since Jews differed in cultural practices and norms (Sand, 2011) and tended to adopt local customs (Falk, 2006). Very little Palestinian Jewish culture survived outside of Palestine (Sand, 2009). For example, the folklore and folkways of the Jews in northern Europe is distinctly pre-Christian German (Patai, 1983) and Slavic in origin, which disappeared among the latter (Wexler, 1993, 2012).”
The only person Stav Shaffir is fooling is herself.
I can remember when the leader of Balad, Jamal Zahalka, called out Shaffir because unlike even Likud MKs she ignored them. To her they were invisible, hence her desire for separation. Perhaps she needs to read the judgment in Brown v Board of Education (1954). The key decision of the Supreme Court in America ruling that segregation was unlawful held that separate was not equal.
The history of the Zionist ‘left’ is that it paved the way for the right-wing. The confiscation of Palestinian lands did not begin with Begin or Netanyahu but with Ben Gurion. Stav Shaffir is good example of the hypocrisy of the Zionist ‘left’. It built the system of settler violence, indeed it directly contributed to the establishment of the settlement movement or has she forgotten the Labour Zionist pioneers, Israel Galili, Yitzhak Tabenkin who crossed over to Gush Emmunim or Yigal Allon, the Deputy Prime Minister who supported them?